To decode these, we throw away the last tx and the last constant of each input, e.g.:
btc getrawtransaction 033d185d1a04c4bd6de9bb23985f8c15aa46234206ad29101c31f4b33f1a0e49 true | jq -r '.vin[].scriptSig.asm' | head -n -1 | sed -r 's/ [^ ]+$//' | tr -d '\n'  | xxd -r -p > tmp.jpg
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.
Cardano by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This was getting very hot as of 2022 for some reason. Would be good to understand why besides the awesome name.
Cryptocurrency swapper by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A "Cryptocurrency swapper" is a service that swaps one type of cryptocurrency for another.
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.
Test buy 2023-04-10 in the UK:
  • fee: 0.99 pounds, minimum buy: 1.99 pounds
  • bought 10 pounds, minus 0.99 fee, totalled: 0.00039162 BTC (£8.92) presumably after further fees/spread
  • bitcoin price on Google on that day: 22,777.54 GBP / BTC
  • bitcoin transaction fees were about 2.7 BTC on that day
Sending 5 pounds to wallet 12dg2FaiZLp3VzDtLvwPinaKz41TQcEGbs
  • network fee: 0.00001989 BTC
  • total bitcoin cost: -0.00023928 BTC
  • new balance: 15,234 satoshi (39,162 - 23,928).
  • total spent: £5.45
  • time est.: about 30 minutes
This worked and I received 21939 satoshis (23928 - 1989) on Electrum on one of the outputs of transaction 1177268091cbeaacbcaac5dc4f6d1774c4ec11b4bcffafa555cd2775eafb954c.
Sending 1 satoshi back! The lowest fee in Electron is 1120 Satoshis targeting 25 blocks (4 hours). Let's do it. Failed, server forbids dust, minimum is 1000 satoshi. OK, sending 1000 satoshi, at 1139 fee.
Caroline Ellison by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Some analysts seem to suggest that the things she said were bad.
But they're not.
They're a rare example of someone with some power saying cool honest stuff that comes across their mind.
Unlike the endless mandatory corporate bullshit we usually get otherwise.
Miner message by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
Punycode inscription by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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:

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