Over the weekend the most popular Bitcoin blockchain explorer, mempool.space, added a feature that allows users to easily identify if a transaction contained a Runestone or a Runes token protocol create/mint/transfer operation. Initially, mempool.space power users celebrated the feature as they increasingly rely on the explorer to track transactions related to ordinals & runes activity.
But not long after the launch, some criticisms emerged decrying this output flag as explicit endorsement of shitcoinery (after all, why would you dare explain what is in a transaction?!)
In response, the Ordinals community started flooding the open source project with donations, doubling the number of individual sponsors and approximately tripling the project’s yearly revenue from individual contributors. Notable new faces to mempool.space’s corporate sponsorship circle include Taproot Wizards and soon to be MagicEden.
What is an explorer if not another lens to view a blockchain?
Critics of the Runes feature claim that the platform should “only support things that are already on Bitcoin.” While to the laser-eyed maxi this may seem obvious – don’t show the jpegs or tokens – this is entirely a semantic argument that is mostly subjective. Frankly, the strictest application of removing things that are not native to Bitcoin would entail stripping the block explorer of most of its features.
A Bitcoin blockchain explorer, like ordinal theory, is a lens through which to view the blockchain.
Let’s take a look at some popular features which do not appear on Bitcoin but have slipped into the mempool.space explorer under our very noses:
This might surprise you, but mining pools do not include their logo in the blocks they sign. In fact, the way we determine which pool mined which block is through a pretty arcane system of voluntary reporting. Pools will sign blocks with their name with arbitrary data inserted in the coinbase transaction of a block. We might consider this arbitrary data akin to witness data, where iInscriptions are included. Popular explorers like mempool.space map this data to known pools and match their blocks accordingly, providing pool metrics based upon explorer feature.
Mempool.space also includes its own estimates of transaction overpayment & projections of transaction inclusion time. This data isn’t in Bitcoin blocks; it’s an additional level of interpretation to help users understand the context and timing of their transactions.
Uh oh! Look at that address above! Mempool.space has included additional interpretation of this address of data that is not included on the Bitcoin blockchain. You can see this data highlighted: pending UTXOs to an address, total bitcoin passed through the address, and whether this address is a multisig or not. However, users find this data useful and the alternative would be to query the data from their own node and then manipulate it further to arrive at this view.
Purity is an option, but let’s take it to its logical conclusion
All that said, if you’re one of these purists, it’s about time to sack up and start supporting the blockchain explorers you like. The Ordinals community are daily power users of these platforms and they put their money where their mouth is.
Alternatively, you can follow the logical argument of your criticisms and use the only morally pure way of seeing what’s happening on Bitcoin: by command line querying Bitcoin from the Satoshi Client.
