You can now mine rather than inscribe a square Bitcoin block image
On Tuesday morning, publicly traded bitcoin miner Marathon Digital created a viral art piece on Bitcoin’s blockchain. However, unlike NFTs, Ordinals, Counterparty assets, or any other type of prior art, Marathon simply ordered transactions in a precise pattern. This block of ordered transactions rendered as a pixelated image on block indexer websites like Mempool.space. Many Bitcoiners shared the image, a corporate advertisement for Marathon, and as such, its media campaign worked. However, Marathon had to forgo some transaction fee revenue in order to carefully craft its block template with less competitively priced transactions. Marathon compensated by increasing public awareness of its block template-building and mining skills. The organizer of one Bitcoin conference poked fun, noting that the ad was uncentered by one pixel . The ad also failed to render on certain block indexers. Nevertheless, its message was communicated clearly enough to thousands of observers. Marathon ord...