BlocksInform
TNT came to Bitcoin – and they quickly take over the network.
On Wednesday, the BITMEX blog presented the adoption of Ordinals, the protocol permitting LNP that was the subject of a lively debate in the Bitcoin community during the past week. What is the amount of steam produced by the new functionality?
Ordinals: The Data
Going by BitMEX’s numbers, the number of Ordinals transactions per block skyrocketed in February 2023, surpassing an average of 225 on February 5. For the sake of context, a Bitcoin block is produced every ten minutes or so.
As the report explained, Ordinals transactions are identifiable by an “ord” OP_Push string within their Taproot input script. Taproot was a Bitcoin upgrade enabled at the end of 2021, bringing more privacy and intelligent contract capacity to Bitcoin.
Ordinals, however, have been an unintended consequence for developers – allowing satoshi individuals (the smallest unit of Bitcoin) to be identified on the network, and signed up with data like pictures or videos. Such transactions are a lot of life nfts that circulate on blockchain as ethereum – except that their image data is integrated directly into the Bitcoin blockchain.
The first ordinals transaction located by BitMEX took place on December 14 and was embedded with the face of an eerie-looking skeleton. However, the cumulative number of ordinary transactions only started to increase at the end of January.
As of February 7 – Bitmex report release date – more than 13,000 regular transactions had occurred. However, data from Dune analytics shows that inscriptions are ramping up exponentially by the day. There are more than 49,000 registrations registered at the time of writing, the vast majority of which are image data.
Just like with other blockchains, people are buying those images: one Ordinals punk sold for 9.5 BTC (~$200,000) earlier this week.
Earlier this week, blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode was able to identify the popularization of Ordinals through a rising number of Taproot transactions noticeable on-chain. The proportion of transactions using this technology was almost tripled from the previous month.
He's preoccupied with the Ordinals.
With new types of files finding a path in Bitcoin, many Bitcoin developers are concerned Ordinals can have unintended consequences. One of their main concerns is the blockchain blockage, which is filling blocks that might otherwise be used for purely financial transactions, This results in a slower and more expensive network for standard users.
"you can't stop them" well ofc! bitcoin is designed to be censor resistant. doesn't stop us mildly commenting on the sheer waste and stupidity of an encoding. at least do something efficient. otherwise it's another proof of consumption of block-space thingy.
— Adam Back (@adam3us) January 29, 2023
BitMEX’s data shows that Ordinals now take up over 500 megabytes of cumulative block space, after only a few weeks of significant use.
Proponents argue that higher fees could be good for Bitcoin in the long term, giving miners a more sustainable source of fee revenue as the network produces less new BTC over time.
Bitmex refused to comment on the advantages and disadvantages of computers in their report.
