What Was Inside Bitcoin’s Biggest Block?

The biggest Bitcoin block ever has just been mined, 14 years after the blockchain went live.

It contained an Ordinal, the controversial new genre of NFT which recently debuted on Bitcoin.

In an apparent tease for a forthcoming bitcoin NFT collection, Luxor Mining and popular Bitcoin figure Udi Wertheimer mined the largest-ever bitcoin block, the company announced Tuesday.

Block 774628 housed the “Taproot Wizard,” a play on the legendary “magic internet money” meme featuring a bitcoin wizard. It was 3.96MB large, close to Bitcoin’s block size limit (which can be stretched to 4MB with SegWit).

The transaction containing the Ordinal made up 3.94MB, about 99.5%. There were 63 transactions in total, including the 6.25 BTC ($149,000) coinbase reward, which also went to Luxor.

“The image is higher resolution so it contains more pixels (and thus more bytes),” Colin Harper, head of research and content at Luxor Mining, told Blockworks.

Luxor announced the block via Twitter Tuesday evening, teasing followers that other wizards may be available soon. The firm earned an additional 0.009 BTC ($209) in fees for successfully mining the block.

Ordinals — the new platform taking the industry by storm — store texts, images, SCG or HTML on-chain, attached to individual satoshis, bitcoin’s smallest unit currently worth $0.000231.

Similar to the NFT concept, inscribed satoshis can then be transferred freely via the Bitcoin blockchain.

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This image is inscribed forever to satoshi 1308063627208201

The features are made possible using a loophole from the Taproot upgrade in 2021, which enabled “practically unlimited (capped by block size) storage using Opcodes, an executable script in a txn that can store arbitrary data,” Blockworks Research analyst Matt Fiebach said.

Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor boasts the NFT protocol holds digital artifacts to a “higher standard,” he wrote in a blog post. Ordinals cannot be stored off-chain or on centralized servers, he said.

Industry members continue to take a mixed view on Bitcoin NFTs, but Ordinals appear to be here to stay.

Updated Feb. 2, 2023 at 12:05 pm ET: Added comment from Luxor Mining’s Colin Harper.

Updated Feb. 2, 2023 at 1:39 pm ET: Adjusted excerpt.

Updated Feb. 2, 2023 at 4:33 pm ET: Corrected Bitcoin’s block size limit.

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