This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Inscription Issue”. Click here to get your Annual Bitcoin Magazine Subscription. Click here to download a PDF of this article. Ordinals have been a polarizing phenomenon for most every subcommunity in Bitcoin — except for miners. The meteoric rise of the new …

Since Bitcoin’s inception, network difficulty has grown from 1 to as much as 48.71 trillion hashes that a miner would theoretically need to generate to find the winning one. This means it is 48.71 trillion times harder to mine a Bitcoin block today than when mining first began in 2009 …