Recording a historic event, the Bitcoin network, on February 1, 2023, mined the largest block ever. Via the “Taproot Wizard” NFT project, an indie developer sent out the historic block (approximately having 4 million transactions).
While the developer and project are still anonymous, the transaction has caught the attention of the Bitcoin world. The “Taproot Wizard” NFT project publisher, in a novel way, utilizes particular satoshi, to direct to a JPG image for implementing NFT identification and distribution.
Loosely perceived as a BTC network attack by some, Udi Wertheimer (a developer), and ex-Bitcoin Core developer, Casey Rodarmor, suggest that the transaction in question is based upon the “Ordinals” invention.
Ordinals solve the lacking solid public identity issue of Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin addresses tend to be for one-time-use with local wallet accounts, ownership of public and private keys is non-transferrable. Ordinals mark every satoshi across outputs to generate Bitcoin’s transferable account or identity.
Owing to a quick Bitcoin blockchain size expansion due to large transactions and blocks, the requirements for full-node devices is anticipated to rise. Apart from possibly weakening the anti-censorship defenses of the Bitcoin network, it could also influence the wallet, mining pool, and browser services, which might lead to some failures and reduced network security.
The Bitcoin community can either avoid doing anything on the issue and permit applications to access the network as is, but doing so might make the issue of limiting OP RETURN and capacity expansion delve into uncertainty.
Increasing the data size limit by hard forking the network is also cumbersome as it would first need all nodes to be updated, harming the fabric of decentralization. Readying primary pools to form a partial agreement for rejecting large blocks and transactions is tedious to implement whilst also inviting human block review.
Considering the enormity of BTC, a seamless hard fork seems far-fetched. The historic event has paved a fresh way forward for community invention and experimentation.
