First 500 000 blocks are less than 35% of the whole blockchain size. Even though there's only been 780 000ish blocks ever mined. Is it only because of ordinals? What are the other factors?
Discussion
Hardly anyone used Bitcoin for the first 5 years
Most recent 5 years are much more representative of what future storage usage will look like
It does seem like it.
During the early years most blocks were not full. Now days there's a lot more transactions in the mempool at any given time and blocks are always full.
Yeah, just watching my node validating blocks from 5 years ago and there are still some empty or almost empty blocks. Majority though contain over 2k transactions.