The Bitcoin Blockchain is now 40.49 gigabytes away from reaching a half terabyte. Given the current pattern of ordinal enrollments, this landmark is likely to be achieved sooner. Blocks typically have a size of 2.52 megabytes, but it fell to a median of 1.634 megabytes on February 27. Despite this decrease, the blockchain grew at a rate of 0.288 gigabytes per day, which is higher than the prior rate of 0.173 gigabytes per day. The ordinal enrollment process began on December 16, 2022.
Impact of Ordinal Enrollments on Bitcoin Community Metrics
Ordinal signups kicked off on December 16, 2022, but only began to gain traction after February 2, 2023. On that day, 3.96 megabyte blocks were mined. Since then, 214,028 enrollments have been added to the Bitcoin blockchain. The pattern of ordinal signups from February 2 to February 27, which spans a period of 26 days, saw Bitcoin’s common community fee and common block size increase. Both metrics peaked around February 12, but have since been declining. This data indicates that the expansion of the Bitcoin Chain has been faster than expected.
For example, the Bitcoin Blockchain was 459.51 gigabytes in size on February 27, 2023. It grew by 7.77 gigabytes within the 26-day period, which works out to be roughly 0.2888 gigabytes per day. This spike can be seen by looking at a graph of the Bitcoin Blockchain’s growth from February 2 to present. Even though signups were faster than usual and bigger blocks were mined more frequently, the growth of the blockchain was much slower. It took 45 days from December 20, 2022 to February 2, 2023 to achieve a growth of 7.77 gigabytes.
At present, the blockchain is growing at a rate of 0.173 gigabytes per day over the 45-day period. The average Bitcoin fee on February 28, 2023, is 0.000077 BTC (or $1.82) per transaction. The median fee, however, is 0.000033 BTC (or $0.777) per transaction. Additional fees are accepted starting from 2 satoshis per byte (or $0.07) up to 19 satoshis per byte (or $0.62) per transaction. On February 16, 2023, the cumulative daily income for miners (block reward + fees) was $28.21 million, as compared to $21.36 million today. Miners of bitcoin (BTC) have a higher income than ever before since December 24, 2022.
It will be interesting to see how another month of ordinal signups affects metrics such as median, average block size, and average fees. This will also affect the overall growth of the Bitcoin blockchain. Even though the hype surrounding ordinal enrollments has subsided, these metrics remain elevated compared to before February 2, and the subsequent influx. The median fees are not lower than in the previous pattern and the average block sizes remain above 1.60 megabytes after being below it for many months.
What do you think is the influence of ordinal signups on the expansion of the Bitcoin blockchain? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
