Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Bibliography

Other Bitcon analysis:

"Annotated blockchain project"
- etherpad.mit.edu/p/r.e33d2e7230fafc0612a0f2e7ebc87bae
- etherpad.mit.edu/p/r.19b7b3e2c5ea08a61cb0bef0aeb213fd image list (February 8, 2017) We tried going over it, but it is just too much work, the huge majority of the results are just AtomSea & EMBII so not that interesting.
- archive.ph/Zz7m5
- www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5wax5v/a_group_is_working_on_building_a_fully_annotated/
- archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/111742853/
Does the same as this page, just that it is an uncomprehensible mess of broken links. But they have soe good ideas!
Their main techniques seem to be:
```
mkdir binout
for file in blk*dat; do echo "$file"; binwalk --dd='.*' "$file" -C binout/. --log=binout/"$file""res.txt"; done
```
and:
```
mkdir subfileout
for file in blk*dat; do mkdir subfileout/"$file"; done
for file in blk*dat; do echo "$file"; hachoir-subfile --category=image,video,audio,container,archive,misc "$file" subfileout/"$file" > subfileout/"$file""subfile.txt"; done
```
which seem promising.
These are installable on Ubuntu 23.10 with:
```
sudo apt install binwalk hachoir
```
TODO how to they automatically map back to transaction IDs? There is a line "Script to add the TX ID to each file." Our attempts: Section "Get transaction id from position in dat file"

Table of contents

Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain by Ken Shirriff (2014)

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www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html

Ken Shirriff is a cool dude, he's done some collabs with Marc Verdiell in electronics restoration.

A Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin by Matzutt et al. (2018)

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fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf

Semi-boring academic overview, but without reproducibility, or in a way that is too hidden for Ciro to have the patience to find it out.

Claims 1600 files found.

Mentions some upload mechanisms, notably AtomSea & EMBII and Satoshi uploader.

Messages from the mines

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messagesfromthemines.brangerbriz.com

Down as of 2025, and because it was a dynamic mess Wayback Machine shows nothing.

Bitcoin Burn Addresses: Unveiling the Permanent Losses and Their Underlying Causes (2025-03-18)

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arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14057

By Mohamed el Khatib and Arnaud Legout.

Both autors were at Inria Centre at Université Côte d'Azur, Mohamed the intern and Arnaud the Inria researcher employee.

Cool, this method could reveal novel P2FKH images:

We propose a methodology to automatically detect burn addresses. We manually classified

208,656 addresses suspected to be burn addresses because they have a low Shannon entropy

Our model identified 7,905 true burn addresses from a pool of 1,283,997,050 addresses with only 1,767 false positive.

Unfortunately their method might not be well suited for finding images, later on:

Storing images for fun and posterity. We did not observe plain text messages encoded in Bech32 addresses. As our methodology is designed to identify burn addresses with a human-readable structure or easily identifiable patterns, we are not supposed to detect images encoded in burn addresses.

Data for their results can be found at: