The image, in case anybody can't see it:



One must wonder how the expected block consisted of only a few giant consolidation transactions.

Edit: apparently they created all those transactions themselves, they're all OP_RETURNs and the first four spells out


There's the US constitution in more OP_RETURNs below that too.

Seems like these transactions were mined privately by MARA.

But you can only see the image from mempool.space. I think that's a feature not a bug.

Yeah it's inscribed in the first couple of OP_RETURN transactions in the block. If you go to the link OP posted then Mempool.space shows a bunch of transactions that look like

UNKNOWN

OP_RETURN "four or five words here"

It's just below the Coinbase transaction, you can't miss it.

But you can see it on any other block explorer that displays OP_RETURN stuff, like Blockstream.

It's split across several transactions because OP_RETURN has a very small data limit.

MARA seems to be a very "patriotic" mining pool (make of that what you will) who put "made in USA" and the American flag in the coinbase of every block they mine so judging by that, they will always implement US recommendations for bitcoin mining. By choice though.

At least we have a lot of other mining pools who's business model is modeled on zero-sum games rather than political directives.

I had no idea this is possible. We are looking at something only a mining pool can do, since they include all their extra transactions (and have to keep doing it until they "win" a real block), is that correct?

only expected fees they did not earn from users txs.
0.01 — 0.03 btc
So, this was cost ~$200


Update: expected fees for that block were 0.015 btc. You can see this on mempool.space

Very cool, thanks for posting the image! This should be merited/"liked" by people no matter what they think of Trump, simply because we enjoy using computers. Recently, I saw an old xFiles - from 1993 - and the young boy produced a huge, hand-coded, multi-page, stunning image of his sister who had been abducted by aliens. Can we be certain Mara pool and/or Trump are not controlled by aliens? 

Yes you are correct.


Yeah but since they mined the block, they also get all the fees from those transactions i.e. it's as if they didn't spend any money on tx fees to create this image.

Now the question is will MARA sell their coins like NFT? because in the last two years, many people are willing to buy coins which were linked with pizza transactions by Laszlo or the other thing that make people feel the coins are limited.


This version looks better.
https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000010c05038d08c742d28a7a248e9d0f94ebe5102f366c8e?audit=false&showDetails=false&view=actual#overview
https://cointelegraph.com/news/mara-trump-47-block-anticipation-pro-bitcoin

No. I've been making similar statements about all centralized entities that start creeping into Bitcoin world. Whether it was the government of my own country when they decided to first blame their own incompetency (power shortage) on bitcoin miners only to regulate and restrict mining to tax it. Or the US government (not any particular administration) which categorized internet as a military battlefield decades ago and has been assigning 4-star military generals to it with tens of billions of dollars budget dedicated to mine people's data on it, running the biggest surveillance operation in the world!

I don't see it that way. I see a trend of increasing surveillance, regulation/restriction, crackdown and shutting down anything decentralized that may help improve privacy like mixers, etc. That trend started a long time ago and is only getting worse every year as Bitcoin grows.

Different administrations in the US may take a different approach but that trend is unchanging. Trump is just more radical than Harris but they both operation within the same regime...

He is the first convicted felon president who talked about crypto, otherwise Nayib Bukele the president of El Salvador is the first real president to didn't just talk about it, he adopted bitcoin as legal tender in his country about 4 years ago!