This is a term invented by Ciro Santilli, and refers to a loose set of uncommon Bitcoin inscription methods that involve inscribing one or a small number of payloads per Bitcoin transaction.
These methods are both inefficient and hard to detect and decode, partly because Bitcoin Core does not index spending transactions: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/61794/bitcoin-rpc-how-to-find-the-transaction-that-spends-a-txo. This makes finding them all that more rewarding however.
On the other hand, they do have the advantage of not depending on any block size limits, as their individual transactions are very small.
A quick overview of some developments: research.aimultiple.com/ordinal-inscriptions-history/
Cryptocurrency with focus on anonymity. Was almost certainly the leading privacy coin since its inception until as of writing in the 2020s.
Ciro Santilli has received and held considerable quantities of Monero, notably 1000 Monero donation. so bias alert.
As mentioned at Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?", Ciro Santilli believes that anonymity is the most valuable feature that really matters on crypto coins, and therefore if he were to invest in crypto, he would invest in Monero or some other privacy coin.
localmonero.co/knowledge/monero-stealth-addresses?language=en gives an overview of the privacy mechanisms:
- ring signatures, which hide the true output (sender)localmonero.co/knowledge/ring-signatures Gives an overview. Mentions that it is prone to heuristic attacks.Uses a system of decoys, that adds 10 fake possible previous outputs as inputs, in addition to the actual input.So the network only knows/verifies that one of those 11 previous outputs was used, but it does not know which one.TODO so how do you know which previous outputs were spent or not?
- RingCT which hides the amounts.
- stealth addresses, which hides who you send toThis forces receivers to scan try and unlock every single transaction in the chain to see if it is theirs or not.The sender therefore can know when the money is spent, but once again, not to whom it is being sent.
Based on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote and like Satoshi Nakamoto created by under the pseudonym "Nicolas van Saberhagen" www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7v2obe/offering_a_bounty_for_a_video_of_the_speech_by/
Coinbase has actually stayed away from trading it even as of 2019 when Monero was the third largest market capitalization crypto because of fear of regulatory slashback: decrypt.co/36731/heres-why-coinbase-still-hasnt-listed-monero. Although it must be said, the value of privacy crypto is greatly reduced when everyone is trading it on exchanges, which require a passport upload to work.
Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:Seems simple, well done devs!
sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:gives:which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.
./xmrig --bench=1M948.1 h/sSo clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.
www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!
Timeline:
- 2021-08-02 arrested in the USA for extradiction
- 2023-11-06 Stepped down from monero Core Team
CIA 2010 covert communication websites Wayback Machine CDX scanning by 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16The Wayback Machine has an endpoint to query cralwed pages called the CDX server. It is documented at: github.com/internetarchive/wayback/blob/master/wayback-cdx-server/README.md.
This allows to filter down 10 thousands of possible domains in a few hours. But 100s of thousands would be too much. This is because you have to query exactly one URL at a time, and they possibly rate limit IPs. But no IP blacklisting so far after several hours, so it's not that bad.
Once you have a heuristic to narrow down some domains, you can use this helper: ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/cdx.sh to drill them down from 10s of thousands down to hundreds or thousands.
We then post process the results of cdx.sh with ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/cdx-post.sh to drill them down from from thousands to dozens, and manually inspect everything.
From then on, you can just manually inspect for hist on your browser.
Their historic DNS and reverse DNS info was very valuable, and served as Ciro's the initial entry point to finding hits in the IP ranges given by Reuters.
Generic information about the website not specific on this project will be stored at: Section "viewdns.info".
Since this source is so scarce and valuable, we have been quite careful to note down all the domain and IP ranges that have been explored.
At news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496244, the creator of the viewdns.info, "Hughesey", also stated that he'd able to give some free credits for public research projects such as this one. This would have saved up going to quite a few Cafes to get those sweet extra IPs! But it was more fun in hardmode, no doubt.
We do API access to IP ranges with this simple helper: ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh, usage:e.g.:
./viewdns-info.sh <apikey> <start-ipv-address> <end-ipv-address>./viewdns-info.sh 8b890b00b17ed2d66bbed878d51200b58d43d014 66.45.179.187 66.45.179.210For domain to IP queries from the API you should use "iphistory" viewdns.info/api/docs/ip-history.php:
curl 'https://api.viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=todaysengineering.com&apikey=$APIKEY&output=json'Just beware of the viewdns.info reverse IP bug, that really sucks and led to us missing a ton of domains.
Sample software implementations:
It is basically the same as buying and selling from exchanges for fiat, except that you only get fiat.
Swappers are in general able to receive send coins from any address, including self custody addresses.
Centralized swappers were a good way to workaround the endless Monero bans from exchanges circa 2024, e.g. x.com/cirosantilli/status/1771900725649371240 as they effectively serve as proxies for exchanges that are still legal in other countries.
They will eventually have to ban Monero of course, and then the only way left will be decentralized exchanges.
This leads to a scenario where the only effective way to ban Monero is to also ban all other cryptocurrencies. The question is if countries will go that far or not.
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!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- 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-calculusArticles 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/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - 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.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. 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.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
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