[oconnor663]

That used to be true, until the network started hitting the "block size limit". That's the combination of two design features:

1) The mining difficulty automatically adjusts to keep the rate of new blocks down to about 1 every 10 minutes.

2) There has always been a 1 MB limit on how large a block can be.

For a long time, #2 didn't matter, because all blocks were much smaller than 1 MB. But about a year ago, transaction volumes finally rose enough that all blocks since then have been at the max. That means that rather than just taking up marginal bandwidth and disk space, transactions are directly competing with each other for the limited space in each block. That's caused transaction fees to skyrocket.

The question of whether the max block size should be raised has been extremely controversial in the bitcoin world, and the "bitcoin cash" fork was primarily focused on this question.