In one night, a miner reaped 6.701 bitcoin (BTC), yielding almost $200,000 in transaction fees.
The amount exceeded Bitcoin’s current block subsidy of 6.24 BTC. This has been described as an extremely rare occurrence, but it demonstrates how a recent surge in activity on the blockchain related to the Ordinals protocol has resulted in skyrocketing costs for users, Yahoo reported May 8.
“Can anyone explain how I'm going to onboard people with these fees?” Anita Posch, Bitcoin educator and the founder of Bitcoin for Fairness, said in a Twitter post, according to the Yahoo report.
Ordinals late last year unveiled "inscriptions," or random data like language or images that could be combined with sequentially numbered satoshis (or "sats"), the smallest units in Bitcoin, to produce one-of-a-kind, non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Ordinals is also being used to create BRC-20s, fungible (or interchangeable) tokens, Yahoo reported
These novel tokens have gained enormous popularity immediately, but that has carried a high price, according to Yahoo. In order to test how the world's first and largest blockchain may respond to the need to scale quickly, they overloaded the Bitcoin network and pushed it to the limit of operation capability.
That resulted in higher coin-sending costs in the form of fees of nearly $20 per transaction, Yahoo reported. It has also meant transactions are being held in line for longer periods of time.
In light of the higher fees and bogged down process, some users and exchanges are already beginning to look at alternatives, according to Yahoo. Among the options people are using is the Lightning Network, a so-called "layer 2" scaling solution that routes payments off-chain, thus speeding up and reducing the cost of Bitcoin transactions.
“Can’t use on-chain, can't open channels,” Posch said in her Twitter post, according to Yahoo. “Makes custodial Lightning the only option. And all that because some people think it's fun to 'break Bitcoin.' Why not use Liquid or RSK?”
