> This seems to suggest that miners dictate the reward they get, rather than miners are forced to adapt to the reward they are offered.
Miners don't dictate the reward they get. The subsidy is the "block reward" that started at 50 BTC and halves every 4 years, which is currently at 6.25 BTC - it will be halved again in a few years to 3.125, etc. Blocks are as full as they can be right now and rarely get to the 1.0 BTC mark, so basically if you want the transaction fee market to pay for blocks without increasing the size you'll need to pay close to 6X to 10X higher fees than the current price.
> There's no required amount of energy used for mining
This is true and actually the difficulty can decrease, but none of that changes how many transactions can actually fit into a block.
> Mining difficulty automatically increases and decreases depending on how profitably miners can operate.
Mostly accurate. Mining difficulty decreases if a block took too long to mine. There are lots of scenarios where mining difficulty could get easier - most of which don't seem plausible right now though.
Miners don't dictate the reward they get. The subsidy is the "block reward" that started at 50 BTC and halves every 4 years, which is currently at 6.25 BTC - it will be halved again in a few years to 3.125, etc. Blocks are as full as they can be right now and rarely get to the 1.0 BTC mark, so basically if you want the transaction fee market to pay for blocks without increasing the size you'll need to pay close to 6X to 10X higher fees than the current price.
> There's no required amount of energy used for mining
This is true and actually the difficulty can decrease, but none of that changes how many transactions can actually fit into a block.
> Mining difficulty automatically increases and decreases depending on how profitably miners can operate.
Mostly accurate. Mining difficulty decreases if a block took too long to mine. There are lots of scenarios where mining difficulty could get easier - most of which don't seem plausible right now though.