[latchkey]

The way to get a transaction through is to pay a fee to have it validated. The higher the fee, the more incentive for miners to add your transaction to their blocks since they will earn that fee if they can validate the block the fastest.

Right now, the fees are relatively low because miners are primarily living on the block rewards for validating transactions. As those block rewards decrease (halvenings), transaction fees will need to pick up the slack. Smaller miners may also leave the network as the competition picks up, which will lower the difficulty and increase the chances of validating the block the fastest (and thus getting paid the rewards/fees).

Halvenings means less inflation, so the theory/practice is that the price will also go up over time... thus the transaction fees will go up, but not substantially because the price is also going up. This will also incentivize outside transactions like lightning network.