Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 07:38:55 AM

For me, I would not mind seeing a bit of a sustainable bump in the bitcoin fees and the use of blockspace, yet the fact of the matter seems to be that bitcoin seems to be already largely prepared to handle these kinds of spikes in usage and able to expand quite a bit beyond the various ways that it is currently being used.... because the mempool is continuing to clear without too many sustainable fee increases (so far) and whether the whole hashing power of the network is overbuilt or not, we have had a lot of increases in the hashrate too in the past week or two (perhaps partly inspired by cardinals/inscriptions, but also just seemingly that hashrate is just constantly going up.. "going up forever Laura.")..

Ordinals and their hype had no direct effect on the hashrate, the hype started so recently that it wouldn't have been time even for the gear to be ordered, less much already received and installed to make for the increase. Plus the timing is not there, the mempool was flooded by them by the 7th, the last difficulty retarget happened on the 12th and was negative.

It's most likely an incredible amount of gear that was ordered a month prior and was still stuck in deposits or farms that at prices below 20k were running their gear in low mode, plus even some farms that were offline in the previous two weeks (we had a -0.49 adjusted prior). A combination of factors, but ordinals are not one of them.

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 07:59:01 AM

That 11% increase in hashrate is going to lead to 11% less blocks. Considering the full blocks, I expect fees to go up a bit tomorrow.

Not necessarily, it depends a lot on where the growth was concentrated, even if it's a bit random and a lot of luck involved the first days saw a higher time block than the last ones, so it is possible the currently installed hashrate is still growing by a bit, a few 1-4%, so we might still have extra blocks even in this period.
Anyhow the hype is dying down, the weekend is coming and we only have 4vMb worth of tx in the mempool, most likely it's going to be empty next morning, and a lot of free space during the weekend for 1sat/b consolidations.