By Susie Violet Ward · Forbes · 18 December 2023
Over the weekend of 16 December 2023, bitcoin transaction fees peaked at $40, above the previous high of $31 recorded that May. The article attributes the spike to increased network activity from BRC-20 tokens and ordinal inscriptions, which left around 470,000 transactions waiting in the mempool. With miners prioritising higher-fee transactions, users who wanted quicker confirmations had to pay more.
The article sees the episode as exposing bitcoin’s scalability limits and the need for layer 2 solutions such as the Lightning Network, while arguing that high fees help secure the network by deterring abuse and keeping node operation affordable. Drawing on Andreas Antonopoulos’s talk “Bubble Boy and the Bitcoin Sewer Rat”, it presents the event as a test of bitcoin’s antifragility: its capacity to become stronger under stress.