AtomSea & EMBII (2013-)

A text/file upload system.

bitfossil.org/ an indexer website which interprets the format. Each page has an "abuse report" button to unindex presumably. TODO website source? Local indexer/extraction script? Ciro's indexer and its generated index can be found at:

Each AtomSea payload has a toplevel transaction which links to other transactions. All the linked transactions together make up the payload. The most common payload type is a text plus image, as is the case of Nelson-Mandela.jpg, which can be seen at bitfossil.com/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e/ where 78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e is the toplevel transaction ID: www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e

See Section "Nelson-Mandela.jpg (2013-12-07)" for a detailed reverse engineering of the format, and Section "AtomSea & EMBII data format" for a summary of it.

Holy crap, they actually support:

apertus.io/ is the system to upload/index locally, and therefore likely part of the backend of bitfossil: github.com/HugPuddle/Apertus

The system shows the messages and the images on a single page: bitfossil.org/4cbb32cd27b5b5edc12d3559bdffc1355ac2a210463d5cfaadc7ce9b06675b2b/index.htm It is basically a blockchain-based Twitter.

Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain by Ken Shirriff (2014) suggests that AtomSea & EMBII are the creator's aliases. The following online profiles of the creators feel authentic:Tried saying hi to them at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1382080760774033415 and they replied: twitter.com/AllenVandever/status/1563964396656812034

Somewhat related projects:

At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1762501350997233976 (2024) EMBII mentions that he was inspired by the Satoshi uploader.

These are of course likely all made by AtomSea & EMBII themselves while developing/testing their upload system.

They are also artsy peoeple themselves, and as pointed at twitter.com/AllenVandever/status/1563964396656812034 what they were doing was basicaly non-fungible token art, which became much much more popular a few years later around 2021.

The first upload that we could find at github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer/tree/3f53e152ec9bb0d070dbcb8f9249d92f89effa70#atomsea-index was tx 44e80475dc363de2c7ee17b286f8cd49eb146165a79968a62c1c2c4cf80772c9 on block 272573 (2013-12-01) but it does not show on Bitfossil: bitfossil.org/44e80475dc363de2c7ee17b286f8cd49eb146165a79968a62c1c2c4cf80772c9/. This is was due to an upload bug explained by the following entry. By looking at the ASCII data at github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer/blob/master/data/out/0272.txt#L449 that this is meant to contain the same content as the following message: a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, so this is definitely a bugged version of the following one.

The next one is bitfossil.org/c9d1363ea517cd463950f83168ce8242ef917d99cd6518995bd1af927d335828/ on block 272577 (2013-12-02). It actually shows on bifossil and it reads:

I WONDER WHAT HISTORY WILL THINK ABOUT THESE FIRST FEW BUGS...HA HA HA. NOBODY IS PERFECT.

followed by:

He who regards
With an eye that is equal
Friends and comrades,
The foe and the kinsman,
The vile, the wicked,
The men who judge him,
And those who belong
To neither faction:
He is the greatest.

~Bhagavad - Gita

The bug message is definitely a reference to the previous non-visible bugged upload bitfossil.org/4b72a223007eab8a951d43edc171befeabc7b5dca4213770c88e09ba5b936e17/, TODO understand exactly how they fucked up. This illustrates the beauty of the blockchain very well: unlike with version control, you don't just see selected snapshots: you see actual debug logs!!!

And then finally we meet Chiharu, EMBII's partner, with her hair painted blond (she's Japanese): ILoveYouMore.jpg.

Then there are two undecoded ones TODO investigate:

Then Nelson-Mandela.jpg.

Then there's an approximation of pi as ASCII decimal fraction bitfossil.org/70fd289901bae0409f27237506c330588d917716944c6359a8711b0ad6b4ce76/ from block 273522 (2013-12-07):

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799627495673518857527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271452635608277857713427577896091736371787214684409012249534301465495853710507922796892589235420199561121290219608640344181598136297747713099605187072113499999983729780499510597317328160963185950244594553469083026425223082533446850352619311881710100031378387528865875332083814206171776691473035982534904287554687311595628638823537875937519577818577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989

tx b8b9f50a354166c46b69ecd47a0fbd20ee78c3471d2557bf275aff1b4cf4752d (2013-12-07) contains Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. TODO find on bitfossil.org, toplevel, tx seemed like a likely toplevel, but not working: bitfossil.org/b8b9f50a354166c46b69ecd47a0fbd20ee78c3471d2557bf275aff1b4cf4752d

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow
, And watch where the chalk-white arrowls go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

tx 56768b30dec33bd284223d85c23087975e2360b3391d20d505aa59a5675e5379 (2013-12-13) TODO find on bitfossil.org has the cutest message:

Dear Aliens,

Hey.

Sincerely, EMBII & AtomSeaMBII

tx 415c702759893c63b3a57a7d196b014e51b2a33d2396c74b8e71acfaff6b9360 (2013-12-14) contains a poem by 13th century Persian poet Rumi (TODO find bitfossil.org toplevel), starting with:

My dear friend
never lose hope
when the Beloved
sends you away.

Reproduced e.g. at: www.abuddhistlibrary.com/Buddhism/H%20-%20World%20Religions%20and%20Poetry/World%20Religions/Islam/Teachers/Rumi/My%20dear%20friend/Rumi%20-%20my%20dear%20friend.htm

bitfossil.org/73ca50321147bac9010bec43d63f7f76857fe9ede240cc89710e28723fdb242f/ (2013-12-14) has message:

MULTIFILE SUPPORT TEST

and links to 3 .txt files 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt containing single characters 1, 2, and 3.

This is the first of many love declarations and mentions EMBII makes of his partner Chiharu! This came just one day afte the very first uploads of the system.

More EMBII social media:

bitfossil.com/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e/ in block 273536 (2013-12-07).

This is one of the earliest AtomSea & EMBII uploads.

The toplevel transaction is 78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e

Like all AtomSea & EMBII uploads, the data it is encoded as P2FKH.

The full concatenated payload contains the following ASCII characters:

8881a937a437ff6ce83be3a89d77ea88ee12315f37f7ef0dd3742c30eef92dba|396*8881a937a437ff6ce83be3a89d77ea88ee12315f37f7ef0dd3742c30eef92dba
575061146335bd57f2dc132112152d0eeea44cf187ea6a52ac02435a7e5bea44
674c7cc34ea44bb276c6caf76f2b28fa1597380ab6e6a6906076d8f7229ca5b3
8e2642416ad20924b43f51a633fa1c0a5ba8e4a7b631877db1c64540a42081c9
a3084018096b92af04df57b6116e01ff4b7c7e8bd228235ed49e23f4a2817029
39348722b841afa0c5b67e5af10839afe965ed1b24874e89336bea9fa4ef3091
tomSea & EMBII

Output 2 is a change, so it contains no data and has been excluded. Change appear to be randomly placed in the list of output of the uploads, but they can be easily removed because they are the only output with a different value.

The newlines shown above are explicitly encoded as CR LF newlines with characters 0d 0a.

396 is the number of payload bytes between 396*8881a937a437ff6ce83be3a89d77ea88ee12315f37f7ef0dd3742c30eef92dba and the last txid 39348722b841afa0c5b67e5af10839afe965ed1b24874e89336bea9fa4ef3091, including newlines but exclusding the last line.

The last line appears to contain arbitrary data to fill out the 20 byte payload granularity:

Now let's inspect the transactions linked to from toplevel.

tx 8881a937a437ff6ce83be3a89d77ea88ee12315f37f7ef0dd3742c30eef92dba contains only payloads without any change. It starts with the following UTF-8 string with CR LF spaces;

396 is once again the number of payload bytes present in that string.

This is immediately followed without any separator by a filename, and another size marker: then followed by all the 14400 - len(Nelson-Mandela.jpg?) + len(/) JPEG bytes bytes, starting with the two JPEG file signature byte "FF D8".

Further toplevel transaction payloads are then simply concatenated with the previous ones, until the last bytes of the image "FF D9" appears at the end of the payload. padded once again by an AtomSea & EMBII string fragment terminated by a NUL character.

tx e3e37ed5c1de2631c147bd39429e42ff634e95b7d72423bc32d6c6b9d8eef8ee (2014-07-01):

For my first official Journal entry I've decided to archive some old poetry. Here are a few of the computational poems I've created using cyphers.

Several other interesting uploads were also made around block 318836 (September 2014):

Audio:

Interesting text:

HTML pages:

For a detailed analysis of one transaction see: Nelson-Mandela.jpg.

Best guess so far, all in ASCII hex of output scripts: