Bitcoin mining pool Luxor lately tweeted that it had “harnessed its magic power” to mine a jpeg file into the blockchain.
This resulted in block 774628 being considerably bigger than the usual approximate 1 MB block measurement, at 3.96 MB.
The jpeg in query depicts a bald, bearded “wizard” in sun shades, captioned by “taprootwizards.com, magic web jpegs, be a part of us.”
“Final evening, Luxor harnessed its magic power and freed an historic wizard from his cosmic cage the place he was trapped for a lot of epochs.
Eager observers of the chain of time may need observed a 4MB anomaly, the likes of which have by no means been seen.
Will there be others?…”
Bitcoin neighborhood cut up
In a follow-up tweet, Luxor continued with the theatrical theme, mentioning the Taproot Wizard being “untethered and free of his bondage!” whereas mentioning he now exists “within the hearts, minds, and onerous drive house of Bitcoin node operators.”
The tweet ended by referencing a refusal to be censored and silenced, implying this was an train in freedom of expression.
“He refuses to be censored, he refuses to be silenced.”
The Bitcoin neighborhood gave a blended response. In a Reddit publish, purists argued that the Bitcoin blockchain must be reserved just for “actual financial transactions.”
One other mentioned the scope for “vile and disgusting” jpegs to be added completely to the chain had been opened.
“Yeah… That is quite harmful. We’re one dangerous actor or one automated miner from cementing vile and disgusting issues to a permenant, globally distributed, uncensorable database….”
One Redditor, who recognized himself as a node operator, mentioned if a code commit existed to “not settle for or relay these transactions,” he would select it. In response, the poster was challenged as endorsing censorship code.
Equally, discuss of the Bitcoin community not being a knowledge storage chain was countered by a touch upon who decides Bitcoin’s makes use of.
“Who’re you to determine what somebody makes use of Bitcoin for?”
Developer Jimmy Tune waded in, saying:
“Luxor shall be punished by the market. Simply watch.”
Block measurement controversy
Block measurement limits the variety of transactions recorded inside the block. Satoshi Nakamoto included a 1 MB block measurement restrict, which equates to round three to seven transactions per second, relying on the scale of the transactions.
There’s a long-running debate on whether or not this hinders the chain by placing the brakes on scalability. Though Nakamoto by no means specified why a 1 MB restrict was set, some speculate it was an anti-spam measure designed to stop community overload.