• The article discusses the growing interest in Bitcoin inscriptions, which are NFT-like activities using the Bitcoin blockchain.
• Data sets from the first weeks of inscription activity indicate a high level of interest in this use case for the Bitcoin network.
• This includes data on pending transactions in mempools, block sizes, and search trends.
Overview Of Bitcoin Inscriptions Data
The amounts and weights of pending transactions in Bitcoin mempools around the world are a clear signal of how popular inscription transactions have been to Bitcoin users amid the ongoing mini-craze over Bitcoin NFTs. Throughout most of the current bear market cycle, pending transaction levels in Bitcoin mempools have stayed fairly low, especially when compared to the height of both the 2017 and 2021 bull markets. In fact, a Twitter bot called Mempool Alert tweets every time its mempool empties, and the tweets were posted on a consistent basis for months throughout 2022.
Pending Transactions Visual
The mempool pending transactions visual below shows the total weight of unconfirmed transactions throughout most of February 2023. The surge in pending transactions directly correlates to the inscriptions craze, which has somewhat subsided toward the end of February.
Block Sizes
Inscription transactions are notoriously large, and the block sizes that have come from the inscription craze prove it. For years, the sizes of Bitcoin blocks hovered just below 1.5 megabytes (MB) as illustrated by a line chart below . But with these Bitcoin NFTs becoming popular, blocks started being produced between 2 MB and 2.5 MB on average with several blocks flirting with 4 MB limit such as “giant” Taproot Wizard block mined by Luxor in collaboration with Udi Wertheimer and others..
Google Search Queries
The interest in Bitcoin inscriptions is also apparent from Google Search queries as demonstrated by line chart taken from Google Trends page for search interest in “Bitcoin Ordinals”. It has seen near-vertical increase over time indicating its popularity among users . It should be noted that these search trends data sets are scored relative to all other queries made at certain times , so it can give an idea about relative popularity more than absolute number .
Conclusion
Inscribing bits of data onto bitcoin blockchain through Ordinals has significantly increased since early 2023 due to its potential use cases like NFTs which is still highly contested issue amongst cryptocurrency enthusiasts inside and beyond bitcoin network . The rise can be gauged through various metrics such as increase in pending transactions , size if block , google searches etc .
