Re: Everyone is celebrating about the fourth halving but what is this?
It is either what @nullama said (people trying to get into the halving block) or this is "fee market manipulation" considering the timing and how the attack took place. There was an "artificial" injection of a rather large number of transactions (the first suspect is the Ordinals Attackers) into the mempool which has only manipulated the fee market and significantly increased the fee rate by creating this fake competition.
Luckily the attack is becoming very expensive so it can not continue for long but the attack itself will not stop as long as the exploit in the protocol exists and the fake market where they sell fake tokens under the codename Ordinals exists. That is creating an incentive to spam attack bitcoin.
Luckily the attack is becoming very expensive so it can not continue for long but the attack itself will not stop as long as the exploit in the protocol exists and the fake market where they sell fake tokens under the codename Ordinals exists. That is creating an incentive to spam attack bitcoin.
Of course it won't continue. Otherwise, people will stop using Bitcoin for good. That's why the fee mechanism was invented. To help protect the Blockchain against spam attacks. I'd imagine chains with bigger block sizes (BCH and BSV) getting abused because of their higher transaction capacity. Even Solana's ultra-low fees paves the way for transaction spamming. Eventually, the attacker is going to run out of money as fees continue to rise like there's no tomorrow. When fees decline, it will be the perfect time to send money across the BTC blockchain. Or you can take the opportunity to open/close a channel on the LN at a lower cost.
I'm not surprised about fees surging towards the "triple digits", since that's usually the norm with every halving event. The past halving caused fees to rise all the way to the moon (although not as high as they are right now). I'd hope Ordinals moves away to a sidechain just to leave the main BTC blockchain for financial-only applications (sending/receiving money). Maybe Bitcoin Core devs will come up with a solution soon?
