Home Updated 2026-10-18
View more
Check out: **OurBigBook.com**, the best way to publish your scientific knowledge. It's an open source note taking system that can publish from lightweight markup files in your computer both to a multi-user mind melding dynamic website, or as a static website. It's like Wikipedia + GitHub + Stack Overflow + Obsidian mashed up. Source code: **github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook**.
Sponsor me to work on this project. For 1M USD I will quit my job and work on OurBigBook full time for three more years to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 400k USD. At 4M USD I retire/tenure and work on open STEM forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I first quit my job 1st June 2024 to work on the project for 1 year after I reached my initial 100k goal mostly via a 1000 Monero donation.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous. More rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Explaining things is my superpower, e.g. I was top user #17 on Stack Overflow in 2025[ref][ref] and I have a few 1k+ star educational GitHub repositories[ref][ref][ref][ref]. Now I want to bring that level of awesomeness to masters level Mathematics and Physics. But I can't do it alone! So I created OurBigBook.com to allow everyone to work together towards the perfect book of everything.
My life's goal is to bring hardcore university-level STEM open educational content to all ages. Sponsor me at github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli starting from 1$/month so I can work full time on it. Further information: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". Achieving what I call "free gifted education" is my Nirvana.
To contact Ciro, see: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". He likes to talk with random people of the Internet.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/ID_photo_of_Ciro_Santilli_taken_in_2013.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Ciro_Santilli's_learn_teach_apply_logo.png
Besides that, I'm also a freedom of speech slacktivist and recreational cyclist. I like Chinese traditional music and classic Brazilian pop. Opinions are my own, but they could be yours too. Tax the rich.
I offer:
My approach is to:
For minors, parents are welcome to join video calls, and all interactions with the student will be recorded and made available to parents.
I am particularly excited about pointing people to the potential next big things, my top picks these days are:
I am also generally interested in:
Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro contributes almost exclusively by answering question he Googles into out of his own need, and never by refreshing the newest question of big tags for low hanging fruit! More information at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions".
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
. Further methodology details at: Figure "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats".
Video 1.
The problem with education by Ciro Santilli
. In this video Ciro Santilli exposes his fundamental philosophy regarding why Education is broken. This philosophy was the key motivation behind the failed OurBigBook Project. Source.
Video 2.
Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source.
Video 3.
OurBigBook Web topics demo
. The OurBigBook topic feature allows users to "merge their minds" in a "sort by upvote"-stack overflow-like manner for each subject. This is the killer feature of OurBigBook Web. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-topics. Source.
Video 4.
OurBigBook dynamic article tree demo
. The OurBigBook dynamic tree feature allows any of your headers to be the toplevel h1 header of a page, while still displaying its descendants. SEO loves this, and it also allows users to always get their content on the correct granularity. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree. Source.
Video 5.
OurBigBook local editing and publishing demo
. With OurBigBook you can store your content as plaintext files in a Lightweight markup, and then publish that to either OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features, or as a static website where you are in full control. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/publish-your-content. Source.
Video 6.
Top Down 2D continuous game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
More information: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games". This is Ciro's underwhelming stab at the fundamental question: Can AGI be trained in simulations?. This project could be taken much further. Source.
Video 7.
Water Margin tribute to Chinese dissidents by Ciro Santilli (2022)
Part of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, see also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/water-margin. Source.
Figure 3.
Lenovo ThinkPad T430 running a BIOS hello world
. This uses Ciro Santilli's project x86 bare metal examples with source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examples
Video 8.
Linux Kernel Module Cheat presentation
. This project, with source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat, aims to be the perfect emulation setup to study and develop the Linux kernel, kernel modules, QEMU, gem5 as well as x86_64, ARM userland and baremetal assembly and more. Source.
Video 9.
My Bitcoin inscription museum by Ciro Santilli
. Introductory video to Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain". Source.
 -------------------------------------
|  Force of Will               3 U U  |
|  ---------------------------------  |
| |                  ////////////   | |
| |                ////() ()\////\  | |
| |               ///_\ (--) \///\  | |
| |        )      ////  \_____///\\ | |
| |       ) \      /   /   /    /   | |
| |    ) /   \     |   |  /   _/    | |
| |   ) \  (  (   /   / /   / \     | |
| |  / ) ( )  / (    )/(    )  \    | |
| |  \(_)/(_)/  /UUUU \  \\\/   |   | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt                           |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost.  Effects   | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this  | |
| | loss of life.                   | |
| | Counter target spell.           | |
| `---------------------------------` |
|                                     l
| Illus.  Terese Nelsen               |
 -------------------------------------
Code 1.
ASCII art of a Force of Will Magic: The Gathering card inscribed in the Bitcoin blockchain
.
Artist unknown, uploaded December 2014. Part of Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" where Ciro Santilli maintains a curated list of such interesting inscriptions.
This was a small project done by Ciro for artistic purposes that received some attention due to the incredible hype surrounding cryptocurrencies at the time. Ciro Santilli's views on cryptocurrencies are summarized at: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?".
Figure 4.
YellowRobot.jpg
. Source.
JPG image fully embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain depicting some kind of cut material art depicting a yellow robot, inscribed on January 29, 2017.
Ciro Santilli found this image and others during his research for Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" by searching for image fingerprints on every transaction payload of the blockchain with a script.
The image was uploaded by EMBII, co-creator of the AtomSea & EMBII upload mechanism, which was responsible for a large part of the image inscriptions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The associated message reads:
Chiharu [EMBII's Japanese wife] and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
This is one of Ciro Santilli's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads, as it perfectly encapsules the "medium as an art form" approach to blockchain art, where even non-novel works can be recontextualized into something interesting, here depicting an opposition between the ephemeral and the immutable.
At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1615389973343268871 EMBII announced that he would be giving off shares of that image on Sup!?, a Bitcoin-backed NFT system he was; making. In December 2023, he gave some shares of the robot to Ciro Santilli.
Figure 5.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
.
This website was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites, a covert system the CIA used to communicate with its assets. More details at: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites".
Ciro Santilli had some naughty OSINT fun finding some of the websites of this defunct network in 2023 after he heard about the 2022 Reuters report on the matter, which for the first time gave away 7 concrete websites out of a claimed 885 total found. As of November 2023, Ciro had found about 350 of them.
Figure 6.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of noticiasmusica.net
.
This is another website that was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. This website is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and therefore suggests that the CIA had assets in Brazil at the time, and thus was spying on a "fellow democracy".
Although Snowden's revelations made it extremely obvious to the world that the USA spies upon everyone outside of the Five Eyes, including fellow democracies, it is rare to have such a direct a concrete proof of it visible live right on the Wayback Machine. Other targeted democracies include France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More details at: USA spying on its own allies.
This investigative report by Ciro Santilli was featured on the Daily Mail after 404 Media reported on it in 2025.
Video 10.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Slightly edited VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects about the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. Source.
Figure 7.
Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
Figure 8.
Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel by Ciro Santilli (2021)
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?. One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Figure 9.
Average insertion time into heaps, binary search tree and hash maps of the C++ standard library by Ciro Santilli (2015)
Used in the Stack Overflow answer to Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST). One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli". Source.
Video 11.
Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in two minutes by Ciro Santilli
. Quick and direct explanation of the statement of the BSD conjecture for people who know basic university mathematics. This is one of the Millennium Prize Problems, and you will get a million dollars if you can solve it! This therefore falls in the Simple to state but hard to prove of Ciro Santilli's the beauty of mathematics aesthetics. Source.
Figure 10.
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. This is Ciro Santilli's hand on the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Nanopore_Technologies. He put it there after working a bit on Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it" :-) And he would love to document more experiments like that one Section "Videos of all key physics experiments", but opportunities are extremely rare. Source.
A quick 2D continuous AI game prototype for reinforcement learning written in Matter.js, you can view it on a separate page at cirosantilli.com/-/raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport. This is a for-fun-only prototype for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, C++ or maybe Python (for the deep learning ecosystem) seems inevitable for a serious version of such a project. But it is cute how much you can do with a few lines of Matter.js!
HTML snippet:
<iframe src="-/raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport" width="1000" height="850"></iframe>
Read the full article
232 Santa Margarita Avenue Created 2025-04-24 Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Video 1.
Google garage (1998)
Source.
Description reads:
The company's sixth employee made this video tour of the office in 1998
so this should be Susan's garage, since the next office move was only in 1999 to 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto.
Video 2.
Explore Google's original garage with Street View by Google
. Source. Featuring the now late Susan Wojcicki.
Read the full article
Android (operating system) Updated 2025-07-16
View more
However, many, many, many terrible horrors come with it:
Read the full article
Applied Science (YouTube channel) Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Host: Ben Krasnow.
Uber practical, well described setups deep science stuff, he is awesome and has been at Google since 2014: www.linkedin.com/in/ben-krasnow-6796a94/
Read the full article
The best articles by Ciro Santilli Updated 2026-08-21
View more
These are the best articles ever authored by Ciro Santilli, most of them in the format of Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro posts update about new articles on his Twitter accounts.
A chronological list of all articles is also kept at: Section "Updates".
Some random generally less technical in-tree essays will be present at: Section "Essays by Ciro Santilli".
Read the full article
Big companies manage to publish white papers in peer reviewed journals Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Big companies like Google are able to publish white papers as peer reviewed papers just due to their reputation, e.g. without giving any source code that is central for the article.
It is insane.
E.g.: AlphaGo is closed source but published as www.nature.com/articles/natnure16961 in 2016 on Nature.
Read the full article
Carl Victor Page, Jr. Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Larry Pages's older brother.
It is hard to find information on this little bugger! Not a single photo online!
As suggested by the "Jr.", he is named after Larry's father, Carl Victor Page.
Carl Jr. is mentioned in a few places in the book The Google Story. The full name "Carl Victor Page Jr." is never given in that source, only "Carl Page Jr." is used. These crazy Anglo-Saxons and their semi-optional middle names!
The Google Story does not cite its sources, but it likely got much of its insider information through interviews, e.g. Chapter 2. "When Larry Met Sergey":
Carl Jr. recalls Larry as an inquisitive younger brother with wide-ranging interests
which suggests the authors actually interviewed Carl Jr., since interviews with Carl Jr. cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet. It would be interesting to know more how they got that level of access.
Chapter 2 mentions that Carl Jr. is nine years older than Larry. Therefore, he must have been born in 1963 or 1964. It also states that Carl studied at the University of Michigan, like his father and like Larry would also do later on:
He also enjoyed helping Carl Jr. - who was nine years older - with his college computer homework when Carl came home from the University of Michigan during breaks.
Their father was a professor at the Michigan State University, which is a different university from the University of Michigan, and not in the same city, so by breaks they mean term breaks.
Chapter 2 also mentions that he was working in Silicon Valley by the time their father died in 1996:
Despite his grief [for the death of their father at the early age of 58], Larry remained enrolled at Stanford. It helped that his older brother, Carl Jr., lived and worked in Silicon Valley. They had each other, so Larry wasn't left to bear the loss alone, and the two spent time together, fondly recalling their dad and reflecting on their childhood memories.
In 1997, Carl co-founded the mailing list management website eGroups together with Scott Hassan, programmer of an early version of Google when he was a research assistant at Stanford University. Carl and Scott presumably met through Larry, but we don't have a source. The company was sold to Yahoo! in 2000. The Google Story Chapter 8. "A Trickle" mentions:
Google's deal with Yahoo!] had special significance for Larry Page, since his brother, Carl Jr., also was in serious negotiations with Yahoo! over a major business transaction. The following day, June 27, Yahoo announced plans to buy eGroups, a technology firm that Carl Page had co-founded, for $413 million.
Carl is listed as a co-founder in the SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105102/0000950149-00-000584.txt as "Carl Page". He does not appear on the 5% stockholders however, poor Carl.
In 2006, he brought a company he founded called "Handheld Entertainment" public through a reverse merger with a shell company: archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/brother-of-google-co-founder-uses-shell-company-for-handheld-start-up/. "Handheld Entertainment" made an iPod competitor apparently. SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1309710/000095013606009480/file1.htm.
Wikidata entry: www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15791098
September 27, 2023 marked Google's 25 th aniversary and the page cirosantilli.com/carl-victor-page-jr had a small surge of views according to Google Analytics. On that day, this page was one of the top Google search results for "Carl Victor Page, Jr."[ref]. Wikipedia also had a large bump in searches for "Larry Page" on the same day: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page which must be the root cause, Larry actually managed to beat "Cat" and "Dog" on that day.
Read the full article
Chemistry course of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-07-16
View more
www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/undergraduate/handbooks in theory links to all handbooks, but some are likely paywalled. But Google can generally find them anyways.
Read the full article
Chrome Android extension Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Lol it is note possible what a joke. Notably this makes it harder to have of a superior third party password manager like Proton Pass (though there seems to be an autocomplete app as an alternative path), and an ad blocker. Fuck Google.
Also, Chromium is not available on Google Play by default, you can install the apk, but you will miss updates:
Read the full article
Chromium (web browser) Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Google is trying to kill it as of 2021: www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/chromium-sync-google-api-removed The lack of sync is a major major blow. So selfish. Google makes billions, and it won't give in a little bit of settings storage...
Read the full article
CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Expired domain trackers Updated 2025-07-16
View more
When you Google most of the hit domains, many of them show up on "expired domain trackers", and above all Chinese expired domain trackers for some reason, notably e.g.:
This suggests that scraping these lists might be a good starting point to obtaining "all expired domains ever".
Data comparison:
We've made the following pipelines for hupo.com + webmasterhome.cn merging:
./hupo.sh &
./webmastercn.sh &
./justdropped.sh &
wait
./justdropped-post.sh
./hupo-merge.sh
# Export as small Google indexable files in a Git repository.
./hupo-repo.sh
# Export as per year zips for Internet Archive.
./hupo-zip.sh
# Obtain count statistics:
./hupo-wc.sh
Count unique domains in the repos:
( echo */*/*/* | xargs cat ) | sort -u | wc
The extracted data is present at:
Soon after uploading, these repos started getting some interesting traffic, presumably started by security trackers going "bling bling" on certain malicious domain names in their databases:
  • GitHub trackers:
    • admin-monitor.shiyue.com
    • anquan.didichuxing.com
    • app.cloudsek.com
    • app.flare.io
    • app.rainforest.tech
    • app.shadowmap.com
    • bo.serenety.xmco.fr 8 1
    • bts.linecorp.com
    • burn2give.vercel.app
    • cbs.ctm360.com 17 2
    • code6.d1m.cn
    • code6-ops.juzifenqi.com
    • codefend.devops.cndatacom.com
    • dlp-code.airudder.com
    • easm.atrust.sangfor.com
    • ec2-34-248-93-242.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
    • ecall.beygoo.me 2 1
    • eos.vip.vip.com 1 1
    • foradar.baimaohui.net 2 1
    • fty.beygoo.me
    • hive.telefonica.com.br 2 1
    • hulrud.tistory.com
    • kartos.enthec.com
    • soc.futuoa.com
    • lullar-com-3.appspot.com
    • penetration.houtai.io 2 1
    • platform.sec.corp.qihoo.net
    • plus.k8s.onemt.co 4 1
    • pmp.beygoo.me 2 1
    • portal.protectorg.com
    • qa-boss.amh-group.com
    • saicmotor.saas.cubesec.cn
    • scan.huoban.com
    • sec.welab-inc.com
    • security.ctrip.com 10 3
    • siem-gs.int.black-unique.com 2 1
    • soc-github.daojia-inc.com
    • spigotmc.org 2 1
    • tcallzgroup.blueliv.com
    • tcthreatcompass05.blueliv.com 4 1
    • tix.testsite.woa.com 2 1
    • toucan.belcy.com 1 1
    • turbo.gwmdevops.com 18 2
    • urlscan.watcherlab.com
    • zelenka.guru. Looks like a Russian hacker forum.
  • LinkedIn profile views:
Check for overlap of the merge:
grep -Fx -f <( jq -r '.[].host' ../media/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hits.json ) cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/tmp/merge/*
Next, we can start searching by keyword with Wayback Machine CDX scanning with Tor parallelization with out helper ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hupo-cdx-tor.sh, e.g. to check domains that contain the term "news":
./hupo-cdx-tor.sh mydir 'news|global' 2011 2019
produces per-year results for the regex term news|global between the years under:
tmp/hupo-cdx-tor/mydir/2011
tmp/hupo-cdx-tor/mydir/2012
OK lets:
./hupo-cdx-tor.sh out 'news|headline|internationali|mondo|mundo|mondi|iran|today'
Other searches that are not dense enough for our patience:
world|global|[^.]info
OMG news search might be producing some golden, golden new hits!!! Going full into this. Hits:
  • thepyramidnews.com
  • echessnews.com
  • tickettonews.com
  • airuafricanews.com
  • vuvuzelanews.com
  • dayenews.com
  • newsupdatesite.com
  • arabicnewsonline.com
  • arabicnewsunfiltered.com
  • newsandsportscentral.com
  • networkofnews.com
  • trekkingtoday.com
  • financial-crisis-news.com
and a few more. It's amazing.
Read the full article
CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Searching for Carson Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Edit: Carson was found Oleg Shakirov's findingsby Oleg Shakirov: alljohnny.com, communicated at: twitter.com/shakirov2036/status/1746729471778988499, earliest archive from 2004 (!): web.archive.org/web/20040113025122/http://alljohnny.com/, The domain was hidden in plain sight, it was present in a not very visible watermark visible in the Reuters article screenshot! The watermark was added to the CIA to the background image, it is actually present on the website. In retrospect, it was actually present at on the expired domain trackers dataset, but the mega discrete all second word made Ciro Santilli miss it: github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2015/blob/9d504f3b85364a64f7db93311e70011344cff788/07/05/02#L1572
Figure 1.
2004 Wayback Machine archive of alljohnny.com
.
What follows is the previous
The fact that the Reuters article has a screenshot of it, and therefore a Wayback Machine link, plus the specificity of the website topic, will likely keep Ciro awake at night for a while until someone finds that domain.
Some text visible on the Reuters screenshot:
It is unclear however if this text is plaintext or part of a an image.
Some failed attempts, either dry guesses or from DNS grepping dataset searches:
Searching the Wayback Machine proved fruitless. There is no full text search: Wayback Machine full text search, and a heuristic web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/Johnny%20Carson search has relevant hits but not the one we want.
Another attempt was to search for "carson" on webmasterhome.cn which lists expired domains in bulk by expiration day, and it search engine friendly. It contains most of the domains we've found so far. Google either doesn't support partial word search or requires you to be a God to find it
so we settle for DuckDuckGo which supports it: duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awebmasterhome.cn+%22carson%22&t=h_&ia=web Adding years also helps: duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awebmasterhome.cn+%22carson%22+2011&ia=web with this we might be getting all possible results. Ciro went through all in 2011, 2012 and 2013 but no luck. Also fuck en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_City,_Nevada and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson,_California :-)
Let's search tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search for "carson" contained in any historic domain name. 10,001 lines. Grepping those, no good Wayback machine hits for those that also contain "johnny" or "show". Data at: raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/tools.whoisxmlapi.com_reverse-whois-search_carson.csv in case anyone want to try and dig...
Let's also search the fortuitously timed 2013 DNS Census.
Read the full article
Ciro Santilli's homonyms Updated 2025-07-16
View more
If any of you ever read this, do send me an email to Ciro Santilli saying hi and we can agree on a clear separation of usernames.
Although if you are just starting out, maybe you should just go from scratch with a unique Internet alias.
www.ancestry.com.au/genealogy/records/ciro-santilli-24-bkmssg documents a "Ciro Santilli" born 31 Jan 1887 at Castelvécchio in Subéquo, L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region, just like Ciro Santilli's ancestors. Parents Francesco Santilli and Anna Silveri. The page also mentions:
Read the full article
Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Ciro like to interpret this as him having "a creative personality" with the tradeoff of generally not being amazing at his well defined jobs.
Ciro is a high flying bird scientist. As mentioned at by Tommaso Fontana at zom.wtf/about/
I'm what happened when you can't choose a single career path
Ciro is obsessed by that which is "quirky". This also often has a parallel with "naughty". He often fantasizes about an imaginary parallel between that feeling and Jobs and Wozniak's blue box.
Ciro's natural fight-or-flight response is to hide in a little corner, and try to solve the problem out. Then get distracted and start procrastinating. And then he tries to solve the unsolvable. Someone Ciro barely new once told him quite correctly:
In the event of war, you would be the type that hides away and makes the bombs.
This is also perhaps why Ciro likes prison decks in Magic: The Gathering. You just sit on your corner, making yourself safer and safer, until the opponent can't do you any harm and concedes.
There are of course infinitely many videos on the "entrepreneurial mindset" online, and it is impossible to know if they are bullshit, or if everyone just feels like that, but OK, just let Ciro feels that he is specially creative will you?
In the words of Rob Pike[ref]:
mostly building weird stuff no one uses, but occasionally getting it right, such as with UTF-8 and Go
Video 1.
What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)
Source.
Good quotes:
Creative people continuously step outside of the domain of evaluation structures
and:
If you are creative and you go off on tangents all the time, there's some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time, and you are going to become hyper-successful as a consequence
[but the probability of that being the right time and place for the idea is extraordinarily low]
The sensible thing to tell anybody is "you shouldn't do it, your probability of success is so low, that its better to just to something sensible".
But the problem with that, is that creative people can't do that, because they are creative. A creative person who isn't being creative, they just wither and die.
Which brings Here's to the crazy ones to mind.
Ciro also one heard a story, likely apocryphal, but still nonetheless resonated with him, that went something like this (TODO find source, Google wasn't helping, stuff that happened before website as usual):
The newly hired manager of some subsection of DuPont (or some other gigantic chemical company) came into the office, and found a chemical engineer, completely drunk in the middle of the day.
Outraged, the manager searched for this colleagues who explained.
Ah, don't mind John (or some other name), the guy invented Teflon (or some other substance) which accounted for 20% of our revenue last year. Even if he does not do anything else in his entire career, his salary won't make any difference compared to those gains, and we take the chance that he might invent something else later.
Ciro likes this story because although he does not drink, he feels his work mind works in a related way. Often, when there is something really hard he knows needs doing he hides, and distracts himself with less important tasks, or by watching crap on YouTube, because he knows that the hard task will hurt his mind. Then one day he wakes up and says: OK, fuck it, let's do it, and does it.
Once Ciro got a performance review from a colleague that said:
If Ciro spent as much effort on his job as he does on side projects, he'd be the most amazing worker.
This is closely related to effortless effort.
Yes, low conscientiousness, give it to me.
Video 2.
And I am not and never have been 'familiar' scene from The Big Short (2015)
. Source.
People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar. And I am not and never have been familiar.
blog.sbensu.com/posts/high-variance-management/ High Variance Management:
Like movies, software projects have parts that require high variance and parts that don't. For most projects, the logging system can be off-the-shelf and predictable. But core parts of the product that require novel design should be as good as they can be.
Read the full article
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions Updated 2026-01-30
View more
Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
.
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions have, unsurprisingly, centered around the subjects he has worked with: systems programming and web development, and necessary tooling to get those done, such as Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.
His best answers are listed at: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, until Ciro noticed that GitHub might be potentially even more effective for it.
In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:
  • answer important questions found through Google which he needs to solve an actual problem he has right now, and for which none of the existing answers satisfied him, and close duplicates.
  • monitor less known tags which very few people know a lot about and where the knowledge sharing desperately lacking, but in which Ciro specializes and therefore has some uncommon knowledge to share
In practice it also happens that Ciro:
When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, Ciro often re-reads it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.
He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation on widely known subjects. See also: online forums that lock threads after some time are evil.
The result is that Ciro ends up getting relatively a lot of reputation without much work! The term passive income, much beloved by fake investment gurus, comes to mind. But now it's "passive reputation"! And it is useless! Yay!
For this reason, Necromancer is Ciro's favorite badge (get 5 upvotes on a question older than 60 days), and as of July 2019, he became the #1 user with the most of this badge. Announcement on Twitter.
The number two at the time was VonC (see also: Section "Epic Stack Overflow users"), who had about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1072396?&Date=2019-07-01&UserId=895245 it can be seen that as of July 2019, 1216 out of his 1329 answers were answered 60 days after the questions and constitute potential necromancers! Compare that to VonC's 1643 potential necromancers out of 21767 answers!
VonC eventually took back the lead in 2022, dude's a machine!!! twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1546389532014247936
Someone at Ciro's work once said something along:
The more patents a research project generates, the less actually working products it produces.
and this does ring true in Stack Overflow as well. When you are answering stuff, it means that you either didn't know, or that the information wasn't well available, and so your specific application is progressing slowly because of that. Once the generic prerequisites are well solved and answered, you will spend much more time on your business specific things rather than anything else that can be factored out across projects, and so you will get more "directly useful work" done, and less Stack Overflow answers. Of course, without the prior research in place, you can't get the final product done either.
In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). He reached top 50 in 2022. Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro's reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)
There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.
Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation than those that contribute to low level subjects.
What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.
Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro's answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone's life, that's fine.
There is great beauty when you are involved in a programming problem, and you suddenly remember: wait, I answered something related a few years ago! And especially so when you can go back and improve your old answer with new insight. This has great value, because when you were more newbie, you would have typed different words into Google Search than you would now. So by updating posts from when you were a newbie, you are helping other newbies more, as they are more likely to be also searching for those keywords. It is also very nice to have some head start on the answer's upvote count and not have to bootstrap yet another answer from 0 upvotes and have to go through all the competition!
For example, Ciro's most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is stackoverflow.com/questions/18875674/whats-the-difference-between-dependencies-devdependencies-and-peerdependencies/22004559#22004559 was written when he spent his first week playing with NodeJS (he was having a look at Overleaf, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn't touch again for several years, and still hasn't "mastered" as of 2019! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.
Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under the best articles by Ciro Articles or even simpler answers such as:
There is something of greater value in perfectly presented technical knowledge, that goes beyond than simply getting something done. The pleasure of understanding and mastering something, and perhaps of the explanation itself. Sometimes when answering, Ciro feels like a tailor, where ASCII is his cloth. See also: Section "The art of programming", Section "Physics and the illusion of life".
Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro's creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.
After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at:
Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.
Ciro also made a question title style guide: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.
Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.
Like all things that end up shaping the course of one's life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.
His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment.
When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!
When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don't yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looked forward to was legendary (archive), and which he achieved on 2021-02-16.
Figure 4.
Ciro Santilli with his Stack Overflow 100k reputation cup
.
From the start, Ciro's motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:
  • save the world through free education
  • It feels especially amazing when people in the real world start taking note of you, and either close friends tell you straight out that you're a Stack Overflow God, or as you slowly and indirectly find out that less close know or came to you due to your amazing contributions.
It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what OurBigBook.com aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.
Ciro feels that his Stack Overflow alter ego is kenorb.
Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:
Follow me on Twitter and tell me what canonical questions you would like me to respond to!
so another necromancer.
Way to go.
Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro's questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.
Some fun reactions to Ciro's Stack Overflow activity:
Read the full article
Codaisseur/feathersjs-react-redux-ssr Updated 2025-07-16
View more
Also webpack and Babel, looks promising!
As of 2021, last commit from 2017.
Running:
git clone https://github.com/Codaisseur/feathersjs-react-redux-ssr
cd feathersjs-react-redux-ssr
npm install
failed on Ubuntu 20.10 Node.js v14.15.3 with:
../src/create_string.cpp:17:37: error: no matching function for call to ‘v8::String::Utf8Value::Utf8Value(v8::Local<v8::Value>&)’
   17 |   v8::String::Utf8Value string(value);
      |                                     ^
Likely similar bullshit from: stackoverflow.com/questions/50111688/node-sqlite-node-gyp-build-error-no-member-named-forceset-in-v8object because the Node.js version is too new.
If I try nvm install v10
I Google error messages until reaching:
diff --git a/gulpfile.js b/gulpfile.js
index b931e06..24d2cc8 100644
--- a/gulpfile.js
+++ b/gulpfile.js
@@ -14,34 +14,34 @@ gulp.task('css', function() {
            .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist'))
 })
 
-gulp.task('css:watch', ['css'], function() {
+gulp.task('css:watch', gulp.series('css', function() {
   gulp.watch('app/styles/**/*.sass', ['css'])
-})
+}))
 
 gulp.task('moveAssets', function() {
   return gulp.src('./app/assets/**/*')
              .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist/assets'))
 })
 
-gulp.task('build:revAssets', ['css', 'moveAssets'], function() {
+gulp.task('build:revAssets', gulp.series('css', 'moveAssets', function() {
   var rev = new $.revAll()
   return gulp.src('./dist/**/*')
              .pipe(rev.revision())
              .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist/public'))
              .pipe(rev.manifestFile())
              .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist'))
-})
+}))
 
 gulp.task('build:cpServer', function() {
   return gulp.src('./app/**/*.{js,ejs}')
              .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist/server-build'))
 })
-gulp.task('build:revServer', ['build:cpServer'], function() {
+gulp.task('build:revServer', gulp.series('build:cpServer', function() {
   var manifest = gulp.src('./dist/rev-manifest.json')
   return gulp.src('./dist/server-build/{components,containers}/**/*')
              .pipe($.revReplace({ manifest: manifest }))
              .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist/server-build'))
-})
+}))
 
 gulp.task('build', function() {
   runSequence('build:revAssets', 'build:revServer')
diff --git a/package.json b/package.json
index bcb29c3..86bd593 100644
--- a/package.json
+++ b/package.json
@@ -67,7 +67,7 @@
     "redux-thunk": "^0.1.0",
     "request": "^2.79.0",
     "rewire": "^2.3.4",
-    "run-sequence": "^1.2.2",
+    "run-sequence": "^2.2.1",
     "serve-favicon": "^2.3.2",
     "socket.io-client": "^1.7.2",
     "superagent": "^1.4.0",
@@ -86,16 +86,16 @@
     "concurrently": "^2.0.0",
     "cross-env": "^1.0.7",
     "enzyme": "^2.3.0",
-    "gulp": "^3.9.0",
+    "gulp": "^4.0.2",
     "gulp-autoprefixer": "^3.1.0",
     "gulp-load-plugins": "^1.2.0",
     "gulp-rev": "^6.0.1",
-    "gulp-sass": "^2.1.1",
+    "gulp-sass": "4.1.0",
     "gulp-sourcemaps": "^1.6.0",
     "jsdom": "^7.0.1",
     "mocha": "^2.4.5",
     "nock": "^2.17.0",
-    "node-sass": "^3.4.2",
+    "node-sass": "^5.0.0",
     "nodemon": "^1.6.0",
     "react-addons-test-utils": "^15.3.2",
     "react-transform-catch-errors": "^1.0.0",
and the next problem is: stackoverflow.com/questions/48513573/gulp-error-gulp-hastask-is-not-a-function
Read the full article
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Largest ordinal inscription Updated 2025-07-16
View more
We can get a list of the ordinals at: archive.org/details/bitcoin-ordinal-inscriptions.csv and then sort them by payload size with:
sort -k6 -n -t, ordinals.csv -o ordinals-sort-size.csv
This shows to us that as of block ~831k, there are 4 ordinals which are far far larger than any other between 3 MiB and 4 MiB, at about 10x larger than then 5th one d115a6e689086fd587e5032f24ba2a8c01f2f87cba758c9d5eb8cf7f6e9a816a
In those cases, a single inscription takes almost the entire block, and the inscribers must have had direct dealings with their mining pool:
As of 2024, all of the big ones were made in early 2023, so it seems that the trend has died down a bit.
Read the full article
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Porn Updated 2026-10-23
View more
For now we are going to keep this site porn-free and only link to prevent bad things from happening, as it might violate GitHub porn policy depending on how it is hosted, and Google may dislike it. Video "What is more obscene: sex or war? scene from The People vs. Larry Flynt".
If illegal porn were to ever be found, we would be unable to acknowledge that, and would just have to silently remove it. Of course, the reproducible nature of Bitcoin Inscription Indexer means that anyone who regenerates the data would immediately see such entries in the diff.
Another issue is that it can be quite hard to determine if porn is legal or illegal, e.g. it can be hard to distinguish legal an illegal ages or revenge vs consensual porn, especially at the low resolutions that you may expect to find embedded in the blockchain. We are generally going to be quite strict about this, and in case of uncertainty on porn legality we will censor first.
OK the list:
Read the full article
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Raw images Updated 2026-10-21
View more
In this section contains a list of images we could find that wre uploaded as raw data to the blockchain, without any special encoding, e.g. as done by the AtomSea & EMBII system.
It is possible that some/most of those were uploaded via the cryptograffiti.info system, but since that indexer stopped working, and since the format is so non-specific, it is not possible be sure as far as we can tell.
These images were indexed by looking for standard transaction output script hashes that contain JPEG or PNG images immediately on the first payload byte based on file signature bytes and indexed/easily downloaded at github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer#image-indexing-and-download.
Figure 1.
western-union-bitcoin-spoof.jpg.gz
.
This ad highlights one of the claimed potential advantages of Bitcoin: cheaper/faster cross border transactions.
This inscription is highlighted at Data Insertion in Bitcoin's Blockchain by Andrew Sward, Vecna OP_0 and Forrest Stonedahl. Finding Gzips with binwalk is hard because the file signature is only 2 bytes long (1F 8B), so there are lots of false positives.
Gzip binary uploaded at: raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/bitcoin-inscription-indexer/data/bin/200f3f6f8a91ae438d1924e5cedca98cea7f0197b9eba11343948b5621ca19ed.jpg.gz gunzip 1.12 complains:
western-union-bitcoin-spoof.jpg.gz: decompression OK, trailing garbage ignored
but we were not able to fix that: removing bytes at the end goes straight from "trailing garbage" to "incomplete file" after a certain byte.
Figure 2.
Super Mario coin sprite
.
tx bf7ef3216ae09f8252c76e7d0031bc4aa131a23a6900f8371c44ffde7957c8da (2015-03-01). Possibly from Super Mario World for the SNES (1990). No doubt a self-reference to Bitcoin itself. Encoded as a data URL for a PNG image:
<img src="data:image/png;base64,
Visible e.g. at www.pinterest.fr/pin/137993176075040653/.
Figure 3.
JPG thumbnail
. Presumably a JPEG upload test. tx 515a95381e511141229966d722db19db7da66a0d629b1f883d296287632e72b3, block 349362 (2015-03-26) via cryptograffiti.info.
Figure 4.
we love bitcoin
.
Embedded in the image itself, there's a message in the header comments:
Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks
which is the opening paragraph of: bitcoin.org/en/
Figure 7.
Iranian lady with polar bear hat.
We don't know if she's actually Iranian, it's just an uneducated guess.
The image data is cut in half. This makes the image an invalid JPEG, but ImageMagick is able to recover and convert to a valid image which is what we show here to make it portable to more browsers. The raw invalid image is present at: raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/bitcoin-inscription-indexer/data/bin/b673c7d0c62cce8315ad6cc63a2c8ca8169bf73432435760b808735e1a7fe0e2.jpg, but it can also be generally viewed by most viewers.
This embedding uses a novel more specialiezd protocol on top of a raw daisy chain Bitcoin inscription.
The daisy actually starts at f49e79889b34d355fa8a02f13b9db4ed69c067f975e25339737ef10e4b993d7a and data is encoded as follows:
OP_RETURN 62 00000000 48656c6c6f20776f726c64212052657475726e20626c6f622070726f746f636f6c2076
OP_RETURN 62 00000001 313a204d41474943203d20307836322c205041434b414745203d2075696e7431362c20
OP_RETURN 62 00000002 53455155454e4345203d2075696e7431362c205041594c4f4144203d20757020746f20

OP_RETURN 62 00000000 48656c6c6f20776f726c64212052657475726e20626c6f622070726f746f636f6c2076
OP_RETURN 62 00000001 313a204d41474943203d20307836322c205041434b414745203d2075696e7431362c20
OP_RETURN 62 00000002 53455155454e4345203d2075696e7431362c205041594c4f4144203d20757020746f20

OP_RETURN 62 00000003 33352062797465732e0a

OP_RETURN 62 00010000 ffd8ffe1001845786966000049492a00080000000000000000000000ffec0011447563
OP_RETURN 62 00010001 6b79000100040000003c0000ffe1039a687474703a2f2f6e732e61646f62652e636f6d
OP_RETURN 62 00010002 2f7861702f312e302f003c3f787061636b657420626567696e3d22efbbbf222069643d
OP_RETURN 62 00010003 2257354d304d7043656869487a7265537a4e54637a6b633964223f3e203c783a786d70

...

OP_RETURN 62 00010085 51290358a41fe5408b4435254208d4810a5fe9113044c1ae3aa544656d729756395b87
OP_RETURN 62 00010086 c4e261f55c5d19e1c792c3f78adff1368db58e5a0bb85b2c6753c42de6d973edae0642
OP_RETURN 62 00010087 1b2c8370f203aaa0a6eb7ea0871d8e9ae6534b785b57347171e4df6a5463d7ce77b93b
OP_RETURN 62 00010088 9b8bf96edd1b982e2474a41ad28e3c01e74586d1d1ad7a874c5a1b7c742d2285c371f6
The first block is:
Hello world! Return blob protocol v1: MAGIC = 0x62, PACKAGE = uint16, SEQUENCE = uint16, PAYLOAD = up to
which then gets repeated, probably an error, but now with the sentence completed:
Hello world! Return blob protocol v1: MAGIC = 0x62, PACKAGE = uint16, SEQUENCE = uint16, PAYLOAD = up to 35 bytes
This therefore gives us the name of the protocol as "return blob protocol". We also understand that the 0x62 was aconfiguration parameter.
ffd8ffe1 marks the start of the JPEG.
If the rest of the image were inscribed somewhere random in the blockchain, we'd expect to find the string 6200010089 containing the netxt data chunck on a nearby block, but bgrep did not find it, so perhaps the data just isn't there.
The last tx of the daisy is 43b182065ab2c7d1908ec3cee756d9f626c1e4bd1efa17a7c3993433b653d499 which is followed by 9e6838a3545bd59a708d0c177d6840c7d82b8ac6220138ca3d8133a1376405aa which does not contain any data.
Figure 8.
Erich Erstu
.
Alias: 1Hyena. A well built man wearing a gas mask. Google image search leads to: github.com/1Hyena (archive), who is the creator of cryptograffiti.info. It was around after this time that the number of raw images surged dramatically in the blockchain, so it is possible that this is when the service started operating. This further suggests that most raw image uploads we found were made with cryptograffiti.info. tx c206e8fff656f07b27dac831ef9b956792bae4e76a2cb43f14f49f0298bf2c2f, block 416527 (2016-06-16). Embedded text:
Hyena was here on the 16th of June 2016.
and:
Hi mom! I love you.
Figure 9.
Water Deer
.
badtaxidermy.com "Water Deer" image, visible at: web.archive.org/web/20200527070011/http://www.badtaxidermy.com/?page=3. tx 357e8ae080e5a1b554eaec2953e3e6e2e7955f3af4559dd0f1bc6381d56aa183, block 416735 (2016-06-16) via cryptograffiti.info. The file contains the strings:
www.badtaxidermy.com
and:
cryptograffiti.info now allows you to attach JPEG images to your messages.
Figure 10.
hotmine.io
.
A mining supplier: hotmine.io/en. twitter.com/uahotmine. tx 8ec01c5e8f3b57adb13079af3b7e40e7acd3986a5ed14325388405771bd43f9b, block 416835 (2016-06-18) via cryptograffiti.info. The file contains the following string embedded into it:
Smart Heating, Bitcoin Mining For You - en.hotmine.io
Figure 11.
Nada from They Live (1988)
.
tx 83df1e5ecc1c7ac455d2855e15cff8fa5771afe2ad1796c8b6b1a8e910e829c4, block 416896 (2016-06-18) via cryptograffiti.info. The file has the following string embedded into it:
I have come here to chew bubble gum and dance on Ethereum's grave.
And I'm all out of bubble gum.
which is a reference to Nada's original dialogue:
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum.
Video 1.
I'm here to chew bubblegum
. Off-chain film scene for context. Source.
Figure 12.
Cryptocurrency Minning ad
.
Twitter "@dobcrypto": twitter.com/dobcrypto Reuploaded at: imgur.com/gallery/00oOuhm. tx eda07af9584391bb6f5ebb07ba57a51b610751fdf06ae49d9166225c36d97d0b, block 417111 (2016-06-20) via cryptograffiti.info. The file contains the following string:
Subscribe, I will be glad to see you! www.youtube.com/c/dobcryptocurrency
Figure 13.
Chinese wedding
.
A white man and a Chinese woman wearing Chinese traditional dressess holding hands, presumably a token from their wedding. A Chinese poem is visible next to them, with four vertical setences made up of 7 characters each, to be read from right to left. This is a classic Classical Chinese poetry form known as qijue.
A photo of a snowy mountain is shown in the background, fitting the theme of the poem. It looks like an European mountain, possibly Mont Blanc? TODO identify. Perhaps a reference to the nationality of the husband.
TODO transcribe the Chinese text, cursive grass script + traditional characters + ultra-low res put this beyond Ciro Santilli's capabilities/patience ratio. Ciro Santilli's wife's transcribed gave the first column as:
丹珍默然藏山中
A scarlet gemstone hides quietly in the midst of the mountains.
and no Google hits, so maybe an original poem? What a hero. TODO transcribe the rest.
The image file contains the English transalation of the Chinese poem embeded into it:
A scarlet gemstone hides quietly in the midst of the mountains.
Its beauty softly enters the wanderer's dreams.
Fame and fortune become like drifting clouds
But the gem endures like the constellations above.
Figure 14.
Superbuffo
.
Googling gives a Toni Caradonna: twitter.com/superbuffo. At twitter.com/Superbuffo/status/1620900765014556672 that twitter account claimed the art or its depiction. www.imdb.com/name/nm9516368/ has some obscure references to him. tx 6240f61bbaeac66cd623e921a153addaf5f379a996f2de0f0c6506d628fe3812, block 417354 (2016-06-21) via cryptograffiti.info. The file contains the following string embedded into it, in addition to a lot of Adobe boilerplate:
Superbuffo the first comedian on the blockchain
Figure 15.
Rene Angelil and Celine Dion
.
Reproduced at: web.archive.org/web/20191130174338/https://people.com/celebrity/inside-celine-dion-and-rene-angelils-21-year-marriage/ but cropped to faces. tx e2e5b9cf04d93ae5fc1b54e9208b92b668823e014b251f57510e4702661fa1a6, block 417272 (2016-06-21) via cryptograffiti.info. Embedded text:
You will be here forever
Figure 16.
New Age dance
.
Woman dancing a New Age-like dance with New Age-like Indian looking clothes, holding a lamp, and with a rose on her hair. TODO identify. tx 0602dd1b375bc71818db0a40d7a14f438499af3eda9056125eb5a1b74bed790b, block 419676 (2016-07-07) via cryptograffiti.info. The image contains the following text embedded into it (TODO unknown mechanism, does not show up on exifTool:
No alcohol and smoking since 07.07.2016. Love girls!
Figure 17.
Snake penetration sculputure
. Sculpture of what seems to be a snake penetrating a vagina. tx 83f412eb7ff40fe542901186a6d37cba0eb4f8458c574bc02a6f7236c599fe07, block 420122 (2016-07-10) via cryptograffiti.info.
Figure 18.
Wedding invitation
. TODO: make out names, quite low res, no patience. Looks like Cyrillic script. tx 01c3af71c12d49260231dcb3cc86d6ff21b3cd90878e9556482ef3b0908abffe, block 420960 (2016-07-16) via cryptograffiti.info.
Figure 19.
Bitcoin love certificate
.
Hard to make out due to ultra-low-res, and in Cyrillic script. Contains three dates: 8.02.1982, 16.07.1992 and 17.07.2016. tx 075d1c78883ccb237b374c7ed7f9ff0f90df3308c48f9e7a29348b815326b769, block 421151 (2016-07-17) via cryptograffiti.info. The file contains the following text embedded into it:
Wedding Wallled 15Nz214yv76BmkKLCi8kAVssa5C7nQHLjx
Figure 20.
Oles Slobodenyuk
.
Wedding picture with people holding "Blockchain" and "Ipa" signs.
Reproduced at: web.archive.org/web/20200926150213/https://freebitcoins.com.ua/zapushhen-ukrainskij-bitkoin-pul-bitcoinukraine/ Google translate:
One of the initiators of the launch of this pool was Oles Slobodenyuk, who earlier created a grocery store in Kiev accepting bitcoins, arranged a TakeMyBitcoin flash mob, and also registered his own marriage in the bitcoin blockchain on the weddingbook.io website.
Oles is for example featured at: uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-miners-heating-homes-free-133053106.html Bitcoin Miners Are Heating Homes Free of Charge in Frigid Siberia by Anna Baydakova (2019)
The image file contains the following text embedded into it:
<Wedding date: Jul 17, 2016
proof link goo.gl/photos/2GToBx1WqRyiQtxQ6
The link is dead of course.
Figure 21.
Nematode
.
A... nematode-like shaped hand drawn extremely simple image? A test upload presumably? The squiggle outside of the worm might be a test direction marker. tx 554846025e808df7adec3b1d099e3d4d54b7367cddaa959939cb5ca0fc6abf7b, block 424414 (2016-08-09) via cryptograffiti.info. The image file contains the following string embedded into it:
2016, painting, 135.7 x 130.7 cm (18 DPI)
Figure 22.
Hand written contract
.
Wedding contract written in Czech. Transcription and translation by Petr Kadlec:
Svým podpisem pod tímto textem potvrzuji, že Daniela Dudysová a Pavel Urbaczka v mé přítomnosti dne 20.8.2016 v Ropici projevili vůli uzavřít spolu manželství, přičemž ani jeden z těchto projevů se mi nejevil jako nesvobodný, nikoliv vážný, nesrozumitelný, omylný nebo uzavřený v tísni.
Translation:
With my signature under this text, I confirm Daniela Dudysová and Pavel Urbaczka have, in my presence on 2016-08-20 in Ropice, expressed the will to enter marriage, whereas neither of their expressions seemed to me to be non-free, not serious, in error, or under distress.
Signatures:
Tereza (unreadable) Hana (unreadable) Jakub (unreadable) Radim Kozub (unreadable) (unreadable) Lenka (unreadable)
Petr also conjectures that Jakub may refer to Jakub Olšina from Blockchain Legal. Figure 23. "Wedding on grass" on the same block contains a image of a wedding, presumably the same of the contract. The photo of the man might be the same person as www.linkedin.com/in/olsinajakub/, but a bit younger.
Figure 23.
Wedding on grass
.
The file contains the following text embedded into it:
Danila a Pavel se právě vzali!
which is Czech for:
Danila and Pavel just got married!
So it is a followup to Figure 22. "Hand written contract".
Figure 24.
Onshape ad
.
Ad for www.onshape.com/en/, an online CAD company:
#CAD users all over the world are designing in the cloud! Join them by creating a #free Onshape account: hubs.ly/HO3vJ6tO. tx c0bb963cb3ceffc49059f09db94e3fd73caa3b7a8e005160d49e99020ff6b51a, block 426832 (2016-08-25) via cryptograffiti.info. Embedded text:
@Onshape - The Future of Professional CAD
Figure 25.
Pepe the Frog
.
ca933de16b6466e40b37c7ee0ec0dcd9a56bc365a567a5fff81ba4927dd61e23 (2016-10-17) via cryptograffiti.info. Embedded text:
In Pepe We Trust
#BITCOINPEPE
Figure 26.
Hello. Yes, this is dog
. knowyourmeme.com/memes/yes-this-is-dog. tx 4b0cd7e191ef0a14a9b6ab1c5900be534118c20a332ff26407648168d2722a2e, block 440418 (2016-11-24) via cryptograffiti.info.
Figure 27.
Ross Ulbricht
.
Exact image also reproduced at: ethereumworldnews.com/ross-ulbricht-attorney-dismiss-2018/. tx b25ba2080d15c1277569bd2fee707a216c4e2ee0a1f479349c2309651c261511, block 442225 (2016-12-06) via cryptograffiti.info. Embedded text:
Silk Road saved lives that would
have otherwise been lost on the
streets.
Figure 28.
Tuxedo and rose
. Black and white and intentionally blurred photo of couple, the woman wears a tuxedo, and the man holds a red rose/light-like thing in the middle. tx c67dca17d3e5544d8d2c70d143196e1c1438a09c7371b80086d0a71ec5aec3c8, block 453083 (2017-02-14) via cryptograffiti.info.
Figure 29.
Couple on mountains
.
Middle aged couple selfie in front of some mountains. tx 00a64f2ff9aae7a34c21d07b8fc9bad79989f25295ccbddc6fbe73b3685b65a9, block 456370 (2017-03-09) via cryptograffiti.info. The file contains the following Spanish poem, whch confirms that their Spanish looking faces are actually Spanish, perhaps they are at the Pyrenees:
Entre tus brazos y los míos
no hay espacio, tan juntitos
estamos que los pensamientos
son uno.
A veces somos casi dos desconocidos,
raros tan raros cómo distintos,
pero nos engañamos, tú lo sabes yo lo sé,
en realidad somos muy dentro
la misma verdad.
Escondidos en tus ojitos
duermen mis sueños más hermosos,
cuándo los abres frente a mi
se despiertan alegres y rumbosos.
Which translates as:
Between your arms and mine
there is no space, so close together
we are the thoughts
They are one.
Sometimes we are almost two strangers,
strange as strange as they are different,
but we deceive ourselves, you know it, I know it,
actually we are very inside
the same truth.
Hidden in your eyes
my most beautiful dreams sleep,
when do you open them in front of me
They wake up happy and cheerful.
Not easy Google hits so possibly novel.
Figure 30.
Tank Man
.
See also: Section "China".
Searching for the image hash ca4f11131eca6b4d61daf707a470cfccd1ef3d80a6f8b70f1f07616b451ca64e leads to archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/191157608/#q191162145 which links to the now dead as of 2021: cryptograffiti.info/#ca4f11131eca6b4d61daf707a470cfccd1ef3d80a6f8b70f1f07616b451ca64e.jpg.
Figure 31.
Mr. Burns You're here forever
.
Mr. Burns from The Simpsons showing a sign:
Don't forget, you're here forever
Still from S06E13 of The Simpsons. A reference to the immutability of the blockchain.
Video 2.
Mr. Burns "You're Here Horever"
. Off-chain source clip for the still. Source.
This transaction is given at Data Insertion in Bitcoin's Blockchain by Andrew Sward, Vecna OP_0 and Forrest Stonedahl. We've decoded it with:
btc getrawtransaction 94e319d09fc236fb9d7a24e60af8f47ed41ca3cc01e9950c925d806153ed8aa3 true | jq -r '.vin[].scriptSig.asm' | sed -r 's/^[^ ]+ //' | sed -r 's/ [^ ]+$//' | tr -d '\n'  | xxd -r -p > tmp.jpg
TODO understand the encoding better. Our indexing scripts Bitcoin Inscription Indexer missed it because the image is encoded on starting on the second constant of the input script and not the first.
This was missed by binwalk because it does not index the valid JPEG signature "ffd8ffdb"... we should patch it... github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk/blob/cddfede795971045d99422bd7a9676c8803ec5ee/src/binwalk/magic/images#L107
Figure 32.
Augustana College Old-Main.jpg
.
First tx 1e347cf7521a1318ef31af4f5758efbc45f1bb2a7db9bc1cc469bfe93599eaf7 sets up 48 P2SH outputs and gives ASCII message
Augustana College Old-Main.jpg Reconstruct with data preceding redeemscripts
Then tx 033d185d1a04c4bd6de9bb23985f8c15aa46234206ad29101c31f4b33f1a0e49 redeems those with 48 input scripts that encode the image with ASCII message:
Augustana College Old-Main.jpg Reconstruct with data preceding redeemscripts
Figure 33.
PDF demo
.
tx b4f537bc536c392d425af0693e3282bbf697df01debeeaf7f9918b93af6bdd14 block 474646 (2017-07-07) via cryptograffiti.info contains a single page 7.9 KB PDF sample file also present e.g. at: www.studocu.com/en-gb/document/harrow-college-uxbridge-college/assessing-risk-in-sport-unit/pdf-sample-its-nothing-dw/61244699. This image is a screenshot of the PDF made manually to make it easier to view here, the actual inscribed file has been uploaded to: raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/bitcoin-inscription-indexer/data/bin/b4f537bc536c392d425af0693e3282bbf697df01debeeaf7f9918b93af6bdd14.pdf. The first lines of the document read:
Adobe Acrobat PDF Files
Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) is a universal file format that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colours and graphics of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it.
Figure 34.
Cat manga
. TODO identify, transcribe japanese. tx 4986e9cd20b75bb534df92e60b232945e18274f4c46d25b8853af9bdda5166b8, block 581526 (2019-06-20).
Figure 35.
Arms crossed
. Nerdy caucasian woman in her late teens/early 20's wearing glasses and a jeans jacked with her arms crossed. TODO identify. tx a55e5e7492848445a9f9ecf55ce566242c9d95e6c46a171fd94a345e8b74c355, block 597374 (2019-10-01) with P2FKH
Figure 36.
Black cat
. No, Google reverse image search is never going to find the exact one amongst billions of pics. tx 8cf28eb9ac221d8cd15298b9ae63eca910b536a5234c133c7e364b29a4e39d21, block 625045 (2020-04-09) with P2FKH.
Figure 37.
Teddy bear
. tx 546124c6ad55acc6e0cd00a66fbd29e9b7df5fe8505e2ebf8470bb44aa35bc16, block 654100 (2020-10-24) with P2FKH. Cost: ~0.002 BTC ~ $25.77 at the time. Transaction made up of 339 * 550 SAT outputs.
Figure 38.
The Starry Night by van Gogh
.
tx 225ed8bc432d37cf434f80717286fd5671f676f12b573294db72a2a8f9b1e7ba, block 685647 (2021-05-31) Stored on SegWit. Googling leads to this hit: github.com/aureleoules/bitcandle by French programmer Aurèle Oulès which is an obscure uploader not known to us before this transaction was found.
tx 8dc2785335c59df6c00257f9b20e5df9b932a717f97066b279e292faba71a67a block 685737 contains another one, but with a slightly different encoding, presumably Aureole was trying out different things.
Figure 39.
Kitchen mirror selfie in swimming glasses
.
This P2FMS has the peculiarity that each payload constant is preceded by a 04 byte which must be thrown away, we've decoded it manually with:
bitcoin-core.cli getrawtransaction 3110f49fb6047d62e6fa198a0a4b180d9abf7075d6f29472747990ae286295cb true | jq -r '.vout[].scriptPubKey.asm' | head -n-2 | sed -r 's/^....//;s/ 3 .*//' | tr -d ' \n' | xxd -r -p  > tmp.jpg
This transactions is also mentioned at: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/28400 "Make provably unsignable standard P2PK and P2MS outpoints unspendable"
Figure 41.
Gulagu.net people
. tx 36e7f004ff22aa1146a00705d166fbca64d174c472a5296ed1f38d4749a74e10 block 710354 (2021-11-19). Rightmost Vladimir Osechkin. Two-stage P2SH inscription.
Figure 42.
Low resolution GIF screenshot of the Bitcoin whitepaper intro
.
The payload starts with: 7b260000 before the acutal GIF, which is why we hadn't found it before using binwalk. TODO what do those bytes mean?
The last payload uses OP_RETURN and encodes the ascii filename:
BTGC:satoshi.gif
TODO what is BTGC?
Figure 43.
A man and his cactus
.
tx 4719e7252f4bdefd9f7bdf5058f17af28729b79c303b067eb01c107e57235754 (2024-01-27). The man depicted is Cryptocurrency developer Sahil Chaturvedi. Encoded as a data URL for a JPEG image in an OP_RETURN:
data:image/jpeg;base64
Perhaps a meme given the phalic shape of the plant.
tx 976e0766ebe0528d44595170f83f46ab1304c0a3b809f16454ee9be0e816e3a3, block 921133 (2025-10-28) contains an OP_RETURN encoded MP4 AI generated video of Bitcoin Core developer Gloria Zhao standing up and showing her buttocks. This transaction takes up most of the block with an Ethereum tatoo on her lower back. Presumably it is from someone criticizing Gloria's design choices regarding inscriptions on the blockchain. Also mentioned at:
TODO decode:
Read the full article
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Text Updated 2026-10-23
View more
Here are some exceptionally interesting text inscriptions that are not mentioned in other sections:
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: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.                 ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  • 140562ceb42fc8943fa52ccc0ddbb11ca2d88dae9b5240d7a4b46864538c515aTODO 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
Read the full article