Now, if you look here:
https://ordiscan.com/, you can see two key statistics about the Ordinals rush:
1. 13.5 GB of our disk space is being wasted by our nodes storing these inscriptions inside transactions. That is 13.5GB used in just
9 months!Extrapolating, that means that you will be wasting roughly 15GB of storage each year on worthless Ordinal tokens, as long as the demand is constant.
2. Ordinals users have paid over 1385
BTC in transaction fees for inscribing this stuff. That means miners have earned literally 1385
BTC from this time period or
over 50 million dollars altogether.
So yes, it is keeping the miners afloat, but the disk space usage (and the associated spike in mempool fees) is quite annoying regardless.
Diskpace would be used anyhow if there would be usage, and the complaining for the 15 GB, sorry it's ridiculous.
Let's ignore that there is 600 GB torrent of One Piece with +200 seeders and over 1000 leechers and, just to make a point let's increase this to 1 TB (60x) a year, so that would make the around 40 000 nodes across the galaxy spend at max 50$ for extra space, that's a full, wow $2 million spent by the average Joe to keep decentralization!
So $2 million, would buy you 1000 S19k Pro (I went for the cheapest $/th), that can hash 120 Petahash/s, so around 0.02% of the global hashrate!
Now, if people are not willing to collectively spend $2 million a year to keep the network decentralized with increased disk storage needs, how can one envision mining not becoming fully centralized in a few years?
People paid in fees in the last 24 hours $6.5 million enough to buy with just today's fees 18731 8TB Evo ssd, in two days the fees would cover 8TB ssd for every node.