Welp, now I've seen it all!
Marathon Digital Holdings, a company I did not know existed until now, has just wasted an entire block on the Bitcoin chain. As if Ordinals and Inscriptions weren't enough. Now this. Sad.
See for yourself
The block height is 836361 and was posted three days ago. All the transactions within that block are totally fake and bogus. A total of $122,524 was spent on fees to create this fake block, but that was just Marathon paying themselves with their own Bitcoin to create all the shell operations. All the transactions within the block are 100% fees and don't actually transfer any value anywhere on a practical level.
Bitcoin block art? Marathon showcases visualization potential of block building
Even worse is how outlets like Cointelegraph are reporting on the situation. It's actually embarrassing. I'm secondhand embarrassed right now.
Marathon Digital explores the potential of “block art” by using its mining pool to craft the order of transactions in a block.
the mining company speculated that this could present a wave of creative potential not yet explored in the Bitcoin space.
Gross
A wave of "creative potential" that fills Bitcoin blocks up with pointless garbage and forces thousands of nodes worldwide to store an "M" that took 1.7 Megabytes to draw. Could their be a worse take? This is an attack on Bitcoin and a celebration of Idiocracy.
According to Bitcoin Gandalf...
https://twitter.com/BTCGandalf/status/1772612156363592162
- BTCGandalf
Even more offensive is that Cointelegraph direct quoted this tweet.
As if he's somehow in support of a junk block attack as "innovation".
So what does Bitcoin Gandalf really think?
So, why did they this?
For marketing/attention purposes.
And it has worked beautifully because any press is good press...
...right?
The obvious answer to that sarcastic rhetorical question: is 'no'.
It's a gross attack on the network.
It's the reason why the blocksize limit exists.
Ever wonder why the Bitcoin community refuses to increase the blocksize limit and make on-chain fees cheaper? Because of this nonsense and Ordinals and everything else. Bitcoin is the ultimate security chain, and you get what you pay for. If they make the blocksize bigger at this juncture it's just going to get filled up with more garbage that every node has to save... forever. No thanks. Maybe later.
https://twitter.com/mononautical/status/1772570991572431298
- mononautical
Would the miscreant responsible for this like to come forward?!?
This is the appropriate response.
And what was the answer?
https://twitter.com/PortlandHODL/status/1772581951582695608
- PortlandHODL
tHe tEChNiCaL cHaLLenGeS wErE INsanE!
Oh yeah cool story bro. Tell me more about how hard it was to hack the Bitcoin blockchain so you could draw a 1.7 MB 'M'. It's like the definition of a scientist that just does something because they can without thinking if they actually should. The complete and utter lack of self-awareness here is absolutely staggering. Full stop.
In case you're wondering
Here is what the typical 2D rendering of a block is supposed to look like. Pretty much random because obviously. Bigger squares represent bigger operations and different colors represent how much of a fee was paid. Marathon created a block of pure garbage with low fees to create the green squares and high fees to create red and orange. And then all of them had to be the exact same size to make it a dot matrix.
Don't get me wrong this actually would be kind of cool if they had created something out of a block that didn't have fake transactions. If they had done this correctly and made a picture just by rearranging the order of VALID transactions I'd honestly be kind of impressed. Now that they've had their fun and have created custom code to do these kinds of manipulations perhaps they'll pull their act together.
Wait, @edicted, haven't you created a junk block?
OMFG that's right I did, huh?
@edicted/65-kb-max-length-post-keywords-javascript-steem-api
Okay so funny story...
I've filled up an entire block as well (on this chain in 2018).
And I didn't even make a cool picture or advertisement.
I was just testing the limitations of the chain and API...
And it also cost me $0 and only took up 65 KB... so not quite comparable.
But still funny that I just remembered.
https://twitter.com/BTCGandalf/status/1772614109273452665
- BTCGandalf
The cost of advertising.
Marathon's previous blocks gave around $8000 in fees so it actually might have been worth it to pull this stunt on a financial level. Like I said, I've never heard of them and now they are burned into memory forever (just not in a good way). Personally I don't think we should let them get away with this type of behavior, but punishing them could prove difficult. All I can say for sure is never delegate to their mining pool if they have one. Never buy their stock. Tell others to do the same if the opportunity arises.
Conclusion
This new way to utilize Bitcoin could present a wave of creative potential.
No, get out. This is not innovative. This is not even acceptable. I demand layer zero justice. No one should be okay with Marathon Digital Holdings filling up a block with complete garbage with an advert while then allowing them to spin it as a good thing. It's not a good thing.
It's a terrible terrible thing and sets the worst precedent imaginable. Luckily the only users who are ever going to look at such trash in the first place are people like me who are going to be pissed off about it. I'm struggling to see how this isn't a net loss for Mara, but I guess we'll see how it goes.
Again if they just used valid transactions in the mempool to make a picture... then fine whatever I have no problem with that. But what they have done here is such blatant blasphemy with complete disregard for any self-awareness or even self-preservation. Doesn't Marathon know how zealous Bitcoiners are? Seems like perhaps they're about to find out.