That wraps up Blockspace’s first full calendar year! In 2024 we hit the ground running with 2 newsletters, 4 podcasts, investigative reporting, and our inaugural scaling conference OP_NEXT.

Our scrappy team covered many topics that conventional Bitcoin media did not, particularly on mining plus new technical and cultural discussions on Bitcoin. Often these topics overlapped – just look at some of our newsletters from this year.

If you haven’t been paying close attention to Blockspace content this past year, here are our self-elected top five favorite newsletters of 2024 for Bitcoin and Bitcoin Season 2 topics (we’ll be covering Mining Pod newsletters on Thursday, so stay tuned!).

#5 The $5 million Bitcoin block

Bitcoin’s halving block saw fireworks as users raced to mint the very first Runes, generating over $2.4 million in fees and an additional $2.1 million in the sale of the block’s Epic satoshi, for a cumulative $5m+ in revenue from a single block. Patting ourselves on the back a bit – we actually called this to a T. We predicted a lower fee scenario of $2.3m in an earlier post, using the early DeGods mint as an analog. 

#4 Fractal Bitcoin attracts over half of Bitcoin hashrate + cloud mining surges

Western media completely missed the Fractal Bitcoin story at the end of the summer, but the cloud mining market sure won’t forget September 2024! 

Fractal’s merged-mining hashrate peaked at roughly 30% of Bitcoin’s total network hashrate, and Fractal permissionless mining (i.e., Fractal-only mining) even briefly pulled hashrate away from Bitcoin! Most interestingly, cloud mining/hashrate rental rates soared as speculators raced to rent SHA-256 to point it to Fractal pools, which in the early stages, was the only way you could acquire the native token $FB. We also pointed out a risk to Fractal as the chain was on track to get unsustainably large (which has also somewhat played out as indicated).

#3 Nearly 3 years later, OP_CTV is entering the Overton Window

In a year dominated by OP_CAT, a Dark Horse for Bitcoin soft fork proposals re-emerges: OP_CTV. 

At our conference OP_NEXT, it became pretty clear that, while OP_CAT does have broad support, OP_CTV is much more explicitly supported by the majority of Bitcoin developers engaged in public discussion. OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY is a narrowly defined opcode from developer Jeremy Rubin, who reflected at OP_NEXT on the path CTV has taken in the popular soft fork discussion. In mid-November, we saw even more public support for CTV from a broad group of influential voices

#2 Quantum computing for dummies

Google announced a “breakthrough” quantum chip, which kicked off multiple weeks of chatter on quantum and crypto, bewildering even some of Bitcoin’s more technical adherents. We broke down the risks quantum could pose to Bitcoin and explained how developers are working towards solutions. No longer do you have to read some confusing twitter thread – just bookmark this article!

#1 Sniping ground zero🔫

One of the most underrated stories on Bitcoin this year was the emergence of power user-driven MEV.

We covered MEV a number of times, but the most notable Bitcoin MEV in 2024 was driven by “Ordinals Sniping.” It can be a little difficult to observe let alone explain, as most of the sniping activity had been an open secret over the past year. Basically, Users were replacing and bumping up the fees for purchases from major ordinals marketplaces by taking advantage of a disparity between secondary market pricing and the ordinals asset’s settlement in a block. At times, the competition for sniping got so hot that the fees for a handful of blocks were comprised of fees from sniping.