All I know is that after having a substantial tx get stuck in a submarine swap via acinq's phoenix wallet I'm staying in LN as much as I can from now on, and I'm sure that is in a lot of people's minds.

The ongoing march of exchange adoption of LN is only going to be accelerated by this nonsense. Last time the chain got spam attacked like this, saw the invention of bulk transactions bundling hundreds withdrawals into one. And soon that will be done with taproot schnorr signatures, but nobody else has incentive to max their margin on moving bitcoin around than exchanges.

The chain would never have had the room to accommodate this before. The marginal cost of block space is very low. Miners are deeply leveraged this cycle, and are the clear suspects for who is motivating this spam. Miners count on a certain average volume of transactions and honestly if you hadn't noticed that average block sizes have shrunk in the last few years you aren't looking.

I think Jevon's Paradox is what we are seeing here. Efficiency increases leading to marginal use cases proliferating. The ordinals will stop being printed if they don't hold their value. If we see a ponzinomic bust, everything will be back to like before. NFTs are basically dead in shitcoin world already.

The correct spelling is "excrement".

I think what's happening is one or two very large miners, like 20% or so of the mining hash power, are making pointless transactions that resemble coin joins, consolidations and batch payments knowing that they will get back 20% of the fees they spend, and if they put enough of these large transactions into the mempool at the front of the price range, the miners will recoup most of this by the rise in fees by the rest of the users with their real transactions.

Go look at some random recent blocks. They aren't ordinals. They are bulk transactions with 50+ on either or both in and out. The total block sizes are not bloated like ordinals do from witness data.

All they have to do is achieve raising the average block fee total for blocks to 5 times normal and they get their fees back.

I think we are looking at an attempt by a bitcoin miner (miners) to bail itself (themselves) out of a debt problem by gaming the fee market.

Sufficiently inefficient use of blockchain space is indistinguishable from spam

I like to assume the worst in people, so... yes 👍

I want the fees to keep increasing and put them out of business. This is usually difficult to last for more than three months. I'm going to spend this time on the Lightning Network.

Is there an easy way to see how many of these are ordinals?

As much as it looks like it, a lot of problems opened up!) and the main thing is that it won't last forever!)

Good question. I'm wondering too.