Bitcoin's Blockchain Growth Accelerates With Trend of Ordinal Inscriptions
The Bitcoin block chain has 40.49 gigabytes (GB) to go until it reaches half a terabyte (TB), and with the recent trend of Ordinal inscriptions, it’s likely to get there faster. The average block size reached a high of 2.52 megabytes (MB) on Feb. 12, 2023, but block sizes have subsided and dropped to an average of 1.634 MB by Feb. 27. Still, the block chain grew at a rate of 0.288 GB per day, compared to the previous rate of 0.173 GB per day recorded before the Ordinal inscription trend began. The Impact of Ordinal Inscriptions on Bitcoin’s Network Metrics Ordinal inscriptions started on Dec. 16, 2022, but didn’t really gain steam until Feb. 2, 2023. That was the day a 3.96 MB block was mined, and since then, 214,028 inscriptions have been added to the Bitcoin block chain . The trend of Ordinal inscriptions between Feb. 2 and Feb. 27, or roughly 26 days, increased Bitcoin’s average network fee and average block size. Both network fee and block size metrics peaked around Feb. 12 and