Wow. The Bitcoin blockchain is currently experiencing a huge traffic jam in the mempool...the "waiting area" to get onto the chain...and is running crazy high fees. Apparently, today was the first time in the history of the blockchain that a block (788695) collect more fees than the block was worth (fees > emission of new 6.25 BTC). [EDIT/UPDATE: I believe this was incorrect. It looks like block 500521 from 2017 has this honor.]
[EDIT/UPDATE 2: Looks like there may have been quite a few situations like this before. See this Reddit post.]
The ramp-up in use is due to the new use-case of ordinal NFTs on the blockchain.
A couple of weeks ago I minted a couple of ordinals on chain. The first was simply a reference to links on Hive. But, I think more importantly, the second was a zip file containing all of Satoshi Nakamoto's public writings in chronological order. I felt those words should exist on the blockchain that they started, so I zipped them down to get a smaller file size and placed them on the blockchain.
Today, I grew curious with all of the talk of fees and congestion. I took a look at Unisat (where I minted the ordinals). If I was to place that same file as an ordinal on chain right now, the "Economy" cost for minting would be $5,731.33. Wow.
Glad I did it way back when in the good ol' days, two weeks ago.
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