Taproot Wizard Inscription breaks Bitcoin blocksize record
Taproot Wizard Inscription breaks Bitcoin blocksize record
5th April 2023 Update: Bitcoin’s average blocksize has now risen above 2 MB, with an obvious spike occurring in early February which corresponds to Ordinals gaining popularity.
Thanks to the “wizardry” of long-time Bitcoiner and Ordinals proponent, Udi Wertheimer, Bitcoin has just mined its largest block to date, a massive monolith nearly 4 megabytes in size. The controversial part is that the block contains a mere 63 transactions, with the bulk of its data occupied by a 3.94 MB Ordinal inscription depicting a wizard:
The crudely-drawn but massively-oversized image is a reference to a vintage Reddit meme promoting Bitcoin as “magic internet money.”
Udi’s “magical” inscription constitutes not just the largest Bitcoin block but the largest Bitcoin Ordinals inscription to date, and in both cases almost the largest possible under the system’s current rules. The record-breaking block was mined by the Luxor mining pool, who were likely paid directly by Udi to mine the special block, which is too large to enter the mempool and reach a miner by the usual process.
This event has, inevitably, generated significant discussion within the Bitcoin community. Bitcoin maximalists have expressed concern about the inclusion of non-monetary “spam” data in Bitcoin’s blockchain, as well as the injection of illegal content into the immutable Bitcoin blockchain, a potential source of legal risk for those running full nodes. Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr went so far as to create a node patch to filter or censor Ordinal “spam.”
