Crypto Twitter’s Bitcoin Quadrant was awash with concern on Sunday, as some users viewed high transaction fees and a congested transaction backlog as an attack on Bitcoin.
There are currently over 469,000 transactions waiting to be confirmed in Bitcoin’s mempool mempool.space. Before transactions are added to Bitcoin’s blockchain, transactions are sent to the network’s mempool, where they wait to be selected by a Bitcoin miner and inserted into the next block of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin transaction fees were also quite high, with high-priority transactions charging a rate of 654 sat/vB, or about $26 mempool.space.
The two metrics suggested that Bitcoin’s network was particularly congested, but some thought it was the product of nefarious behavior aimed at cutting off those who couldn’t handle the surge in transaction fees.
“High transaction fees are the attacker’s chosen pain point, likely to make […] Bitcoin unusable for smaller players,” claimed @proofofjogi on Twitter on Sunday. “We’re in the then-they-fight-you phase.”
The notion that high transaction fees could be used as an “attack vector” on Bitcoin was echoed by Bitcoin maxi Dylan LeClair. However, he claimed that short-term increases in costs will not have a significant impact on Bitcoin in the long-term.
A user on Twitter named @Toma_7_32 pointed out that bitcoin’s mempool clogging mostly benefits miners “having a great time” while reaping the rewards associated with higher transaction fees, despite what some have described as an “attack ‘ on Bitcoin. “
The account claimed that it was only a matter of time before those who flooded Bitcoin’s mempool with transactions ran out of funds, with short-lived impacts on the network.
Still others attributed the surge in transaction fees and bitcoin’s sizeable backlog to Ordinals, a protocol used to mint NFT-like assets on bitcoin. The total number of bitcoin-based digital assets, known as inscriptions, rose to over 4.3 million as of Sunday, according to Dune dashboard. Just last week, inscriptions 2.5 million in totalrelated to decrypt Cover.
The recent increase in inscriptions can be attributed to the growing popularity of BRC-20 tokens originally pioneered experiment March. Some exchanges like UniSat Wallet have created ways for people to trade these bitcoin-based tokens, which bear a resemblance to ERC-20 Tokens on Ethereum.
According to another Dune, UniSat Wallet had generated over $9.3 million worth of inscriptions trading volume on Sunday alone as of this writing dashboard. The number coincided with around 7,500 transactions.
While chatter surrounding ordinals and bitcoin transaction fees intensified on Sunday, bitcoin was largely unchanged. The coin is down about 0.1% to around 28,800 as of this writing, according to Bitcoin Trader CoinGecko.
And while some raised concerns on Twitter, others like Kashif Raza balked at the idea of Bitcoin being under attack, pointing out that Ordinals is an innovation made possible in part by Bitcoin Taproot upgrade.
“Developers are using it to explore new opportunities that you can’t stop,” he said. “It’s called a free market.”
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