Do I understand correctly, though? If I want to send a small amount of bitcoin, with a minimal fee, there is a possibility that that transaction won't go through, because no miner picks it up?
As ignaloidas explained in another comment though, this doesn't include the Lightning Network which is where most everyday transactions would occur.
This is something I've never fully understood. Is the Lightning Network essentially a separate ledger of transactions that are "floating", if you will, off chain until (eventually) they get verified at some later time in a "final" state? What is the timing mechanism for when they get verified?
Would you have any resource that is worth checking out to learn more about blockchain? I don't care about market analysis, economy. I just want to understand the underlying technology to know what's happening there. Book would be fine too.
The Bitcoin wiki has a lot more information, although it can be hard to navigate: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page
For some more modernish innovations in Blockchain tech in general, I would also recommend the Ethereum white paper: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper. Ethereum re-imagines the Bitcoin protocol with a turing complete virtual machine that runs on the chain itself.
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.
This is probably the best in depth technical overview of how Bitcoin works.
