Miners are barely profitable. When block reward is mostly made up from fees, miners are going to turn their machines on and off depending on fees.

In the future, the incentive for mining is mostly based off of transaction fees. Assuming that miners are barely running on profit, they are going to be turning their machines on and off depending on what kind of fees can be collected.

Say that in the world we have 10x hash rate. The difficulty might still be just x, if on average 90% of the machines are turned off. This would mean that if there are transactions with high fees, all machines will be turned on and the expected block time is just 1min instead of 10min. However, if there are only transactions with low fees, the hash rate plummets accordingly, possibly to a complete halt, until high fee transactions are available again.

submitted by /u/OCPetrus
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from Bitcoin - The Currency of the Internet http://bit.ly/2UvKbpK