Bitcoin purists slam Luxor’s support of ‘magic internet jpegs’
Bitcoin mining pool Luxor recently tweeted that it had “harnessed its magical energy” to mine a jpeg file in the blockchain.
This resulted in block 774628 being significantly larger than the standard block size of about 1 MB, at 3.96 MB.
The jpeg in question depicts a bald, bearded “wizard” wearing sunglasses, captioned “taprootwizards.com, magic internet jpegs, join us”.
Source: ordinals.com
“Last night, Luxor harnessed its magical energy and freed an ancient wizard from his cosmic cage where he had been trapped for many eras.
Careful observers of the time warp might have noticed a 4MB anomaly, the likes of which have never been seen.
Will there be others?…”
Bitcoin community split
In a follow-up tweet, Luxor continued with the theatrical theme, mentioning that the Taproot Wizard was “untied and freed from his bondage!” while emphasizing that it now exists “in the hearts, minds, and hard drive space of Bitcoin node operators.”
The tweet ended by referring to a refusal to be censored and silenced, implying it was an exercise in free speech.
“He refuses to be censored, he refuses to be silenced.”
The Bitcoin community gave a mixed reaction. In a Reddit post, purists argued that the Bitcoin blockchain should only be reserved for “real money transactions.”
Another said the option to permanently add “despicable and disgusting” jpegs to the channel had been opened up.
“Yeah… It’s kind of dangerous.” We are a bad actor or an automated miner who cements vile and disgusting things into a permanent, globally distributed, uncensorable database…. »
A Redditor, who identified himself as a node operator, said that if there was a code commitment to “not accept or relay these transactions”, he would choose it. In response, the poster was challenged as endorsing the censorship code.
Similarly, talking about the bitcoin network not being a data storage chain was countered by a comment about who decides bitcoin’s uses.
“Who are you to decide what someone uses Bitcoin for?”
Developer Jimmy Song entered saying:
“Luxor will be punished by the market. Just look.”
Block size controversy
The block size limits the number of transactions recorded in the block. Satoshi Nakamoto incorporated a block size limit of 1 MB, which equates to approximately three to seven transactions per second, depending on transaction size.
There is a long-standing debate on whether this hinders the chain by hindering scalability. Although Nakamoto never specified why a 1MB limit was set, some believe it was an anti-spam measure designed to prevent network overload.
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