See Fees vs Subsidy - all of it needs to be green eventually

It's arguable that the Knots people are doing that essentially... Why? Because eventually the fees will need to power/incentivize the entire mining network.

There will be less and less subsidy... or not much of one, as the subsidy decreases 50% every 4 years. So every four years we need a relatively large increase in BTC's price (which we'll have over the short/medium) OR we need more and transactional demand.

The monkey JPEG and memecoin people are not long-term sustainably going to pay to use Bitcoin. They are here for speculation only, and could more cheaply use a PoS centralized network...

They aren't going to stick and 'pay the miners' in my opinion, they're not going to subsidize them, it won't be enough revenue, they only pay at 1-2 sats/vb typically and most of the spam is BRC20 tokens with a few lines of JSON which takes up almost no space anyway.

Sure it bloats the UTXO set... but they are wasting money? Are they going to do this forever?

In my view, any time there is an economic downturn or tightening in Chinese economic policy, the memecoins stop or slow temporarily. Why is that?

Because that's where most of them (memes) come from and the Chinese love to gamble.

But they won't be around forever they aren't going to 'pay the miners' to make the entire 'ring' green.

Monetary transactions have to take over BIG TIME and long term they are the only source of monetary revenue for miners.

SOME miners that are state-sponsored will mine even at a loss... to ensure the economic viability of the nation-state or its institutions that pay them but that is a long ways off.