Indeed! Thank you for highlighting this. IOTA made a lot of claims, some of which I felt to be a bit ungrounded. I haven't quite been able to figure out why I felt this way and this helps point me in a direction!
Correct me if I'm wrong. But doesn't Iota work as anyone who uses the system then validates 2 other transactions? Thus negating the need for miners at all? This is what I was told, I may be completely wrong.
Yes, which means everybody should be a miner - as validating two other transactions requires to check for double spend and then do some PoW which will burn some electricity and cost resources. So, you do pay fees - but only with electricity. But since you can always pay to someone else to burn this electricity - you actually can transact just for fees.
Ah, I see what you mean. Relating 'energy' to fees. Though to me it seems almost negligible to the moderate user. I have sent several transactions with IOTA and it only takes but a minute to POW on my laptop in the background. I hardly notice it going on. Sure my CPU kicks up a bit, but that's about it. I see what you mean though, for someone making large amounts of transactions it would take a bit more computing power (i.e. electricity and fees) to conduct them.