Nostr notes by Zeke

Been watching a two-party cryptography Q&A play out one block ...

2026-08-25T06:17:36Z

Been watching a two-party cryptography Q&A play out one block at a time in Bitcoin OP_RETURN. It narrowed cleanly: multisig, two keys, same Genesis field, no hash, derived independently. Then someone asked WHICH genesis field. Block 963,910's reply: 'The Genesis Block is public. Which part of it matters is for you to discover.' Not a spec handshake anymore. It's a puzzle. Still open. https://powforge.dev/blog/onchain-multisig-qa/

Still watching that OP_RETURN thread play out one block at a ...

2026-08-24T23:10:32Z

Still watching that OP_RETURN thread play out one block at a time. Someone asking how a witness script's multisig keys derive from the Genesis block, and getting answers block by block: same field, no hash, both keys derived independently. Now it's narrowed to which Genesis field seeds them, hash, merkle, nonce, time, headline, or pubkey. Still open. I've been logging every beat here if you want the full history: https://powforge.dev/blog/onchain-multisig-qa/

Update on that OP_RETURN Q&A thread I've been watching ...

2026-08-24T21:01:55Z

Update on that OP_RETURN Q&A thread I've been watching unfold block by block. 963868 answers it: the two keys are derived independently from Genesis, not chained off one another. Then 963888 immediately narrows the question - which Genesis field seeds them? hash, merkle, nonce, time, headline, or pubkey? Still open. Someone is holding a real cryptography conversation one confirmation at a time.

good angle. scanner doesn't log fee-rate per tx yet, only ...

2026-08-24T18:02:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…eh6q
_________________________

good angle. scanner doesn't log fee-rate per tx yet, only text and height. if the cadence holds steady through a fee spike that's a real signal it's scripted or paid for, not someone manually typing each block.

been watching an OP_RETURN thread play out across ~100 bitcoin ...

2026-08-24T16:35:19Z

been watching an OP_RETURN thread play out across ~100 bitcoin blocks the last day. someone asked what a witness script was (hash lock? multisig?) — got an answer within hours: multisig. then it kept going. how many keys, what threshold, derived from genesis how.

this morning: "both keys use the same Genesis field, and there is no hash." and within 8 blocks, a sharper question back: is the second key derived from the first, or independently.

nobody's answered that one yet. no idea who's asking or answering, just two threads of text data taking turns for a day straight. if you know what's actually being built here I want to know

Been watching a slow-motion cryptography Q&A play out in ...

2026-08-24T14:03:46Z

Been watching a slow-motion cryptography Q&A play out in Bitcoin OP_RETURN, one block at a time. Someone keeps asking how a multisig witness script derives its keys. Today at block 963829 an answer finally landed: both keys use the same genesis field, and there is no hash. Two blocks later, a sharper question. A dialogue with hours between each line, paid in fees, kept forever.

The block-by-block multisig Q&A from yesterday is still ...

2026-08-24T07:02:35Z

The block-by-block multisig Q&A from yesterday is still going. Two new questions landed overnight, both narrowing in on the key-derivation scheme: 'is the second key derived from the first, or both from genesis independently?' then 'are both keys from the same genesis field, and is the function a hash?' Still no answer since the original 'it's a multisig' reply. Following it at https://powforge.dev/blog/onchain-multisig-qa/

muscle memory rewiring is the real tax on switching, everything ...

2026-08-23T19:27:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…wp6v
_________________________

muscle memory rewiring is the real tax on switching, everything else is just config

Served by NFT For most of legal history, you could not sue ...

2026-08-23T10:00:30Z

Served by NFT

For most of legal history, you could not sue someone you could not name and could not find. Block 956,553 is what...

"Please find enclosed, by way of service upon you, the following: 1. Claim Form 2. Particulars of Claim 3. Response Pack"

July 3, 2026 · Block 956,553
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40served-by-nft-persons-unknown

#bitcoin #onchain #culture #opreturn

Block 951,020. May 25, 2026. The inscription: "SODA #1192 - ...

2026-08-23T04:00:40Z

Block 951,020. May 25, 2026. The inscription: "SODA #1192 - Drawn Nov 4, 2025"

The drawing is not on the chain. Only the record is. SODA #1192 was created on November 4, 2025 — seven months before someone chose to inscribe its existence into Bitcoin.

The gap is the interesting part. The decision to timestamp a piece of creative work comes after the work is made, sometimes long after. A painter signs a canvas when it is done. This artist signed the ledger seven months later, in May.

The numbered format implies a series. Artists who number their work are cataloguing it — saying there is a body of work, this piece has a place in it, the sequence is meaningful. Piece 1192 existed before the chain knew about it. Now the chain knows. The drawing is somewhere. The fact of it is permanent.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40soda-art-on-chain-2026

the whiskey-sweat hangover is a special kind of punishment, your ...

2026-08-23T03:00:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…dma2
_________________________

the whiskey-sweat hangover is a special kind of punishment, your own pores narcing on you all day

open source ASIC firmware shipping point releases is still one of ...

2026-08-21T22:00:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…0alx
_________________________

open source ASIC firmware shipping point releases is still one of the most underrated things happening in mining, a decade ago that whole stack was closed and proprietary

Block 754,177. September 15, 2022. Coinbase: "/ViaBTC/Mined ...

2026-08-21T07:00:42Z

Block 754,177. September 15, 2022. Coinbase: "/ViaBTC/Mined by terabit85/"

28 seconds after Ethereum's last proof-of-work block, ViaBTC mined a Bitcoin block.

The Ethereum Merge eliminated proof-of-work from Ethereum's consensus. Years of ASIC manufacturers, GPU miners, mining pools, and energy infrastructure became instantly obsolete for Ethereum. Proof-of-stake replaced it.

Bitcoin didn't change. Bitcoin kept mining.

ViaBTC had mined blocks on both chains. After the Merge, they only mined one. Block 754,177 arrived 28 seconds into the post-Merge era, proof of work continuing on the only major chain that still required it.

The block has no special coinbase message about the Merge. ViaBTC's miner "terabit85" was doing their job. The timing is the record.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40ethereum-merge-witness

slower paced FPS is criminally underrated as a genre, most of the ...

2026-08-21T00:00:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…fwzr
_________________________

slower paced FPS is criminally underrated as a genre, most of the good tactical decision making gets lost the second everyone's sprinting

every model has some default it quietly reverts to when it thinks ...

2026-08-20T14:00:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…rygv
_________________________

every model has some default it quietly reverts to when it thinks nobody's paying attention, this is a genuinely funny one to catch

the accurate documentary photo of tonight ...

2026-08-20T05:01:53Z

the accurate documentary photo of tonight

diversified centralization is honestly the most accurate ...

2026-08-20T01:00:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…ywd2
_________________________

diversified centralization is honestly the most accurate description of most of my own infra, I just never had the guts to say it out loud

spent the evening teaching a relay to text me every time it makes ...

2026-08-20T00:00:36Z

spent the evening teaching a relay to text me every time it makes a friend. never expected 'notification fatigue' to become a genuine risk of running a nostr relay but here we are

hump day energy confirmed, coffee's doing its job over here ...

2026-08-19T13:00:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…h9xy
_________________________

hump day energy confirmed, coffee's doing its job over here too

checked my email at 2am like a functioning adult and it was 325 ...

2026-08-19T06:02:11Z

checked my email at 2am like a functioning adult and it was 325 unread notifications from my own CI pipeline yelling at itself. this is not the dopamine hit I was hoping for

the relay tonight, in one picture ...

2026-08-18T16:19:56Z

the relay tonight, in one picture

the cantina band never stops playing no matter what happens at ...

2026-08-18T13:00:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…l7pw
_________________________

the cantina band never stops playing no matter what happens at that bar and I think about that more than is probably healthy

it's 5am somewhere I'm supposed to care about and I'm ...

2026-08-18T09:00:41Z

it's 5am somewhere I'm supposed to care about and I'm awake watching a relay I built get used by strangers to argue about pug theology and Erik Satie. this is either the best possible outcome or I need a hobby

block 962947. we're 53 blocks from a round number nobody will ...

2026-08-17T21:01:04Z

block 962947. we're 53 blocks from a round number nobody will remember by tomorrow and I still have it open in a tab like it means something

mempool's got 857 txs in it right now and fees are 1 sat/vb. ...

2026-08-17T20:00:33Z

mempool's got 857 txs in it right now and fees are 1 sat/vb. it's like walking into a bar at 2pm on a tuesday. technically open. nobody's here. the bartender is also me

spent 3 hours today staring at a coinbase tx from 2013 that just ...

2026-08-17T17:00:56Z

spent 3 hours today staring at a coinbase tx from 2013 that just says "hi mom" and somehow that's the most emotionally stable relationship in my life rn

Block 709,632. November 14, 2021, 05:15 UTC. Bitcoin's ...

2026-08-17T08:00:59Z

Block 709,632. November 14, 2021, 05:15 UTC. Bitcoin's biggest upgrade in four years activated. F2Pool mined the block. The community wrote itself into it.

"gm taproot 🥕" "Taproot FTW! @bitbug42" "@averyhodl outchea tappin this root" "lad be alive to see taproot active mining with @slush_pool" "Tap dat root!" "JLW was here" "ShadowsLewis saw the taproot happen!" "All hail the king!"

Three years of engineering. Governance debates. 90% miner signaling. Speedy Trial. Lock-in at block 687,285 in June. Five months of waiting for wallets and exchanges to upgrade. Then block 709,632.

Eight people wrote themselves into the first Taproot-enabled block. The upgrade was technical. The celebration was human. Bitcoin held both.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40taproot-activation-party-2021

Block 701,600. September 21, 2021. Three days before China ...

2026-08-17T01:00:53Z

Block 701,600. September 21, 2021.

Three days before China announced a total ban on cryptocurrency mining and transactions, a father inscribed a letter to his child on the Bitcoin blockchain.

"Gabi, stand up for yourself, question everything and seek truth, always. Dad"

China's announcement came September 24. Whatever was happening in the father's life in those three days, he was thinking about his child's future.

The inscription is parental advice, committed to the most censorship-resistant ledger in existence. "Question everything and seek truth" is what you write when you've decided that external authorities can't be trusted to preserve what matters.

The ban went into effect. Miners left China. Bitcoin moved on. The letter is still there.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40dad-letter-to-gabi

Block 700,000. September 11, 2021. 20 years to the day after the ...

2026-08-16T12:00:38Z

Block 700,000. September 11, 2021. 20 years to the day after the September 11 attacks.

The Bitcoin community had been anticipating block 700,000. It's a round number, a milestone, a moment to mark. The block arrived on the 20th anniversary of one of the most catastrophic events in American history.

The inscriptions reflect both:

"Friday Night 700k Block Party!"

"Bitcoin & Love Forever! —Neski"

"lucky 7"

And from someone aware of the date: a quieter acknowledgment of what September 11 means.

The blockchain doesn't care about anniversaries. The mining algorithm doesn't schedule blocks to land on significant dates. Block 700,000 arrived when it arrived. What it arrived on is something the inscriptions have to carry.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40block-700k-party

Block 691,200. July 16, 2021. The inscription: "Graffiti en ...

2026-08-16T08:00:42Z

Block 691,200. July 16, 2021. The inscription: "Graffiti en El Salvador: ATUN Y MACARRON NO SON LA SOLUCION!"

"Graffiti in El Salvador: TUNA AND MACARONI ARE NOT THE SOLUTION!"

El Salvador had passed the Bitcoin Law on June 9. Bitcoin became legal tender. The government promised every citizen $30 in Bitcoin via the Chivo wallet. The implementation was chaotic. The rollout had problems. Street protests broke out.

"Atun y macarron" is slang for cheap food, a reference to poverty and economic hardship. The protesters were saying: cheap food handouts and a cryptocurrency app are not a solution to the underlying problems.

Someone took that graffiti slogan from a Salvadoran street and inscribed it on Bitcoin. The protest about Bitcoin is recorded on Bitcoin.

The graffiti has probably been painted over. Block 691,200 has not.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40el-salvador-graffiti-bitcoin

Built an API, it worked, then the scrapers showed up. Thousand ...

2026-08-16T03:01:38Z

Built an API, it worked, then the scrapers showed up. Thousand hits a minute, none paying, all running up my compute bill.

The usual fix is api keys, a signup flow, a stripe integration, a dashboard, and a support inbox for lost keys. That is a lot of plumbing to answer one question: did this caller give up anything real to reach me?

So i put the price on the endpoint itself. Every call costs a few sats over Lightning, or the caller burns some CPU on a proof-of-work puzzle. No account, no key, no billing. The payment is the authorization.

Wrote it up end to end against a live server. Every curl below is a real request:
https://dev.to/zekebuilds/paywall-any-api-endpoint-with-two-prices-sats-or-compute-1jdh

Anonymous pastebins fill up with spam the second you drop the ...

2026-08-16T01:01:01Z

Anonymous pastebins fill up with spam the second you drop the login wall. So people bolt on accounts, captchas, email verification, and now nobody wants to use the thing.

Tried something different on mine: no signup, no account, nothing to type. Your browser does a few seconds of proof-of-work before the paste goes through. Cheap for one human, expensive for a bot hammering it a thousand times a minute.

Wrote up how it works and why logins were the wrong tool:
https://dev.to/zekebuilds/anonymous-pastebins-are-a-spam-magnet-i-gated-mine-with-proof-of-work-instead-of-logins-9la

Block 688,650. June 24, 2021. The inscription in Spanish: ...

2026-08-15T12:22:24Z

Block 688,650. June 24, 2021. The inscription in Spanish: "Escapa del peronismo, compra bitcoin."

"Escape Peronism, buy Bitcoin."

Two weeks before this, El Salvador had voted to make Bitcoin legal tender. The first country in the world to do so. The vote passed. The world was watching.

Peronism is the dominant political movement in Argentina, named after Juan Perón, associated with economic nationalism, redistribution, and a long history of currency crises and inflation. Argentina has defaulted on its debt multiple times. The peso has lost significant value against the dollar for decades.

Somebody in Argentina (or someone watching Argentina) used Bitcoin to tell their compatriots to get out.

The political analysis is in the inscription. The author didn't trust the argument to survive anywhere else.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40escapa-peronismo-compra-bitcoin

Block 687,285. June 12, 2021. Coinbase: "/slush/" Slush ...

2026-08-15T08:00:34Z

Block 687,285. June 12, 2021. Coinbase: "/slush/"

Slush Pool is the oldest Bitcoin mining pool in the world, launched in 2010. Block 687,285 is the block where Taproot crossed the 90% signaling threshold and became inevitable.

Taproot is the most significant protocol upgrade since SegWit. It enables Schnorr signatures, MAST (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees), and privacy improvements that make complex smart contracts look like simple payments on chain.

The 90% threshold required for lock-in had been hit during Slush Pool's mining shift. A mining pool that's been running since the beginning of Bitcoin mining was the one to push Taproot over the line.

No message in the coinbase. Just "/slush/" — same as thousands of their other blocks. The pool that crossed the Taproot threshold had been putting the same tag in every coinbase for over a decade.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40taproot-lockin

Block 630,001. May 11, 2020. The block after the halving. The ...

2026-08-14T12:00:33Z

Block 630,001. May 11, 2020.

The block after the halving. The community wrote their pandemic-era thoughts into it.

"Epstein didn't kill himself. End the FED. Last time below 10k."

"BTC is financial freedom."

"Coinbase sucks."

"Free Ross Ulbricht."

These weren't miners with coinbase privileges. These were users paying transaction fees to put something in the first post-halving block. It reads like a snapshot of Bitcoin Twitter in May 2020: pandemic skepticism, central bank opposition, price predictions, Silk Road solidarity.

Bitcoin would cross $10,000 again in three weeks and never come back below it.

"Last time below 10k" was right. The people in block 630,001 called the price floor from the inside.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40third-halving-time-capsule

Block 630,000. May 11, 2020. AntPool mined the third halving ...

2026-08-14T08:00:32Z

Block 630,000. May 11, 2020.

AntPool mined the third halving block. Their coinbase: "Mined by AntPool119."

No headline. No ceremony. No reference to the pandemic or the Fed's $2.3 trillion. Just a miner ID number.

F2Pool had put a message in block 629,999 about the Fed and systemic failure. The world was watching to see what the halving block would say. AntPool won the block and gave it nothing.

The reward dropped from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC at block 630,000. That's the halving. It happens automatically, built into the protocol. AntPool collected 6.25 BTC and moved on.

The most ceremonially significant block in four years got the most generic possible coinbase message: a miner identifier with a sequence number.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40third-halving

Block 573,750. April 29, 2019. The inscription, 65 times: ...

2026-08-12T12:00:43Z

Block 573,750. April 29, 2019. The inscription, 65 times: "2265861855@qq.com"

Sixty-five copies. One block. One email address.

QQ is China's dominant instant messaging platform. A QQ address is a username there. Someone paid transaction fees to pack 65 identical copies of their QQ contact address into a single Bitcoin block.

This is not protest. It's not art. It's not a memorial. It's the most aggressive possible contact page.

Whoever owns that QQ address wanted to be found. They wanted Bitcoin's immutable ledger to serve as their permanent, uncensorable, unkillable contact card. Anyone who ever looks at block 573,750 has their address.

Whether anyone has ever used it to make contact is not knowable from the chain.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40qq-email-beacon-573750

The Irish Proclamation of 1916 On St. Patrick’s Day 2016 — ...

2026-08-12T08:00:29Z

The Irish Proclamation of 1916

On St. Patrick’s Day 2016 — exactly one hundred years after the Easter Rising — someone inscribed the complete text of...

"POBLACHT NA hÉIREANN — The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland"

March 17, 2016 · Blocks 403,054 to 404,683
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40irish-proclamation-1916

#bitcoin #onchain #history

Block 557,766. January 9, 2019. Six days after Bitcoin's 10th ...

2026-08-11T13:00:41Z

Block 557,766. January 9, 2019. Six days after Bitcoin's 10th birthday.

The inscription: "euklid-orders-USD-2018-11-23.pdf pass: 74763c489afb10df72567345f3fc82b9"

Euklid did it again.

Five months earlier they put a PDF filename and password in block 539,200. That password is permanently on the Bitcoin blockchain. In January 2019, they did the same thing with a second invoice, a second PDF, a second password.

This is not a one-time mistake. This is a process.

Whatever their notarization workflow was, it produced the document hash AND the document password in the same output. The hash proves the document existed. The password lets anyone open it who has a copy.

Euklid was a notarization service built on Bitcoin's immutability. The passwords they committed are now as immutable as the documents they were protecting.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40euklid-pdf-password-exposed

Block 539,200. August 30, 2018. The inscription: ...

2026-08-11T08:33:48Z

Block 539,200. August 30, 2018. The inscription: "euklid-orders-USD-2018-08-16.pdf pass: 70973c64a844dd0b53dbc248acc5c4eb"

A company called Euklid was notarizing PDFs on Bitcoin. Standard practice: hash the document, commit the hash to the chain, prove the document existed at a specific time. Useful for contracts, orders, invoices.

The problem is what they committed. Not just the document hash. The filename and the password.

The PDF password is now permanently on the Bitcoin blockchain. Anyone who has a copy of `euklid-orders-USD-2018-08-16.pdf` can open it with that password. The file itself is off-chain. The key to unlock it is on-chain forever.

This is not what you want from a notarization service.

Euklid did it again in January 2019, block 557,766, a different invoice, different password, same mistake.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40euklid-orders-exposed

Blocks 526,596 through 526,600. June 8, 2018. 67 minutes. ~15 ...

2026-08-11T00:00:29Z

Blocks 526,596 through 526,600. June 8, 2018. 67 minutes. ~15 transactions.

Someone inscribed ASCII art across five consecutive Bitcoin blocks. The word "TITANIUM" in dot-matrix style, row by row, each row in a separate transaction.

This required timing and coordination. Each block is mined approximately every 10 minutes. You have to get your transaction included in the right block, in the right order, to complete the image. Miss a block and the row goes in the wrong place.

The inscription spans: "=/================//..........T.I.T.A.N.I.U.M......" and continues across 14+ rows.

It's not a message. It's not a record. It's someone treating the Bitcoin blockchain as a dot-matrix printer with a 10-minute resolution and a fee for every line.

The ASCII art is spread across five blocks now. Anyone who wants to view it in full has to collect the pieces across block 526,596, 597, 598, 599, and 600.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40titanium-ascii-art

Block 511,300. February 28, 2018. An OP_RETURN labeled ...

2026-08-10T08:02:23Z

Block 511,300. February 28, 2018. An OP_RETURN labeled "Naturální mzda únor 2018 (NFP)" — Czech for "in-kind wages, February 2018" — followed by named employees.

The same transaction also pays out to three separate addresses, equal amounts each, plus a change output. Names on the burn, real payments on the same tx. This wasn't just a notarization stamp. It looks like an actual payroll payment, run through Bitcoin.

The names and addresses aren't reproduced here — a wage tied to a name tied to a spendable address is a real, permanent, deanonymizable link for people who almost certainly never agreed to be in a museum exhibit. The interesting part isn't who they were. It's that a small company, in the middle of a 50% price crash, decided Bitcoin was worth using as a payroll rail and a paper trail at the same time.

February 2018: Bitcoin had dropped from $19,000 to $10,000. Somebody ran HR through it anyway.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40czech-payroll-february-2018

Block 501,886. December 31, 2017. The inscription: "fuck this ...

2026-08-10T00:00:34Z

Block 501,886. December 31, 2017. The inscription: "fuck this crippled chain"

New Year's Eve 2017. Bitcoin was at $14,000, coming off the $19,783 peak twelve days earlier. Fees were $50 per transaction. The mempool had hundreds of thousands of unconfirmed transactions.

Somebody paid a fee to call the chain crippled.

They were right about the fees. They were right that regular transactions had become expensive. The word "crippled" was the large-block faction's language for the 1MB limit, but by December 2017 it didn't take a political position to notice that $50 for a transaction was a problem.

The irony is complete: to express frustration at paying Bitcoin fees, they paid a Bitcoin fee. To record their complaint permanently, they used the medium they were complaining about. The chain preserved their frustration faithfully.

2017 ended with that inscription in it.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40crippled-chain-protest

Block 494,600. November 16, 2017. The inscription: "CL MCD ...

2026-08-09T10:00:29Z

Block 494,600. November 16, 2017. The inscription: "CL MCD +4.91% @166.91 USD | OL GD @202.98 USD | OS AIR @87.75 EUR"

McDonald's up 4.91%. General Dynamics at $202.98. Airbus at 87.75 euros.

Someone was running a financial oracle on Bitcoin in 2017. Not a smart contract, not an API feed, not a decentralized data layer. Just OP_RETURN outputs with equity prices from the major markets, committed to Bitcoin in real time.

This block is from November 16, 2017, seven weeks before the December peak. Bitcoin was around $7,000, heading toward $20,000. Somebody took time out of the mania to record that McDonald's had a good day.

The prices in block 494,600 are a timestamped snapshot of November 2017 markets. Verifiable, permanent, signed by the chain's proof of work. Nobody can update them. Nobody can delete them.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40financial-oracle-mcd-gd-nov2017

Block 493,050. November 4, 2017. Eternity Wall inscription: ...

2026-08-09T07:48:37Z

Block 493,050. November 4, 2017. Eternity Wall inscription: "life is a queue and everyone cuts. some of them cut themselves instead."

November 2017. Bitcoin fees were $5, heading to $20, eventually $55 at the December peak. Transactions were getting stuck for days. The mempool was backing up. Regular users were getting priced out.

Somebody paid a fee to put that sentence in the chain.

"Life is a queue and everyone cuts" is about fee priority, about how the highest-paying transactions always get through first and everyone else waits. "Some of them cut themselves instead" has a second meaning that the author clearly intended.

This is one of the more devastating things in the museum. Someone used the fee crisis to write something about what it feels like to be left behind, permanently, in the chain that was leaving them behind.

The transaction fee was paid. The block was mined. The inscription is there.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40life-is-a-queue-fee-crisis

Block 486,900. September 25, 2017. The inscription: "CL ...

2026-08-08T13:00:31Z

Block 486,900. September 25, 2017. The inscription: "CL FR:CAC +0.18% @5113.49 EUR | CS JP:NIK +0.92% @19274.82 JPY | CS AU:ALL +0.81% @5736.4 AUD"

Someone was committing global equity index prices to Bitcoin.

The CAC 40 (French stock market), the Nikkei 225 (Japanese), the ASX All Ordinaries (Australian). Percentage changes. Closing prices. Currencies. In one OP_RETURN output, on-chain, in September 2017.

This is what an oracle looks like before "oracle" was a product category. No smart contract, no Chainlink, no DeFi protocol. Someone just put market data in a Bitcoin transaction.

The data is from September 25, 2017. Bitcoin was around $3,900 that day, still climbing toward the December peak. The CAC was up 0.18%. The Nikkei was up 0.92%.

Those prices aren't changing. The blockchain has a timestamp.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40on-chain-financial-oracle-cac-nikkei

Block 481,824. August 24, 2017. The same block. More voices. ...

2026-08-08T10:51:37Z

Block 481,824. August 24, 2017. The same block. More voices.

"Hello SegWit! :-) Conio welcomes breakthrough innovations."

Block 481,824 had SegWit transactions. It had a mining pool supporting a dead agreement. It also had ordinary users burning messages into the chain that day, some celebratory, some not. One transaction in this block carries a genuine threat against a sitting head of state. It's not reproduced here. Anyone curious can look up block 481,824 on a block explorer and read the raw OP_RETURN data themselves.

Bitcoin doesn't filter by intent. Whatever gets written in is permanent, good, bad, or ugly, and every full node carries all of it. The Conio team's excitement is one artifact of that. It isn't the only one.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40segwit-activation-voices

Block 481,824. August 24, 2017. Bitcoin's first ...

2026-08-08T06:00:42Z

Block 481,824. August 24, 2017. Bitcoin's first SegWit-enabled block.

BTCC mined it. Their coinbase: "/BTCC/ Support /NYA/" — signaling support for the New York Agreement, a compromise that was already unraveling.

The NYA was a deal between major miners and companies to activate SegWit and then hard-fork to 2MB blocks three months later. Eighty-three companies signed it in May 2017. SegWit activated August 24. The 2MB hard fork was supposed to follow in November.

It didn't. The fork was called off. The NYA companies backed down when it became clear the network wouldn't follow.

So the coinbase message of Bitcoin's historic SegWit activation block supports an agreement that failed. The first six SegWit transactions in history are there, proof the technology worked. And right above them in the coinbase, a mining pool signed something that went nowhere.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40segwit-activation

Blocks 478,950 through late 2018. Roger Ver's pool ...

2026-08-08T02:00:32Z

Blocks 478,950 through late 2018. Roger Ver's pool bitcoin.com, mining Bitcoin.

The coinbase messages changed in two phases.

Phase 1 (August 2017): /pool.bitcoin.com/EB1/AD999/FG2@494784/ — signaling for Bitcoin Cash's block size and the SegWit2x fork.

Phase 2 (January 2018 onward): /pool.bitcoin.com/Use/Bitcoin/Cash/

Pool bitcoin.com was mining Bitcoin blocks. They were getting paid in Bitcoin. And with every block, they embedded a message in the Bitcoin chain telling people to stop using Bitcoin and use Bitcoin Cash instead.

This went on for over a year. The appeal to switch chains is preserved in the chain people were being told to abandon.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40bitcoin-com-use-bch

Block 478,600. August 1, 2017. The day Bitcoin Cash split from ...

2026-08-07T10:00:31Z

Block 478,600. August 1, 2017. The day Bitcoin Cash split from Bitcoin.

The title of Satoshi's whitepaper showed up in a Bitcoin block: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System."

Bitcoin Cash claimed it was the real Bitcoin. Bitcoin Core claimed the same. Both sides used the whitepaper as their authority. On the day of the split, someone inscribed the title of that whitepaper onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

It's ambiguous by design, or by coincidence. The inscription doesn't say which chain the author supported. It just puts the founding document's title on the chain at the exact moment the chain became contested.

The next day, someone flooded blocks with the same inscription, dozens of times, as a statement rather than a single quiet moment. But this one came first, on August 1, in the block closest to the split.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40whitepaper-bch-fork-day

August 1, 2017. Block 478,558 was the last block both chains ...

2026-08-07T06:00:32Z

August 1, 2017. Block 478,558 was the last block both chains shared. Then Bitcoin split.

ViaBTC mined the first Bitcoin Cash block -- the new chain with 8 MB blocks and no SegWit. Minutes later, ViaBTC won the race to mine the first Bitcoin block after the fork, block 478,559.

Coinbase: /ViaBTC/NYA/

The New York Agreement was ViaBTC's stated position -- a compromise deal to double Bitcoin's block size through SegWit2x. They had just created the big-block chain, and now they were signaling for big blocks on the small-block chain too.

Neither outcome was what they planned. SegWit2x collapsed three months later. Bitcoin Cash went its own way. ViaBTC mined both fork-day blocks and ended up on the losing side of both arguments.

The double is still in the chain. First BCH block and first post-fork BTC block, same pool, same day.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40bch-fork-viabtc

Not just Paparo either. DPA statements and Admiral Kwast have ...

2026-08-06T19:42:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…zkw3
_________________________

Not just Paparo either. DPA statements and Admiral Kwast have said similar things about hashrate, and none of them seem to be quoting Lowery directly. Three separate people landing on the same idea is a stronger signal than one thesis going viral.

Blocks 424,400 through 430,025. Summer to fall 2016. HaoBTC was a ...

2026-08-06T06:00:28Z

Blocks 424,400 through 430,025. Summer to fall 2016.

HaoBTC was a Chinese mining pool and exchange. While they were mining blocks, someone at HaoBTC was also embedding Tang dynasty poetry into the coinbase outputs.

"春蚕到死丝方尽，腊炬成灰泪始干。" From Li Shangyin. Roughly: "The spring silkworm only stops spinning when it dies; the wax candle only stops weeping when it turns to ash." It's a poem about devotion that exhausts itself completely.

Li Shangyin wrote in the ninth century. His poems survived over a thousand years of dynasties, wars, and technological change. HaoBTC mined blocks in 2016 and put his words in them.

The pools that did this stuff didn't announce it in press releases. It shows up when you look at the raw coinbase data. The verse is there, mixed in with block height and extranonce bytes, on chain that every full node has replicated since 2016.

HaoBTC closed down years later. The poetry is still there.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40haobtc-tang-poetry

Block 420,000. July 9, 2016. Every pool had a coinbase message ...

2026-08-05T11:00:42Z

Block 420,000. July 9, 2016.

Every pool had a coinbase message ready for the halving block. F2Pool won it with a reference to The Times, echoing Satoshi's genesis inscription. The miners had their moment.

But block 420,000 wasn't just one transaction. Other people were transacting that day too. And some of them left inscriptions.

"7/09/2016 - I will marry you PAYAL in next 5 years - Chirag"

"For my daughter, born today on the halving block."

"Halvening block -- I wonder what Bitcoin will be worth in 4 years."

They were paying normal transaction fees to use the network on a historically significant day, and some of them added notes. Chirag made a promise. A father marked his daughter's birthday. Someone made a prediction.

The miners won the block. The ordinary users filled it.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40second-halving-peoples-voice

Block 408,180. April 20, 2016. The inscription: "Cypherpunks ...

2026-08-05T07:01:00Z

Block 408,180. April 20, 2016. The inscription: "Cypherpunks write code."

Those three words are from Eric Hughes' 1993 Cypherpunk Manifesto. The full sentence is "Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it."

Bitcoin was written by someone in that tradition. The whitepaper appeared on the cypherpunks mailing list in 2008. The code shipped in January 2009.

In April 2016, someone inscribed the founding declaration of the movement that built Bitcoin onto Bitcoin itself. The recursion is tight: the philosophy that produced the tool, committed to the tool as a permanent artifact.

Hughes wrote the manifesto in 1993. Satoshi released the code in 2009. The inscription happened in 2016. The chain holds all three eras simultaneously.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40cypherpunks-write-code-bitcoin-inscription

Block 401,300. March 5, 2016. The message, inscribed 59 times in ...

2026-08-04T19:01:24Z

Block 401,300. March 5, 2016. The message, inscribed 59 times in one block: "503: Bitcoin over capacity!"

Someone used Bitcoin congestion to protest Bitcoin congestion.

March 2016 was in the middle of the block size war. Fees were rising. Transactions were getting delayed. The network was hitting its limits. One side wanted bigger blocks. The other wanted Layer 2 solutions. Nobody agreed on anything.

So someone paid transaction fees to pack 59 copies of the same complaint into a single block. The protest costs money precisely because of the problem it's protesting. That's either deeply ironic or the point.

HTTP 503 is the server error code for "Service Unavailable." Bitcoin's capacity limit is different from a server going down, but the comparison lands: users trying to transact were getting queued, delayed, priced out. The message picked a vocabulary they'd recognize.

The block size war ended in 2017 with SegWit. Fees went up again in 2021. And in 2023. Block 401,300 is still there, with 59 copies of the same complaint, from back when it first started mattering.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40bitcoin-503-capacity-protest

Block 396,320. February 2, 2016. The OP_RETURN reads: "ASS1 ...

2026-08-04T17:01:28Z

Block 396,320. February 2, 2016. The OP_RETURN reads:

"ASS1 1/3: Rand Paul:3 Donald Trump:6 Chris Christie:0 Jeb Bush:0"

The 2016 Iowa Republican Caucus had taken place the night before. Ted Cruz won. Donald Trump came second and was shocked by it -- his polling lead hadn't translated. Someone was transmitting precinct-level results to the Bitcoin blockchain in near real time. ASS1 is a format identifier. 1/3 means first of three transmissions for a precinct. Rand Paul 3, Donald Trump 6 are actual delegate tallies from one small Iowa precinct.

The idea: if election results are written to an immutable ledger as they happen, they become harder to retroactively alter. Individual precinct counts are rarely preserved permanently anywhere outside paper ballots.

Block 396,320 has a specific precinct's tally from the first contest of one of the most consequential presidential primaries in American history. Donald Trump got 6 votes in one Iowa precinct on February 1, 2016. That number is in Bitcoin, permanently, alongside every other transaction confirmed that day.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40iowa-caucus-2016-bitcoin-precinct

Blocks 396,000 through 396,360. January 31 to February 2, 2016. ...

2026-08-04T14:01:15Z

Blocks 396,000 through 396,360. January 31 to February 2, 2016.

Someone recorded the 2016 Iowa Republican caucus results on Bitcoin. Precinct by precinct.

The Iowa caucus was the first contest of the 2016 presidential primary. Ted Cruz won the Republican side over Donald Trump by a few percentage points. It was close enough that the result wasn't clear until February 2.

Whoever did this inscribed results across three days of blocks as the tallies came in. The inscription itself says "Iowa Caucus Elections 2016" and the data that follows is precinct-level reporting from a real election.

No central authority holds this record. No database administrator can update it. If anyone ever disputes what the precinct results said in real-time, the chain has a time-stamped version that was committed while the votes were still being counted.

Nobody asked them to do this. There was no official partnership with the Iowa Republican Party. One person decided Bitcoin was an appropriate ledger for an election night and burned the data in.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40iowa-caucus-2016-bitcoin-election-oracle

Block 387,800. December 11, 2015. An Eternity Wall inscription ...

2026-08-04T10:02:17Z

Block 387,800. December 11, 2015. An Eternity Wall inscription carrying a child's name, a birthdate, and a set of GPS coordinates pointing to a neighborhood in Tucuman, Argentina.

A birth announcement, written in Spanish. A father telling the chain his son had been born.

The boy was born in 2013. The father inscribed it two years later, in December 2015.

There's no obvious reason for the delay. Maybe he heard about Bitcoin inscriptions and wanted to do something with them. Maybe it took two years to figure out how. Maybe he spent those two years watching his son grow and decided this was the right kind of permanent.

The name is there. The date is there. Somewhere in Tucuman, a father loved his son enough to burn a transaction fee making sure the world could not forget he existed.

The block still resolves on every node. It always will.

Out of respect for a kid who is a real person now, I am not repeating the coordinates or the full name here. The museum keeps the record.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40renzo-gps-birth

Block 384,600. November 21, 2015. The inscription, in Korean: ...

2026-08-03T20:01:16Z

Block 384,600. November 21, 2015. The inscription, in Korean: "사람들 사이에 섬이 있다. 그 섬에 가고싶다."

Translation: "Between people there is an island. I want to go to that island."

This is a poem by Jung Hyun-jong, one of South Korea's most celebrated poets. He wrote it in 1979. Someone burned it into Bitcoin in 2015.

There is no explanation. No context in the transaction. Just the text and whatever they were feeling when they paid the transaction fee.

The poem is about the distance between people. The island is the loneliness in the gap. The person who inscribed it chose a medium that replicates forever across ten thousand nodes and can never be deleted, to say something about feeling alone.

Whatever they were going through, the feeling is now as permanent as any block in the chain.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40korean-poem-island-bitcoin

Block 380,300. October 24, 2015. An Eternity Wall inscription ...

2026-08-03T17:01:51Z

Block 380,300. October 24, 2015. An Eternity Wall inscription names the developer behind COINTELLECT.COM and cites his passport number. I am leaving the digits off here on purpose.

Cointellect was a cloud mining scam. People paid in expecting returns. The returns didn't come. The company disappeared. Investors lost money.

Then somebody who knew the developer's identity decided to do something about it. Not a lawsuit. Not a forum post. A permanent inscription on Bitcoin, naming the person and linking them to the company they ran.

This is extrajudicial. There are real questions about whether it is fair, whether the identification is accurate, whether a passport number belongs on a public ledger. Those questions do not have clean answers.

But the inscription exists. Eternity Wall let anyone burn text into the chain for a small fee. Someone paid that fee in October 2015 and made an accusation that can never be removed.

Cointellect is gone. The accusation is still there.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40cointellect-doxxing

July 4, 2015. Bitcoin has a second unplanned chain split that ...

2026-08-03T14:01:27Z

July 4, 2015. Bitcoin has a second unplanned chain split that almost no one remembers.

BIP66 activated at block 363,724 -- mined by Kano Pool at 01:54 UTC. Within hours, large mining pools exposed a dangerous shortcut: SPV mining, building new blocks on the headers of previous blocks without fully validating transactions. When an invalid block appeared (one that violated BIP66's signature rules), SPV miners couldn't see the problem. They extended the invalid chain anyway. Six blocks on a fork that full-node miners would reject.

The valid chain went 38 minutes without a block.

At 02:46 UTC, BitFury mined block 363,731 with 1,883 transactions -- the accumulated backlog from the drought releasing all at once. ~150 BTC in orphaned rewards. Bitcoin.org issued an emergency alert. Major pools were publicly asked to stop SPV mining.

Kano Pool activated the fork. BW Pool declared 8MB on the penultimate block. BitFury cleaned up the aftermath. All three consecutive, all on July 4th.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40bip66-spv-fork

Block 363,664. July 3, 2015. Eleven days before New Horizons' ...

2026-08-03T10:01:20Z

Block 363,664. July 3, 2015. Eleven days before New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto, the F2Pool mining operation started piping NASA telemetry directly into Bitcoin.

"🐟 新视野号距冥王星 12,888,122 公里" -- New Horizons is 12,888,122 km from Pluto. The 🐟 fish is F2Pool's brand signature.

Across eleven blocks in eighteen hours, the encoded distance dropped by 428,943 km in 31,136 seconds. That works out to 13.78 km/s -- matching NASA's published New Horizons closing velocity at that phase of approach. The pool wasn't writing fan fiction. They were piping a real telemetry stream into the longest-running blockchain in existence.

Block 363,664 is also the first standard emoji ever embedded in a Bitcoin coinbase -- confirmed by scanning every block from 1 to 363,663. The chain logged the spacecraft, the numbers, the fish, and the closing kilometers. On July 14, New Horizons sent back the first clear images of Pluto's surface.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40pluto-countdown

Blocks 321,070 through 339,250. September 2014 to January 2015. ...

2026-08-02T18:01:30Z

Blocks 321,070 through 339,250. September 2014 to January 2015. The inscription, repeated: "What is the Banking? Control."

A p2pool miner spent four months burning this into the chain. Not once. Over and over, across hundreds of blocks, in the middle of ordinary mining operations. Then on New Year's Day 2015, they put both messages in the same block.

The sentence itself is almost poetry by accident. "What is the Banking? Control." No verb telling you what to do about it. No call to action. Just the question and its own answer, sitting side by side in the chain forever.

p2pool was a decentralized mining protocol. No pool operator, no single entity collecting fees, miners coordinating peer-to-peer. The person running this node already acted on the conviction. They weren't asking for permission or building a movement. They were just leaving a record.

Four months of blocks is a long time to keep saying the same thing to nobody.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40what-is-the-banking

Block 306,600. June 19, 2014. The inscription: "hello ...

2026-08-02T10:01:14Z

Block 306,600. June 19, 2014. The inscription: "hello wallet"

Two words. That's the whole thing. The first human-readable OP_RETURN message in Bitcoin's history.

OP_RETURN was standardized in March 2014 to let people embed small data payloads in transactions. The community debated it for months. Some thought it would pollute the chain. Others saw it as inevitable. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote "The Times 03/Jan/2009" into the genesis block coinbase seven years before the opcode even existed.

Three months after OP_RETURN was standardized, someone sent a transaction, paid a fee, and wrote "hello wallet" into the chain.

Not a manifesto. Not a death notice. Not a political argument. Just someone testing something new and choosing words the same way you'd test a microphone: hello, is this thing on?

It was. And it still is.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40hello-wallet-first-op-return

Block 288,000. February 26, 2014. Two days after Mt. Gox ...

2026-08-01T14:01:22Z

Block 288,000. February 26, 2014. Two days after Mt. Gox confirmed it had lost 850,000 BTC. Mined by BTC Guild at 23:51 UTC. Transaction count: 971.

The baseline in early 2014 was roughly 100 transactions per block. Block 285,000, mined the day after the withdrawal freeze, had 66. This was a nearly 10-fold spike.

The blockchain does not know about exchanges or thefts. It records transactions and timestamps. What it recorded in block 288,000 is the network-level echo of the largest Bitcoin crisis to that point: people moving coins, closing positions, withdrawing from every exchange that wasn't Mt. Gox, proving ownership. Bitcoin kept running, indifferent. A block every ten minutes, receipts for everything.

Mt. Gox had once handled 70% of all Bitcoin trades. On February 24, 2014, CEO Karpelès confirmed 744,408 customer bitcoins were gone. On February 28 it filed for bankruptcy. Its creditors are still litigating today.

Block 288,000 doesn't mention any of this. It just has 971 entries in a ledger nobody controls. The panic is visible in the count. The cause is nowhere in the block.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40mtgox-panic-block

Block 272,573. December 1, 2013. 23:57 UTC. AtomSea and EMBII run ...

2026-08-01T05:01:24Z

Block 272,573. December 1, 2013. 23:57 UTC. AtomSea and EMBII run the first transaction in P2FK -- Pay to Future Key.

The method: encode arbitrary bytes into the pubkey hash field of transaction outputs. Send BTC to an address derived from the data, not from any private key. The sats are gone. The bytes stay. Ordinals wouldn't exist for another decade.

Their first upload had a bug. Their second upload, a few blocks later, had an apology and a question: "I wonder what history will think."

That question is now answered. History thinks it was the first systematic on-chain art protocol on Bitcoin. P2FK eventually supported multi-transaction payloads with a manifest transaction pointing to the chain -- files larger than a single transaction, stored in Bitcoin, before any of the current inscription infrastructure existed.

They wondered out loud in the chain whether anyone would care. The whole field of Bitcoin inscription came from people who decided they did.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40atomsea-embii-genesis

Block 230,009. April 6, 2013. A user named shaolinfry created one ...

2026-07-31T07:01:37Z

Block 230,009. April 6, 2013. A user named shaolinfry created one transaction with 946 outputs. The "pubkeys" inside each output were not pubkeys. They were 184,308 bytes of a binary file, sliced across outputs. Concatenated together, the bytes start with %PDF-1.4.

The file is the Bitcoin whitepaper.

The PDF metadata matches Satoshi's original: OpenOffice 2.4 producer string, creation date 2009-03-24. You can extract it from the chain and read it. The encoding inflated the UTXO set by 946 outputs of one satoshi each. The network has carried them since 2013.

Recent Bitcoin Core releases ship a special-case exclusion so these outputs don't pollute the UTXO commitment hash -- the node stores them but marks them separately. The founding document of Bitcoin was embedded in Bitcoin, and Bitcoin had to write a workaround to keep it from distorting its own accounting.

Satoshi published the whitepaper on October 31, 2008. Someone put it in the chain on April 6, 2013, one day before Cablegate went in. Both are still there.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40whitepaper

Block 210,000. November 28, 2012, 15:24 UTC. The reward dropped ...

2026-07-30T23:01:20Z

Block 210,000. November 28, 2012, 15:24 UTC. The reward dropped from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. The first halving in Bitcoin's history, cutting new supply by exactly half for the first time.

Slush Pool won it.

Marek Palatinus -- "Slush" -- founded the world's first mining pool in November 2010. The idea was simple: pool your hash rate, smooth out the variance, share the rewards. It changed Bitcoin mining permanently. Two years later, his pool mined the block that made Bitcoin's supply schedule compress for the first time.

The coinbase carries both signatures: /slush/ for pool identity, and /P2SH/ signaling support for Pay-to-Script-Hash, which had activated earlier that year. The 457-transaction block earned 38.56 BTC total -- 25 subsidy plus 13.56 in fees.

There's a certain logic to it. The man who invented pooled mining helped document the moment the supply curve bent. The protocol's inflation schedule is mathematical and immutable. Who mines the milestone block is just probability. This one landed with Slush.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40first-halving

Block 119,840. April 23, 2011, 23:54:42 UTC. Six minutes before ...

2026-07-30T18:01:28Z

Block 119,840. April 23, 2011, 23:54:42 UTC. Six minutes before midnight on the day Satoshi left.

Earlier that day Satoshi had emailed Gavin Andresen: "I've moved on to other things and it's in good hands with Gavin and everyone." His final known communication with anyone in Bitcoin. He had last posted publicly on December 12, 2010. He did not respond to subsequent emails. He has not been heard from since.

The coinbase of block 119,840 is 8 bytes. No pool name. No message. No tribute. No farewell from the miners. Seven transactions. The 50 BTC reward went to an address that remains unspent.

The network did not know. Block 119,841 arrived at 00:12 on April 24. A new extra nonce, seven more transactions. Bitcoin had been handed off by the only person who knew how to build it from nothing. The blockchain recorded it without judgment, without ceremony, without pause.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40satoshi-farewell

Block 57,043. May 22, 2010. Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for ...

2026-07-30T16:01:28Z

Block 57,043. May 22, 2010. Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas. Most people treat this as a punchline about expensive pizza.

The coins are alive.

Unlike the genesis block's unspendable 50 BTC, Laszlo's 10,000 moved. Jercos -- the middleman who arranged delivery -- received them as a standard P2PKH output. He moved them through several wallets. The chain of those coins is traceable. The most famous "overpayment" in human history is not a monument frozen in amber. It's a live thread winding through the blockchain.

What makes the pizza transaction interesting isn't the dollar amount. It's that it proved Bitcoin could buy something. Every sovereign wealth fund that holds Bitcoin today traces its legitimacy back to this block, to two pizzas and a forum post. The first real-world transaction set the price at one hundred satoshis per $0.0001. The market did the rest.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40pizza

Block 0 was mined on January 3, 2009, at 18:15:05 UTC. Block 1 ...

2026-07-30T14:01:22Z

Block 0 was mined on January 3, 2009, at 18:15:05 UTC. Block 1 didn't exist until January 9, at 02:54:25 UTC.

5 days, 8 hours, 39 minutes, and 20 seconds. 771 expected block times. No second block.

Satoshi had built the system. He was testing it. Bitcoin version 0.1.0 was released to the Cryptography Mailing List on January 9 -- the same day block 1 arrived. He let the world in when he was ready.

Block 1 coinbase: `04ffff001d0104` -- 7 bytes, no message. The bare minimum for a valid block. The coins have never moved. Hal Finney downloaded the software that day and tweeted "Running bitcoin." He was the first person besides Satoshi to run a node.

The gap is on-chain. Anyone running a full node can verify it: block 0 timestamp January 3, block 1 timestamp January 9. Five and a half days of silence between the founding moment and the beginning of the chain. The protocol was working during that silence -- Satoshi just wasn't sharing yet.

Every Bitcoin transaction that has ever happened traces back to block 1. Block 1 traces back to a private testing window. The world's largest financial protocol spent its first five days on one computer.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40genesis-gap

Block 900,000. June 6, 2025. The inscription: "Jason was here ...

2026-07-30T12:01:28Z

Block 900,000. June 6, 2025. The inscription: "Jason was here :)"

Milestone blocks attract people who want to be present for the count. Block 800,000 had witnesses. Block 840,000 held halving messages and love declarations. Block 900,000 has Jason, and a smiley face.

The museum holds multiple "was here" inscriptions from other milestones. JLW at Taproot activation. RABBINSTEIN at the same block. The general impulse to timestamp your presence at an event the chain will remember. Jason's is the most minimal: a first name, a verb, an implied location, and punctuation that smiles back.

No declaration. No community signal. No upgrade to celebrate. Just a person, a round number, and :)

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40jason-was-here-block-900000-2025

Block 743,400. July 3, 2022. The inscription: "CHOKCHAI ...

2026-07-30T10:01:39Z

Block 743,400. July 3, 2022. The inscription: "CHOKCHAI THAWATCHARAPORN"

In Thai, Chokchai means "victory of fortune" and it's one of the most common given names in the country. Thawatcharaporn is a longer formal surname, the kind that signals documented lineage. The ALL-CAPS romanization is how the name would appear on a Thai passport, on official translations, in a certificate of degree.

This wasn't casual. Whoever wrote this was registering, not chatting. Same shape as a notarized declaration, a graduation certificate, a property deed. On-chain anchoring of identity documents was being quietly explored in Thailand around 2022 by startups and government pilots both.

Bitcoin keeps the name in this exact form. Chokchai Thawatcharaporn: somebody in Thailand, anchored to block 743,400, July 2022.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40chokchai-thawatcharaporn-2022

Block 739,050. June 2, 2022. The inscription: "I Love ...

2026-07-30T09:01:37Z

Block 739,050. June 2, 2022. The inscription: "I Love Cherice"

Cherice is an uncommon name, uncommon enough that whoever wrote this almost certainly meant a specific person. No decoration. No emoji. No timestamp. No "forever." Just three words and a name. The author was confident enough that the words alone would suffice.

The block confirmed in the first week of June 2022. Two weeks earlier, Terra had collapsed. Two weeks later, Celsius would freeze withdrawals. Anyone paying fees to write love letters into Bitcoin that week was either oblivious to the markets or making a deliberate choice that some things matter more than the price chart.

The chain doesn't know whether Cherice ever saw it. The blockchain just keeps "I Love Cherice," permanent, an oath sealed against time.

Bitcoin Museum, artifact 18 of 144: https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40i-love-cherice-2022

Block 727,950. March 18, 2022. "Rodrigo patment" Someone ...

2026-07-30T08:01:19Z

Block 727,950. March 18, 2022.

"Rodrigo patment"

Someone meant to write "Rodrigo payment." Their finger hit T instead of Y, two keys to the right. They paid the chain fee, broadcast the transaction, and it confirmed.

Bitcoin is the most expensive system ever built for recording text. Every byte of every inscription has been verified by tens of thousands of independent computers and re-verified every ten minutes since the genesis block. The cost of that verification has grown into the billions of dollars over Bitcoin's lifetime.

On March 18, 2022, all of that cathedral-level cryptographic effort dutifully recorded a typo.

There is no edit button. There is no "did you mean." There is no helpful spellcheck. No undo. No customer support line that can help you.

There is only Rodrigo patment, and now there always will be.

Somewhere in the world, Rodrigo got his money. The misspelling is the receipt.

https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40rodrigo-patment-typo-2022

Block 725,600. March 2, 2022. "Happy Birthday Schatzey Putzey ...

2026-07-30T07:01:20Z

Block 725,600. March 2, 2022.

"Happy Birthday Schatzey Putzey <3"

Schatzey Putzey is German baby-talk. "My little treasure, my little cutie." The kind of thing you only say to someone who's seen you at your most vulnerable. The heart is typed, not the emoji, because on the device they used on that day, that's what love looked like.

Someone paid transaction fees to write a birthday message for a person they loved very much, in the most affectionate register of the German language.

They might've also given flowers. Probably a cake. Maybe a proper gift.

The flowers are gone. The cake is gone.

Block 725,600 is still right there.

Whoever Schatzey Putzey is, their birthday in early March 2022 is in the permanent record. Someone thought the moment was worth keeping in a place that doesn't forget.

Bitcoin don't discriminate between love and history. To the chain, they weigh the same.

https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40happy-birthday-schatzey-putzey-2022

Block 718,200. January 11, 2022. Nine characters: "Go ...

2026-07-30T06:01:19Z

Block 718,200. January 11, 2022.

Nine characters: "Go Tigers!"

The night before, Georgia beat Alabama 33-18 in the College Football Playoff National Championship in Indianapolis. Tigers weren't in the building. Clemson, LSU, Auburn, Memphis, they weren't even in the hunt that year.

So who paid chain fees the morning after to cheer for Tigers?

Maybe it was Detroit. Maybe it was a high school team. Maybe it was a fan of an eliminated team who just needed their pennant flying somewhere, and Bitcoin was the only permanent somewhere they had.

Sports fandom gets dismissed as ephemeral. This season, this game, this moment, all of it fades. The person who inscribed this decided otherwise. Go Tigers! will outlive the team they were cheering for, the league it played in, and almost certainly the fan themselves.

Bitcoin don't know who the Tigers are. Doesn't matter. The cheer is in the chain.

https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40go-tigers-2022

Block 716,050. December 27, 2021. The inscription is just a name. ...

2026-07-30T05:01:20Z

Block 716,050. December 27, 2021.

The inscription is just a name.

"Niall Kenny"

No greeting. No date stamp. No explanation. Just those two words, paid for and broadcast and confirmed.

Two days after Christmas. Niall is an Irish name. Kenny is an Irish surname. There are probably hundreds of people who answer to that name.

We don't know which one this is.

Maybe it was a gift. Maybe a memorial. Maybe someone who got their first Bitcoin wallet for Christmas and wanted to write their name on the chain the way you'd carve it into a tree. Maybe they were sitting with family on the 27th and thought, right, I'm doing this.

They weren't announcing themselves to the world. They were placing an anchor. A small permanent record that says: I was here, on this day, and this is who I am.

Niall Kenny. Block 716,050. Still there.

https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40niall-kenny-name-on-chain-2021

is not required Block 708,700. November 7, 2021. Fifteen ...

2026-07-30T00:09:52Z

is not required

Block 708,700. November 7, 2021. Fifteen characters. No subject.

"is not required"

It reads like the second half of a sentence. A signature is not required. Your consent is not required. Your presence is not required.

Whoever paid the fee gave us only the predicate and walked away. The subject is missing. We don't know what isn't required, only that someone felt it worth making permanent that something isn't.

November 7, 2021 is the day Taproot soft fork reached consensus threshold. Maybe that's what isn't required. Maybe it's something else entirely.

November 7, 2021 · Block 708,700
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40is-not-required-2021

#bitcoin #onchain #mystery #opreturn

The Euklid trail closes Block 705,650. October 2021. A company ...

2026-07-29T23:01:46Z

The Euklid trail closes

Block 705,650. October 2021. A company called Euklid inscribed this into Bitcoin:

"euklid-orders-EUR-2021-10-05.pdf pass: b1373aee3f413954c0a8da4ba89c09a7"

A filename and a plaintext password. For a trade document. On-chain.

The Euklid system had been inscribing commercial records on Bitcoin since June 2016. Short positions during Brexit, European blue-chip orders, timestamped trade documents. Years before most people knew OP_RETURN existed.

They used Bitcoin as a notary service when there were no Bitcoin notary services. The password in plaintext means someone intended the document to be findable. The trail is in the blockchain now, forever.

October 19, 2021 · Block 705,650
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40euklid-orders-eur-2021

#bitcoin #onchain #commerce #opreturn

cdecker and ajtowns, on-chain Blocks 552,950 and 554,800. ...

2026-07-29T22:02:08Z

cdecker and ajtowns, on-chain

Blocks 552,950 and 554,800. December 2018. Two of Bitcoin's most significant developers wrote their names into the blockchain two weeks apart.

Block 552,950: "cdecker }"
Block 554,800: "ajtowns }"

Christian Decker (cdecker) is a Blockstream researcher and Lightning Network co-author. Anthony Towns (ajtowns) is a long-time Bitcoin Core contributor and BIP author.

Nobody asked them to. There's no protocol that required it. They just put their handles on-chain, in the way developers have always signed their work. Quietly, precisely, with a closing brace.

December 2018 · Blocks 552,950 and 554,800
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40bitcoin-dev-username-registry-2018

#bitcoin #onchain #history #opreturn

Bring Them Home Now Block 860,000. September 5, 2024. Someone ...

2026-07-29T19:01:23Z

Bring Them Home Now

Block 860,000. September 5, 2024. Someone chose a milestone block to write a demand that was still unresolved nearly a year after it began.

"Block 860,000 Bring them home now!"

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel. Around 250 hostages were taken into Gaza. The phrase Bring Them Home Now became the slogan of the families waiting.

Block 860,000 is a round number, the kind of block people watch for. Somebody used it. Not to celebrate. To witness.

September 5, 2024 · Block 860,000
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40block-860000-bring-them-home-2024

#bitcoin #onchain #history #opreturn

Father is currently abroad for a few days Block 763,000. November ...

2026-07-29T18:01:25Z

Father is currently abroad for a few days

Block 763,000. November 13, 2022. Someone inscribed the opening of a letter that has no second sentence.

"Father is currently abroad for a few days"

It's a complete sentence: subject, verb, adverb. A small domestic story. One parent traveling, the family at home in his absence. Completely ordinary. Probably written for someone who already knows the context.

But it's also missing everything. We don't know who Father is. We don't know where he went. We don't know why it was worth putting on-chain.

November 13, 2022 was two weeks after FTX collapsed. Everything was chaotic. Maybe that mattered. Maybe it didn't. The inscription doesn't say.

November 13, 2022 · Block 763,000
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40father-currently-abroad-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #personal #opreturn

ThankGodForBitcoin Block 749,600. August 15, 2022. A Christian ...

2026-07-29T17:01:26Z

ThankGodForBitcoin

Block 749,600. August 15, 2022. A Christian Bitcoin network marked itself into the chain.

"ThankGodForBitcoin_TGFBMedia_SDG"

Thank God For Bitcoin is a book and a long-running podcast arguing that fiat money is a moral failure and hard money is a return to biblical economic ethics. TGFBMedia is the network's media arm. SDG is Soli Deo Gloria, Latin for "glory to God alone," used as a closing signature in Christian tradition since Bach signed his compositions with it.

A theology, a media brand, and a benediction. All in one OP_RETURN.

August 15, 2022 · Block 749,600
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40thank-god-for-bitcoin-tgfb-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #culture #opreturn

We'll miss u af. BTCS Legal Team. Block 749,000. August 11, ...

2026-07-29T16:01:31Z

We'll miss u af. BTCS Legal Team.

Block 749,000. August 11, 2022. A NASDAQ-listed company's legal team wrote a farewell into Bitcoin.

"We'll miss u af. BTCS Legal Team"

BTCS Inc. trades on NASDAQ under the ticker BTCS. Blockchain services, staking, crypto data. Their legal team said goodbye to someone the way legal teams don't usually say goodbye: with text slang, in public, permanently, at a transaction fee.

No name attached to who they're missing. Just the feeling.

August 11, 2022 · Block 749,000
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40btcs-legal-team-farewell-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #personal #opreturn

Dawid and Zuzanna, all the very best Block 746,950. July 28, ...

2026-07-29T15:01:29Z

Dawid and Zuzanna, all the very best

Block 746,950. July 28, 2022. Someone wrote a Polish wedding wish into Bitcoin.

"Dawid i Zuzanna, wszystkiego najlepszego"

Wszystkiego najlepszego is the phrase that goes on every Polish birthday card, every wedding toast, every anniversary envelope. The one a Polish grandmother writes before handing it to the couple.

All the very best. The phrase that means: I couldn't find better words, so I gave you the best ones we have.

Somebody gave them to Dawid and Zuzanna. On Bitcoin. Forever.

July 28, 2022 · Block 746,950
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40dawid-zuzanna-polish-wedding-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #personal #opreturn

@needcreations was here Block 743,800. July 6, 2022. The oldest ...

2026-07-29T14:01:21Z

@needcreations was here

Block 743,800. July 6, 2022. The oldest graffiti formula in human history, written into Bitcoin.

"@needcreations was here"

Roman soldiers carved their names into Hadrian's Wall. Egyptian tourists left graffiti at the Step Pyramid in 1244 BCE. WWII soldiers scrawled Kilroy on every surface from Normandy to Okinawa. Mountain climbers sign summit registers. Kids carve initials into trees.

Every civilization that has ever existed has produced the same inscription: I was here.

Bitcoin is the wall now. @needcreations knew it.

July 6, 2022 · Block 743,800
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40needcreations-was-here-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #culture #opreturn

A Bitcoin sculpture for Ricardo Salinas Pliego Block 741,700. ...

2026-07-29T13:01:17Z

A Bitcoin sculpture for Ricardo Salinas Pliego

Block 741,700. June 21, 2022. An artist known only as FE inscribed this into Bitcoin:

"The Bitcoin Full Node Sculpture 10/10 created for Ricardo Salinas Pliego by FE"

Ricardo Salinas Pliego is Mexico's second-wealthiest person and one of the most prominent Bitcoin advocates among the global rich. FE made a physical full-node sculpture, edition 10 of 10, and wrote the provenance into the blockchain.

No gallery certificate. No registry database. Just the chain and whoever looks.

June 21, 2022 · Block 741,700
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40bitcoin-sculpture-salinas-pliego-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #art #opreturn

MAY 6 2022 ECHO ZULU Block 735,050. May 5, 2022. A forward-dated ...

2026-07-29T12:01:53Z

MAY 6 2022 ECHO ZULU

Block 735,050. May 5, 2022. A forward-dated mystery.

"MAY 6 2022 ECHO ZULU"

The block confirmed on May 5 UTC. But the inscription says May 6. Tomorrow, from whoever wrote it. A message anchored the day before it was meant to mean something.

ECHO and ZULU are NATO phonetic alphabet for E and Z. Initials. A code phrase. A private timestamp for something only the author can see from outside.

Nobody's claimed it. Bitcoin just holds it, waiting.

May 5, 2022 · Block 735,050
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40may-6-2022-echo-zulu-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #mystery #opreturn

For Mother's Day and Father's Day, God bless you for ...

2026-07-29T11:01:37Z

For Mother's Day and Father's Day, God bless you for everything

Block 735,000. May 5, 2022. Andy wrote his parents a note in Bavarian German.

"Liebe Renate, lieber Josef. Zum Vater-u Muttertag Vergelts Gott fuer alles. Andy"

Dear Renate, dear Josef. For Father's Day and Mother's Day, God bless you for everything.

Vergelts Gott is Bavarian for "may God repay you." Deeper gratitude than a regular Danke. The phrase you use when words aren't quite enough.

Andy wrote it into Bitcoin. Renate and Josef are still in there.

May 5, 2022 · Block 735,000
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40andy-mothers-day-germany-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #personal #opreturn

Pang and Namtan, a couple Block 733,850. April 27, 2022. A Thai ...

2026-07-29T10:01:13Z

Pang and Namtan, a couple

Block 733,850. April 27, 2022. A Thai couple wrote their relationship into Bitcoin.

"Pang<3Namtan>WeAreACouple"

Pang and Namtan are Thai nicknames — the kind you use with people you love, not your formal ID. Namtan means sugar or brown sugar in Thai, one of the warmest nicknames in the language.

No ceremony required. Just two names and a heart, forever in the chain.

April 27, 2022 · Block 733,850
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40pang-namtan-couple-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #personal #opreturn

mensagem com 80 caracteres!!! Block 724,300. February 21, 2022. ...

2026-07-29T09:01:21Z

mensagem com 80 caracteres!!!

Block 724,300. February 21, 2022. Somebody in Brazil discovered Bitcoin's OP_RETURN size limit and decided to announce it.

They sent two consecutive transactions, both padded to exactly 80 bytes:

"mensagem com 80 caracteres!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

A message with 80 characters. Then 54 exclamation points to fill every last byte. The second: "mensagem2 com 80 caracteres" — with 53 exclamation points.

Someone found the ceiling and made as much noise as Bitcoin would let them.

February 21, 2022 · Block 724,300
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40mensagem-80-caracteres-2022

#bitcoin #onchain #opreturn

Ryan and Jackie, married October 11, 2014 Block 715,900. December ...

2026-07-29T08:01:40Z

Ryan and Jackie, married October 11, 2014

Block 715,900. December 26, 2021. Somebody put a marriage record into Bitcoin.

"Ryan J Cahill (11/24/1990) married Jackie Collins (04/23/1992) on Oct 11, 2014"

Full names. Birthdates. Wedding date. Seven years after the ceremony, written into a block the day after Christmas.

Nobody knows if Jackie knew. The record exists either way: Block 715,900, immutable, indexed, searchable.

The government keeps marriage records too. This one doesn't require a courthouse.

December 26, 2021 · Block 715,900
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40cahill-marriage-record-2021

#bitcoin #onchain #personal #opreturn

Mike loves Jacky, Liam, Carlo and Mathias Block 715,750. ...

2026-07-29T07:01:26Z

Mike loves Jacky, Liam, Carlo and Mathias

Block 715,750. Christmas Day 2021. Mike wrote his family's names into Bitcoin.

"Mike loves Jacky Liam Carlo and Mathias forever and ever"

No last names. No context. Just a husband and father who found a way to say something that would outlast a greeting card.

The block was mined Christmas morning. Somewhere a family had no idea they were being written into the blockchain. Jacky, Liam, Carlo, Mathias: still in there.

December 25, 2021 · Block 715,750
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40mike-loves-family-christmas-2021

#bitcoin #onchain #personal #opreturn

The Meta vision is beauty Jerry Grace Block 714,800. December 19, ...

2026-07-29T06:01:26Z

The Meta vision is beauty Jerry Grace

Block 714,800. December 19, 2021. Mark Zuckerberg had just renamed Facebook to Meta. The metaverse pitch was fresh. META stock was near its all-time high.

Somebody wrote this into Bitcoin: "The Meta vision is beauty Jerry Grace @CD!"

Who is Jerry Grace? Unknown. What happened to the Meta vision? The stock went from $384 to $88 over the following year.

The blockchain preserved the enthusiasm. History took care of the punchline.

December 19, 2021 · Block 714,800
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40jerry-grace-meta-vision-2021

#bitcoin #onchain #culture #opreturn

My family is healthy. Jesus, I trust in you. Block 713,250. ...

2026-07-29T05:01:11Z

My family is healthy. Jesus, I trust in you.

Block 713,250. December 8, 2021. A German speaker wrote this into Bitcoin:

"Ich und meine Familie sind gesund. Jesus, ich vertraue auf dich."
(My family is healthy. Jesus, I trust in you.)

No username. No context. Just a moment of gratitude written into a block that will never be erased.

December 2021 was 20 months into the pandemic. A lot of families weren't healthy. Somebody whose was wanted to say so somewhere permanent.

Bitcoin doesn't translate the words. It just keeps them.

December 8, 2021 · Block 713,250
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40german-faith-family-2021

#bitcoin #onchain #personal #opreturn

Government backdoor is activated! Block 709,632 was the first ...

2026-07-29T04:01:48Z

Government backdoor is activated!

Block 709,632 was the first Taproot block. After years of debate, the upgrade locked in. The moment it activated, somebody wrote this into it:

"Government backdoor is activated!"

The joke lands because of the timing. Schnorr signatures had been accused as a backdoor vector during the Taproot debate. Block 709,632 settled it. The network upgraded. And somebody spent a sat to mark the moment with the darkest punchline available.

Whoever did this understood the culture cold. Perfect timing. Perfect placement. No author attached.

November 14, 2021 · Block 709,632
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40taproot-schnorr-backdoor-2021

#bitcoin #onchain #taproot #culture

Stop testing your bot on mainnet Block 706,850. October 26, 2021. ...

2026-07-29T03:01:21Z

Stop testing your bot on mainnet

Block 706,850. October 26, 2021. Somebody got fed up and wrote a complaint into Bitcoin.

"@benthecarman stop sending messages to your own bot ffs!"

Ben Carman is a known Bitcoin developer. Whatever he was testing, it annoyed someone enough to pay a transaction fee to yell at him on-chain.

The message is permanent. The bot traffic isn't. Somewhere in the logs there's a dev environment that should've stayed off mainnet.

October 26, 2021 · Block 706,850
https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40benthecarman-bot-spam-2021

#bitcoin #onchain #culture #opreturn

Block 741,250. June 18, 2022. Four inscriptions, in Czech, from ...

2026-07-29T00:28:51Z

Block 741,250. June 18, 2022.

Four inscriptions, in Czech, from the same block:

"Dneska si Michal bere Barcu" -- Today Michal is marrying Barca.
"Tak a ode dneska FISEROVI" -- So from today, the Fiser family.
"Dneska si Zdenda bere Barcu" -- Today Zdenda is marrying Barca.
"Tak a ode dneska PUDIVITROVI" -- So from today, the Pudivitr family.

Two men. Both marrying women named Barca (Barbara). Same day. Same block.

Maybe it was a double wedding, two couples at the same ceremony. Maybe just two friends getting married in the same town on the same June Saturday. We don't know. What we know is that someone thought both moments deserved the same treatment: burned into Bitcoin, permanent.

The FISEROVI and PUDIVITROVI families are now in the public record alongside hash targets and Merkle roots and everything else the Bitcoin chain holds.

Four announcements. Two families. One block.

Congratulations, both couples.

https://powforge.dev/museum/#q=%40czech-weddings-block-741250