The trend of a faster growing blockchain I pointed out 1 year ago did not stop. Even tho according to some bitcoiners the ending of the hype would make it go back to normal.
In the past year we expirienced an increase of around ~91GB (Messured Feb.23 --> Feb.24) .
Before we had an stabil increase of ~65GB (Messured Feb.22 --> Feb.23).
[Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/647523/worldwide-bitcoin-blockchain-size/ ]
Its clearly increased with the launch of ordinals in february 2023 and caused an additional ~27GB load per year. Thats an increase of 40% !!!
Funny rock pictures don't hurt anyone. So why does it matter?
Bitcoin's biggest asset is its decentralisation. Meaning that all users should be able to run their own fullnode and verify transactions them self. Not having to trust others.
However not everyone is able to run a big data centre like amazon. Some don't have enough money, others might have bad internet. Ideal would be that even in the most remote village in africa in an totalitarian state a poor guy can run a fullnode via tor.
But that only works on 2 conditions. 1) The totall size is not too big, so they can store it on drives which are accesable (lower end of size)and affordable. And 2) The incoming data is not bigger that the amount the can download per second.
Its easy to throw of the ones that have the worst conditions. But generally speaking every increase will throw off another lower layer of people, a level of decentralisation, with each increase. With 40% increase the ordinals protocoll however is no small increase.
We might see these results in ~4 years when nodes pass the 1TB (a common drive size). But maybe we won't even notize it since most private nodes run behind tor.
We can't really undo the activation, because lightning got so far. However we can standardize to prune Ordinal data. So we don't throw of new and existing fullnode runners.
#pruneOrdinals
quotingEven now 3 months later with only few blocks in mempools we still have a hudge increase in block sizes.
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Which may mean the blockchainsize will continue growing in a rate our decentralization might not be able to handle.
