20$ transaction fee is an incentive for the users to restrain themselves to smaller number of larger transfers.
Is the limit too strict? Probably. Miners still get a lot from mining rewards and don't need to be incentivised with fees yet, but there must be some limit that will force people pay for transactions because when mining rewards end there will be nothing to keep miners mining.
In my country (the Philippines) everyone is buying from high school kids to office workers.
The current minimum transaction fee is around $40. To exchange your bitcoin to Philippine Peso (PHP), the fixed conversion fee is 5%. If those don't seem a lot, get this: 83% of Filipinos earn below $400 a month. Most of whom I know are HODLing their bitcoin because it's too expensive to move their money. They would rather wait for their investment to reap huge gains before they cash out.
Bitcoin here is branded as a "get rich quick" investment scheme, and that's understandable, bitcoin doesn't have a valuable use case here. You can't buy anything here with bitcoin.
