Coinbase transaction by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The first transaction of each Bitcoin block is called the "coinbase transaction", and it is magic as it does not need to point to a previous output script and have a valid input script as it serves as a Block reward for miners.
Bitcoin Core snap by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Officially supported installation method on Ubuntu 23.10.
There are apparently two methods:
Specific implementations:
This is about transactions that are interesting not because of their inscriptions, but for some other reason, such as transaction size, etc.
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.
Inscribing anything large would however take a very long time, as you'd have to wait until the previous payload chunk is confirmed before going to the next one. This alone makes the format impractical perhaps.
Monero by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
    It's a bit like having a built-in cryptocurrency tumbler in every transaction.
    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 to
    This 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.
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.
Mt. Gox by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The first Bitcoin exchange. Coded as a hack, and they didn't manage to fix the hacks as the site evolved in a major way, which led to massive hacks.
Their creation is clearly visible on the archive history of bitcoin.org: web.archive.org/web/20100701000000*/bitcoin.org which started having massively more archives since Mt. Gox opened.
Video 1.
One Mistake Brought Down This FBI Most Wanted Hacker by Crumb (2023)
. Source. Good overview of Mt. Gox.
Grepping the 2013 DNS Census first by overused CGI comms subdomains secure. and ssl. leaves 200k lines. Grepping for the overused "news" led to hits:
  • secure.worldnewsandent.com,2012-02-13T21:28:15,208.254.40.117
  • ssl.beyondnetworknews.com,2012-02-13T20:10:13,66.104.175.40
Also tried but failed:
OK, after the initial successes in secure., we went a bit more data intensive:
New results: only one...
  • 208.254.42.205 secure.driversinternationalgolf.com,2012-02-13T10:42:20,
After 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches we later understood why there were so few hits here: the 2013 DNS Census didn't capture the secure. subdomains of many domains it had for some reason. Shame, because if it had, this method would have yielded many more results.
Scrapped justdropped data, patched:
+++ b/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/cdx-post.sh
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env bash
 # Post process the output of cdx.sh to enrich IDs even further, and reconstruct easier to Web Archive inspect domain names.
-grep -P -e '([^,)]+)\)\/\1\.swf|\)/[^/]+.jar|([^,)]+),([^,)]+),([^,)]+)\)/cgi-bin/[^/]+\.cgi' "$1" |
-  sed -r 's/\).*//' | awk -F, '{ printf("%s.%s\n", $2, $1) }' | uniq -c | awk '$1 == 1{ print $2 }' | tee $1.post
+grep -P -e '([^,)]+)\)\/\1\.swf|\)/[^/]+.jar|([^,)]+),([^,)]+),([^,)]+)\)/cgi-bin/[^/]+\.cgi' "$1"|
+  sed -r 's/\).*//' | awk -F, '{ printf("%s.%s\n", $2, $1) }' | uniq -c | awk '{ print $2 }' | tee $1.post
and then:
./hupo-cdx-tor.sh out 'news|headline|internationali|mondo|mundo|mondi|iran|today' 2006 2022
web.archive.org/web/20110203041325/http://financecentraltoday.com/
web.archive.org/web/20110202221328/http://thenewsofpakistan.com/
web.archive.org/web/20050424123432/http://www.pokernewsweb.com/ likely legit in the intended emulated style
web.archive.org/web/20100923090646/http://mideasttoday.net/
web.archive.org/web/20100206221718/http://euronewsonline.net/
web.archive.org/web/20110208063146/http://news-and-sports.com/ Hit.
web.archive.org/web/20110202054628/http://intoworldnews.com/ hit.
web.archive.org/web/20110207171340/http://mydailynewsreport.com/ hit
web.archive.org/web/20050508220858/http://www.asianewsupdate.com/ this looks like the exact format of legitimate site the CIA was emulating. Copyright 2005, a CGI link to as: www.asianewsupdate.com:80/cgi-sys/FormMail.cgi There's a phone there 01 647-0910 so seems less likely?
2010. JAR unarchived. rss, split image
2010. JAR. Split header.
2011. JAR unarchived. Split header.
2011. JAR. a.newslink, a.newslinkalt.
2011. Arabic. RSS.
web.archive.org/web/20110129115400/http://kmirano.com/ shallow but off style? Has a kmirano.sfw... viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=kmirano.com says 211.1.224.71 Japan NTT SmartConnect Corporation 2012-01-11
2011. JAR. Copyright 2008. Split header and other images. They are obsessed about CDMA (2G).
2011. JAR. split header, RSS.
2010. Suspicious. But no clear fingrenprint. Also not as shallow as others. Also Joomla based which would be novel.
2010. JAR.
newspapergateway.com/ web.archive.org/web/20110208070309/http://newspapergateway.com/ hard to tell but generally off. Has both JAR and SWF.
2011 Farsi. JAR. RSS.
2010 JAR. Split header, rss.
2011. English. Split header, RSS.
sandstormnews.com 2011, SWF Arabic. ul.rss-items > li.rss-item, split header
zerosandonesnews.com 2011. SWF Split header, ul.rss-items > li.rss-item
lasthournews.com web.archive.org/web/20100513182623/http://lasthournews.com/. Urdu. JAR at: web.archive.org/web/20100513182724/http://lasthournews.com/recent.jar. Split header images.
mynepalnews.com, split header images, ul.rss-items > li.rss-item, Unarchived jar:
Michael Moritz by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Michael Moritz interview by Stanford Graduate School of Business (2019)
Source. The dude is quirky.

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 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  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