If demand was growing but not causing computations to get harder, fees would stay lower, and prices of bitcoin would stay lower since miners wouldn't need to recoup as much electricity losses
If demand was growing and causing the computations to get harder, fees will be higher, and prices of bitcoin will rise because miners will need more money to cover their electricity losses.
Incorrect. The calculation of fees has nothing whatsoever to do with the
mining difficulty (the latter of which I previously explained to you).
Imagine by analogy that there were literally a single old-fashioned paper ledger to record the financial transactions of everybody in the whole world. The ledger has pages. Obviously, each page has limited space for writing. People with specialized equipment called “miners” choose the transactions to put on each page, then seal the page with a magical security stamp which makes the page impossible to change for all eternity. Miners get paid for this service, because the magical stamp is difficult and costly to produce. Moreover, there is a rule: One new page is sealed every ten minutes, whether it is empty or full; and new pages can’t be filled any faster than one per ten minutes. This rule is a property of the magical stamp which keeps everything secure.
If too many people want their transactions included in the book, then each person needs to compete with everybody else by offering the miners more money to include their transaction instead of somebody else’s.
Fees are based on simple supply and demand. There is a certain amount of space in each block, constrained by the
block weight limit as defined by BIP 141; that is a common resource, shared by everybody who uses Bitcoin. Blocks are produced at a rate of one block every ten minutes (on average; I am intentionally oversimplifying). Each transaction has a certain weight, based principally on its size in bytes and whether it uses Segwit. Those weights all add up. When there are too many transactions with too much total weight for them to all fit into a block, then people need to compete with each other on fees to entice miners to select their transactions instead of somebody else’s.
By the way,
Bitcoin users can get a 75% instant discount on fees by using Segwit addresses. Check your wallet’s documentation. Now, see my signature; look at my address, and the adjacent note about Segwit.
If your address starts with a “1”, then you are overpaying 4× on fees! Those who still use addresses starting with a “1” are consuming 4× the aforementioned shared resource; so it is only natural and fair, they wind up paying 4× the fees. They should either upgrade, or shut up and quit whining about fees.
