Bitcoin mining pool Luxor he recently tweeted that he “used his magical energy” to mine a jpeg file into the blockchain.
This resulted in block 774628 being significantly larger than the standard approximate 1 MB block size of 3.96 MB.
The jpeg in question shows a bald, bearded “wizard” wearing sunglasses with the caption “taprootwizards.com, magical internet jpegs, join us.”
“Last night, Luxor used his magical energy to free an ancient wizard from his cosmic cage where he had been imprisoned for many epochs.
Keen watchers of the time chain may have noticed a 4MB anomaly that has never been seen before.
Will there be more?…”
The Bitcoin community has split
Following tweetContinuing with the theatrical theme, Luxor mentioned that the Taproot Wizard is “unchained and freed from his slavery!“and at the same time points out that there is now”in the hearts, minds and hard drives of bitcoin node operators.”
The tweet ended with a reference to the rejection of censorship and silencing, suggesting that it was an exercise of free speech.
“He refuses to be censored, he refuses to be silenced.”
The Bitcoin community had a mixed reaction. In a post on Reddit, purists argued that the Bitcoin blockchain should be reserved for “real money transactions” only.
Another said it opened up a space to permanently add “shameful and disgusting” jpegs to the thread.
“Yeah… That’s pretty dangerous. We are one bad actor or one automated miner, cementing vile and disgusting things into a permanent, globally distributed, uncensorable database…”
One Redditor, who identified himself as a node operator, said that if there was a code commit that “doesn’t accept or forward these transactions,” he would pick it. In response, the poster was attacked as endorsing code for censorship.
Similarly, talk of the Bitcoin network not being a data storage chain was countered by a comment about who decides the use of Bitcoin.
“Who are you to decide what someone uses Bitcoin for?”
Developer Jimmy Song came in and said:
“Luxor will be punished by the market. Just watch.”
Block size controversy
The block size limits the number of transactions recorded within the block. Satoshi Nakamoto incorporated a block size limit of 1 MB, which equates to approximately three to seven transactions per second, depending on the size of the transactions.
Whether this slows the chain by inhibiting scalability is a long-standing debate. Although Nakamoto never specified why the 1MB limit was set, some speculate that it was an anti-spam measure to prevent network congestion.
