The narrative around ordinals is ever-changing, but one of the more persistent ones is about how it enables miners to have a better business. The main idea is that by subsidizing miners, the Bitcoin network is going to get stronger and more robust.
There are several problems with this argument, but let me focus on one particular aspect. The argument that spamcoins will strengthen mining companies is based on more fees. And indeed, that's true. But for it to really benefit mining companies, the revenue needs to be consistent and reliable. And the thing about these short term fee spikes is that they are anything but consistent and reliable.
Sure, you get some blocks where the fees are greater than the block reward, but that's the exception, and not the rule. They generally congregate around the hype of one thing or another. In the case of ordinals and BRC-20, they clearly spiked when Binance listed one of the tokens. It was a fickle altcoin market's coin of the month, and while it did spike fees, the fees came down a short while later.
Surprisingly, the dynamic is similar to what we've seen in energy markets with renewables like wind and solar. Like spamcoin revenue, they are both also unreliable and inconsistent, and they've added considerable variance to the business of energy. Rather than strengthening the grid, they've weakened it considerably, creating terrible mismatches of supply and demand, which inevitably result in blackouts or brownouts.
In the same way, spamcoin fee revenue has made the business of mining that much harder to predict. The revenue is not consistent or reliable, so to depend on that revenue is, from a business standpoint, a considerable risk. Any fee spike that's based on a random scammer's pump and dump is not easy to predict and leaving around extra mining capacity to take advantage of these spikes is not tenable. In other words, from a business standpoint, it makes little sense to modify a business trying to capture this intermittent, unpredictable revenue.
The thing that businesses need is consistent and predictable revenue because that's what allows them to plan and grow. A flash in the pan like spamcoins is not something that's really going to help with that. Consistent fee revenue, something that has a proven track record, is what mining businesses need to really take advantage and invest in capital goods. Indeed, when we say "fee market," that's what we mean, not these random spikes based on dishonest marketing and hype.
In the meantime, fee spikes like this are a nice little bonus, but they are more likely to create malinvestment. If a business makes that bet that spamcoin fee revenue will stay consistent for the next 4 years, they're likely to lose to a competitor that doesn't make this assumption.
We like to believe that a dollar earned is the same no matter where it comes from, but that's just not the case. If it's a dollar earned that you can't predict, it's unhelpful and perhaps even detrimental for planning. Spamcoins are in the long term not good for miners as they are so obviously hype-based. We need to dispense with unsophisticated narratives like this.
Bitcoiners are better than that.