Independent developer, Udi Wertheimer, claims he minted a giant image of what appears to be a bald, bearded wizard donning sunglasses and promoting “magic internet JPEGs” on the Bitcoin blockchain via the Ordinals protocol. His announcements in the Discord channel “taprootwizards.com” and on Twitter sparked further flames of division between Bitcoin purists and Ordinals proponents. The block that minted the NFT was mined by Bitcoin mining firm, Luxor, which said it was “the largest Bitcoin block ever mined.
Lines were drawn when the Ordinals protocol, which stores non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Bitcoin, launched on the dominant blockchain last month. That showdown created two factions – purists who insist on using Bitcoin exclusively for payments and Ordinals fans who welcome NFTs, including this “Taproot wizard” sketch that nearly filled an entire 4 megabyte (MB) block, incurred no transaction fees (although a premium off-chain fee was likely paid) and left Bitcoiners of both stripes mystified.
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