Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person or entity

We have analyzed all Ordinal Inscriptions created since Bitcoin block 779832, which marks the introduction of the BRC-20 standard. It appears that 80% of all inscriptions created in early-mid May 2023 belong to a single person or entity that controls a single public key, 117f692257b2331233b5705ce9c682be8719ff1b2b64cbca290bd6faeb54423e. Between March 7, 2023 (the introduction of BRC-20), and May 25, 2023, this entity accounted for 64% of all inscriptions. Their transaction fees amount to 1056 BTC, single-handedly influencing the regime of the entire blockchain.

During our test runs, which parsed and printed tapscripts in the P2TR script-path transaction inputs, we noticed that a script featuring the same single public key dominated all tapscripts. The script matched this pattern:  OP_PUSHBYTES_32 117f692257b2331233b5705ce9c682be8719ff1b2b64cbca290bd6faeb54423e OP_CHECKSIG OP_PUSHBYTES_6 <6 bytes> OP_DROP OP_0 OP_IF OP_PUSHBYTES_3 6f7264 OP_PUSHBYTES_1 01 OP_PUSHBYTES_M <M bytes> OP_0 OP_PUSHBYTES_N <N bytes> OP_ENDIF. 


We leave the conclusions to the reader. However, we notice that by spending only 0.005% of the total Bitcoin supply on transaction fees, a single entity can significantly impact the entire Blockchain regime. This illustrates that if a whale or a governmental actor, possessing hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins, decides to spam the blockchain, they could impede its usability for normal payments. This vulnerability may partly be due to the discount for witness vBytes in SegWit, along with relaxed witness size restrictions in the P2TR (Pay to Taproot) transactions scheme, although further research on the transaction fees market is needed.



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