Bitcoin addresses are by convention expressed in Base58, which is a human readable binary-to-text encoding invented by Bitcoin.
It is a bit like Base64, but obsessed with eliminating characters that look like one another in popular but stupid fonts like capital "I" and lower case ell "l". As such, any embedded text is rather obfuscated due to this limitations, and people often resort to leet-like replacements such as '1' to represent 'I'.
This seems to be one of the earliest strategies used to encode messages into the Bitcoin blockchain. The first known example appears in 2011. Then starting November 2011, a large number of messages were inscribed n short successsion, presumably by a single person or small group.
Figure 1. . Although it is not solely focused on inscriptions and may also contain functional burn addresses, it is likely that the methods of Khatib/Legout capture the overall trend of base58 inscription counts.
These messages were originally found with: github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer#payload-size-out-utxo-2vals which tracks the largest transactions with unspent outputs.
Bitcoin Burn Addresses: Unveiling the Permanent Losses and Their Underlying Causes later revealed many new ones.
Finding Base58 messages is intrinsically hard for a few reasons
  • the words may be garbled by Base58 leet
  • only very small ammounts of data can be encoded at a time, and all of it contains ASCII, so you can't just "find all long ASCII strings" as we started doing for other ASCII inscriptions a la strings -n20; you have to use some dictionary as a basis
  • the Base58 does not show up raw on the blockchain, as it is just a human representation for the actual binary data that does, so you can't just strings the blockchain, you have to parse it
The interesting following transactions contain base58 encoded messages on addresses, sorted chronologically, and heighlighted either due to their earliness or historical or artistic quality:
etchablock.com was presumably an inscription service that allowed people to pay to have Base58 messages inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The service failed to gain popularity and not much is known about it. justdropped.com marks the domain as having expired on 2013-02-03.[ref].
The first known mentions of the service date back to December 2011, when it started self-advertizing in the blockchain around tx 8ffacbb18f63576fe323cbf2acc6c4c01c86aadf13d8352cfdd39d91916d98c8, block 156164 (2011-12-05) by repeating the following 3 messages 80 times:
11EtchABLockDotComGivesYouXZHcYVz
11BLockChain1mmortaLityXXXXYRZD5m
11VisitEtchABLockDotComNowXTbeZZ9
decoding to:
etchablock.com gives you blockchain immortaility. Visit etchablock.com now.
The website was down as of 2021, and there are were decent archives unfortunately: web.archive.org/web/20130301000000*/http://etchablock.com/.
Some surviging online mentions include:
  • www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/s9cra/comment/c4d5x9b/ Gold, Silver, and Bitcoin spot prices are now only a call (or text) away (2012-04-14) suggests that the creator is a "Jonathan Ryan Owens" since user jonathanryanowens comments:
    Aside from Bitcoinduit, which was the first project we worked on for the purpose of investigating the inner workings of the bitcoin network and double spend threats? Ok.. here's a few: We developed custom bitcoin signing agents (etchablock.com), we did the first facebook bitcoin wallet (yougotcoin.com), we have our own custom c++ libraries that completely reimplement bitcoind for our own applications, we have an actual working double spend detection and alerter infrastructure, and also a coming slew of apps related to microlending and fixed exchange services..
    Some profiles:
  • bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53752.msg651512#msg651512 says on 2011-12-15:
    Try etchablock.com!
    by user TT.
  • dune.com/queries/3857233 has a random looking commented out mention of etchablock.com on the SQL

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