TLDR; People are willing to pay high fees to get their meme art on the blockchain aka the blockchain is getting more popular therefore fees have gone up. The i

TLDR; People are willing to pay high fees to get their meme art on the blockchain aka the blockchain is getting more popular therefore fees have gone up. The issue here is that this meme art popularity has almost nothing to do with the bitcoin currency. My understanding is that the protocol has an allotted memory size and you can use that space however you choose, whether transactions or meme art or like Satoshi did on the first transaction, adding the message, "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." I assume that was to mimic how a person holds up the current day's newspaper in a photo to show its creation date is accurate.