Here are some exceptionally interesting text inscriptions that are not mentioned in other sections:
1759ed3f0f5829711157c1fc3662f4bf01f3bee3a430242bc729898bb77c2a4a
TODO:
  • 55a5d0c09ad5535711d649fdab394add3bb6e50cc2c49920cf0cb758ff0b69e8 via cryptograffiti.info contains what seems to be a ASCII table tracking train movements? Maybe from a train lover? But also curiously, it is GPG signed:
    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
    Hash: SHA256
    
    time    direction    # covered    #uncovered    notes
    11/11/2013 6:31pm    E    4    1    csx 6243
    11/19/2013 4:46pm    E    3    0    csx 6215
    11/19/2013 5:44pm    W    4    0    Amtrak
    11/21/2013 4:05pm    E    0    0    csx 6206
    Interesting.
    86c1b7bd8bbdd8903355a8f6a408616621fd2ea4321b9aced778f388afe0b244 has something similar.
  • cc38d740dc1999a803dbba0c48a82af994861e0767f6bcd7d6ceebe4e66b4678 via cryptograffiti.info contains a pipe dream technical proposal idea entitled:
    Attack-resistant decentralized time and location services via Nakamoto chain consensus.
  • 5d9ef37e6beea5342ce1cb2681a7b465a542394aeda2b1e1fed00fab44b17833 via cryptograffiti.info contains a test of every character from 0 to 255, e.g. some of the readable characters are:
    65:              A
    66:              B
    67:              C
    68:              D
    69:              E
    70:              F
    71:              G
    72:              H
    73:              I
    74:              J
    75:              K
    76:              L
    77:              M
    d5f6614b4e3bdc611c8ad15f158163e48e1a1298ea5f5f9832ada8db6e2dd4b2 has something similar.
  • 0f96b2f6e3c4f4b6319efbafd2e7148d507b260b4d7914766e79aec7d9ac9574 via cryptograffiti.info has a long-ish message that looks like a software release note, not sure what it is about:
    Truecrypt 7.1a
    ==============
    
    2015-07-19
    
    I am setting the filesizes and checksums of the last Truecrypt version (7.1a) in stone.
  • 206a0edb11ba0677248709d9bc5210b35e8a03710d9bb19c6f1e4e254bf21f5e via cryptograffiti.info has a letter to AGI:
    Dear Artificial Intelligence,
    While cute, the author clearly underestimates the magnitude of singularity!
  • cdbeb50c11b788fa4e67e00fb2e2607b129492a4a38bed0a9e31443a42e272a4 via cryptograffiti.info contains a semi-philosophical text that starts with:
    When in the course of cosmic evolution,
  • b55c3312ceeeb4ab422b658f5f4d5884775a498ddde6a527fca7b67752e1b044 via cryptograffiti.info contains some wedding vows starting with and GPG-signed:
    Zachary Thomas Smith,
    I give myself - Jenna Marie Vaziri - to you, to be your wife, your best friend, and your home - just as you are to me.
  • 3620da027df2e2e34ac9abe0123dcd7217fc5b8dec9921cbae258c640c7a6591 via cryptograffiti.info contains a neatly formatted UTF-8 ad with a link to: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1033773.0
    ╭───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
    │    B&C EXCHANGE:  A decentralized cryptocurrency exchange for everyone    │
    ┝━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┥
    │             https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1033773.0             │
    │                                                                           │
    │ B&C Exchange will be an open-source decentralized exchange that completes │
    │ cryptocurrency  trades between  users by utilizing multisig signers  that │
    │ compete for blockchain  rewards based on their effectiveness and honesty. │
    ├╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┤
    ┆          ▷▶▷▶    There are 10 days  left in the auction!    ◀◁◀◁          ┆
    ╰───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    The thread links to bcexchange.org/ which is dead as of 2024.
    f93e128c59b357ca2d1b256eb1c4d991c488da460527ca0898dc789210073bd2 has another one:
    ┏━━ UTF-8 is coming to CryptoGraffiti.info!!! ━━┓
    ┠╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┨
    ┃ I love you.                          Σ΄αγαπώ. ┃
    ┃               Ma armastan sind.               ┃
    ┃ Aš tave myliu.               Mä rakastan sua. ┃
    ┃                 Я люблю тебя.                 ┃
    ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  • 140562ceb42fc8943fa52ccc0ddbb11ca2d88dae9b5240d7a4b46864538c515a
    Reddit on the Bitcoin blockchain Test
    TODO understand this part:
    The "Address" you see above is more than a bitcoin address? For example, the web address to this 
    
    reddit thread is: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3cdxep/reddit_on_the_blockchain_test/
    
    Which converts to the bitcoin address of:
    12uPLj6PSz6ULnZi1jXo7Ch1Je1SuqxRcE
    
    How? Because any text, like a web address, can be converted into a bitcoin address.
    
    www.reddit.com = 1MZCEUCtyJCDkNSLYbPVvAgf9V3CsEw3t
    www.google.com = 1JEZLaFciACHDEMVd3RXZzPmGcsWEwYQLr
    www.voat.com = 1JvCp9X5Bvvt2kz3EqP5ppkzX62sKgKbqr
    www.paystamper.com = 14wgeaWz2rKax8iVSWNFSrSsAYNeGyNdkt
    Duriel@paystamper.com = 1HcuhfTAiQCt6KdMG2rZLXsTcKYj9nLDhS
  • 940f41f5cc96182c1392c239d7570f94bd524e141ca0a88fdb154bd817049f83.bin via cryptograffiti.info contains some links to profiles controlled by a "Daniel Michael Abraham" www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-abraham-9432a798/. Other messages by him:
    • 3d39024fa0cddfc529d4a41501df7a076f5bcf9a7a43f88f54a717e6df7f4770
    • 088ebf7ffdef96b8fcac7eafa2ff6d04f295ea24f159e1ce4b7d47ed7b91b1f9
GitHub is for newbs.
  • 50002f38a40aeca96f7d03ceac1c62fc233b44207af99df8f1daddf03f6ef61c via cryptograffiti.info contains a Python script that starts with:
    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    #
    # This file is placed in the public domain.
    #
    # CryptoGraffiti tool
    #
    # Requires python-bitcoinlib-v0.2.1
    #
    # https://github.com/petertodd/python-bitcoinlib
    #
    # pip install python-bitcoinlib
  • 209c9106c7261582f5d0907819c6e10dea670c273133047d911be41f8a42d86f via cryptograffiti.info contains a Base64 encoded Python script starting in:
    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # brainwallet "base58"
    # v2015-05-18, fixed Tor DNS problem
    import binascii
    import hashlib
    Some related ones:
    • 25658f625c8f3964593b9e3c632040cb69aea9cf24403af33ab173d7cba7c42f
    • 7d188bd499137b5a0d68271ef8a4f3c4dc2f2b38bd03dfc913cb2b0be15b1e0d
Coinbase message are messages that only miners can embed in the blockchain.
As such most of them tend to be boring ads for mining pools, but there are a few exceptions, especially in the early days.
The Horrible Horrendous Terrible Tremendous Mining Pool inscribed a few cute Coinbase messages during their operation in 2012-2013.
Many of their messages also mention SockThing, which was part of their mining infrastructure:
block 229417 (2013-04-03) has a cute sword ASCII art:
./SockThing/HHTT/o()xxxx[{::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>
Starting from their very first ASCII transaction on block 197602 (2012-09-07), there is what seems to be a poem spread across several transactions. Some of the lines are repeated, presumably because they didn't update the current line to a new line and so mined the same thing multiple times:
I am a pretty princess
covered in mud and blood
water with stuff in it
like everything else that wiggles or jiggles
screaming might not be your waY
see no reason to operate otherwise since
came into the world naked, wet and screaming
but silence will never be mine
until I am dead
but the smell will also give that away
gather all my things
load them in a big boat
airlift that to Kansas
and light it on fire
drop it from 7,000 feet
then railgun my corpse straight down
The sentences are not very coherent together, perhaps this is because lines were chosen by different miners one at a time.
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".
This seems to be one of the earliest strategies used to encode messages.
The generated text is however rather obfuscated by the limitations of Base58.
The following transactions contain base58 encoded messages on addresses:
This website used to allow embedding text messages with OP_RETURN, here's an archive from 2015: web.archive.org/web/20150718052659/http://eternitywall.it/
As of January 2024, it seems to read-only mode, where it simply indexes matching transactions that were made via other means: web.archive.org/web/20230929075331/https://eternitywall.it/
There were 3191 hits for the search term:
git grep '\bEW '
in our data starting with tx a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e (2015-06-24):
EW Eternity wall is live
up to the last entry on tx 28820bc14cf2cfda58ecbc9ac6df3f41a1cb90f4246543f01ba42a5e9dac3cf8 (2023-06-15)
EW May our friendship endure, signed by hg, kty, wjj, and xyz.
no doubt initials of 4 Chinesepeople. A blood brother oath comes to mind, akin to the Oath of the Peach Garden. Will these four be the ones to take down the evil dictator Xi Jinping?
The very first message gives away the name of what we assume is a web-based upload system, "EW" being its advertisement signature added to every message.
Running bitcoin-cli:
bitcoin-core.cli getrawtransaction a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e true
shows that the messages are encoded with OP_RETURN:
  "vout": [
    {
      "value": 0.00000000,
      "n": 0,
      "scriptPubKey": {
        "asm": "OP_RETURN 455720457465726e6974792077616c6c206973206c697665
Starting tx 2f201c8518c7b012c03c2c82e40e86f6aaf616ea5fbe22570aac9d2c6611cb68 (2023-03-11), the chain is flooded with ASCII transactions containing many repeated double quotes " and digits 3, with some other characters interspersed in them without any clear pattern e.g. the first one:
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""jk""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""'}""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""/D""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""q1""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""XK""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
TODO what is up with that?
In that first trasaction the quotes appear as part of a Multisig output script.