[jstanley]

I think we're confusing 2 different costs here.

My parent was talking about Bitcoin costing a lot of money (overall) because of the amount "wasted" on mining. While this is true, it doesn't affect the costs for sending transactions. Causality actually runs in the other direction here: as transaction fees increase, more mining revenue is available, so more is spent on mining.

High transaction cost leads to high mining cost, not the other way around.

You point out that much of the value that is given to miners comes through devaluing everybody else's coins. That's true too, but also doesn't affect the cost of sending a transaction. This cost is borne in proportion to the amount of BTC you hold, rather than the amount of transactions you send.