A Bitcoin Core contributor has taken the logo of Marathon Digital, a mining company, and transformed it into a visual representation within a Bitcoin block using the company’s template building tools. The artwork, known as “block art,” is created by arranging transactions in a block in a specific order, which can then be viewed on a Bitcoin indexer website. Marathon Digital recently shared the details of block 836361, which they successfully mined on March 26. They named it the M block and intended for the visualization to showcase their template building capabilities and technology stack.
By owning their own mining pool, Marathon Digital has the ability to manipulate the order of transactions and create block art. While they do not offer this as a service, they believe it has potential for creative exploration within the Bitcoin space. Portland.HODL, the user who created the block’s visualization, claims to have achieved it through a lengthy trial-and-error process.
To create this block art, OP_RETURN transactions in the Bitcoin protocol were utilized. These transactions allow for a small amount of arbitrary data to be included, typically used for embedding messages or metadata on the blockchain. By carefully crafting the content of these transactions and ordering them correctly, an image or pattern can emerge when the block data is visualized.
Before a block is mined, all transactions reside in the mempool. Miners can create multiple transactions to generate block art once they are mined. These transactions are developed with outputs that correspond to the pixels of the desired image when visualized.
Creating block art requires miners to modify their software to prioritize specific transactions that form the desired pattern, rather than focusing on maximizing profit based on fees. Additionally, it requires significant hashing power, similar to that of Marathon, to mine a block with the desired set of transactions.
Marathon paid a total of $122,524 in fees to achieve the desired output for the “M block.” The user who created the visualization previously worked at Braiins mining, and each colored square in the block represents a transaction and its associated fee.
Cointelegraph has reached out to Marathon and Portland.HODL for more information on the “M block” and the implications of block composability.
In February 2024, Marathon launched a BTC transaction submission service designed to facilitate and speed up large and complex Bitcoin transactions.