Inscription (blockchain)

Data that is inscribed in a blockchain as a way to perpetuate the data, rather than to follow the main intended purpose of the given blockchain, e.g. ASCII art instead of financial transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

A catalogue for Bitcoin can be found at: Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain".

A "miner message" is an inscription message left by a miner on a blockchain.

This is opposed to messages that may be left by non miners during transactions.

Miner messages are therefore of course much harder to control on established blockchains, as they basically require consensus in a mining pool to set. Most of them are just ads for the mining pool itself.

Namecoin examples are catalogued at: punycodes.xyz. The are small Unicode art or emoji code.

There seems to be nothing of particular artistic value as far as we've seen so far, the only interest in such tokens seems to be that:

We define an "inscription system" as a software or service that facilitates the creation of inscriptions.

We define an "Inscription service" as a website that easily allows you to pay to have arbitrary data inscribed on a blockchain.

The most notable early example of such a service on the Bitcoin blockchain was cryptograffiti.info.