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 were no decent archives unfortunately: web.archive.org/web/20130301000000*/http://etchablock.com/.
Some surviging online mentions include:
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:
Colin Hughes by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
TODO: real name? Occupation?
Claude says he's from the UK and has a background in mathematics. Oxbridge feels likely. How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code says he started off on the ORIC computer, which is British-made, so he is likely British.
Article by James Somers by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
Expired domain tracker by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
AGI interest group by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
SWE-bench by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
By Princeton people.
This one aims to solve GitHub issues. It appears to contain 2,294 real-world GitHub issues and their corresponding pull requests
The dataset appears to be at: huggingface.co/datasets/princeton-nlp/SWE-bench in Parquet format.
Mathematical olympiad by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
Inscription service by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
Inscription system by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
We define an "inscription system" as a software or service that facilitates the creation of inscriptions.
Apache Parquet by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16
Evan Chen by Ciro Santilli 37 Created 2025-03-24 Updated 2025-07-16

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact