> I do know, however, that Bitcoin is undergoing a cooling of sorts on account of the block difficulty getting higher and higher. As a result, transactions now take forever to verify and fees are going up.

Completely untrue. Difficulty is proportional to the hash rate. Transaction time varies as a result of multiple factors.

Some reading and historical difficulty/confirmation time data:

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespa... https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation#Confirmation_Times