Bitcoin addresses are by convention expressed in Base58, which is a human readable binary-to-text encoding invented by Bitcoin.
It is a bit like Base64, but obsessed with eliminating characters that look like one another in popular but stupid fonts like capital "I" and lower case ell "l". As such, any embedded text is rather obfuscated due to this limitations, and people often resort to leet-like replacements such as '1' to represent 'I'.
This seems to be one of the earliest strategies used to encode messages into the Bitcoin blockchain. The first known example appears in 2011. Then starting November 2011, a large number of messages were inscribed n short successsion, presumably by a single person or small group.
The interest in Base58 encoding might have initially arisen with people's desire to have "vanity addresses", that is Bitcoin addresses that have real words in them, much like vanity plates or vanity numbers. Such addresses with long words in them are hard to find while keeping the address spendable, because they have to correspond to a private key. An extreme notable example is:which contains the awkward 13 letter word:
embarrassable
in it. TODO: proof that it is pendable?
Perhaps inspired by this, some people also decided to use Base58 addresses as a way to create more general unspendable inscriptions, even even though the method is much more clumsy and complicated than P2FKHS. There is however a certain art to working under limitations.
Figure 1.
Total burn addresses as a function of time found by Bitcoin Burn Addresses: Unveiling the Permanent Losses and Their Underlying Causes
. Although it is not solely focused on inscriptions and may also contain functional burn addresses, it is likely that the methods of Khatib/Legout capture the overall trend of base58 inscription counts.
These messages were originally found with: github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer#payload-size-out-utxo-2vals which tracks the largest transactions with unspent outputs.
Bitcoin Burn Addresses: Unveiling the Permanent Losses and Their Underlying Causes later revealed many new ones.
Finding Base58 messages is intrinsically hard for a few reasons
The interesting following transactions contain base58 encoded messages on addresses, sorted chronologically, and heighlighted either due to their earliness or historical or artistic quality:
Related:
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Composed by Abing in 1949[ref]
Video 1.
Reflections of the Moon on Erquan with erhu solo performed Song Fei
. Source.
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As of 2020 leading makers of the most important fab photolithography equipment.
Video 1.
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Source.
Video 2.
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Source.
First there were dominant Elmer and Geophysics Corporation of America dominating the market.
Then a Japanese government project managed to make Nikon and Canon Inc. catch up, and in 1989, when Ciro Santilli was born, they had 70% of the market.
youtu.be/SB8qIO6Ti_M?t=240 In 1995, ASML had reached 25% market share. Then it managed the folloging faster than the others:
Tribute to computer security researcher Len Sassaman, who killed himself on 2011-07-03, starting with an ASCII art portrait followed by text.
Because it comes so early in the blockchain, and because it is the first ASCII art on the blochain as far as we can see, and because is so well done, this is by far the most visible ASCII art of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Created by famous computer security researcher Dan Kaminsky and Travis Goodspeed, presumably this other security researcher, evidence:
"Bernanke" is a reference to Ben Bernanke, who was one of the economists in power in the US Government during the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and much criticized by some, as shown for example in the documentary Inside Job (2010). As hinted in the Genesis block message, the United States Government bailed out many big banks that were going to go bankrupt with taxpayer money, even though it was precisly those banks that had started the crisis through their reckless investment, thus violating principles of the free market and business accountability. This was one of the motivations for the creation Bitcoin, which could reduce government power over economic policy.
It is worth mentioning that there do exist some slightly earlier "artistic" inscriptions in the form Punycode inscription in the Namecoin blockchain, but as far as we've seen, the are all trivial compared to BitLen in terms of artistic value/size.
---BEGIN TRIBUTE---
#./BitLen
:::::::::::::::::::
:::::::.::.::.:.:::
:.: :.' ' ' ' ' : :
:.:'' ,,xiW,"4x, ''
:  ,dWWWXXXXi,4WX,
' dWWWXXX7"     `X,
 lWWWXX7   __   _ X
:WWWXX7 ,xXX7' "^^X
lWWWX7, _.+,, _.+.,
:WWW7,. `^"-" ,^-'
 WW",X:        X,
 "7^^Xl.    _(_x7'
 l ( :X:       __ _
 `. " XX  ,xxWWWWX7
  )X- "" 4X" .___.
,W X     :Xi  _,,_
WW X      4XiyXWWXd
"" ,,      4XWWWWXX
, R7X,       "^447^
R, "4RXk,      _, ,
TWk  "4RXXi,   X',x
lTWk,  "4RRR7' 4 XH
:lWWWk,  ^"     `4
::TTXWWi,_  Xll :..
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
LEN "rabbi" SASSAMA
     1980-2011
Len was our friend.
A brilliant mind,
a kind soul, and
a devious schemer;
husband to Meredith
brother to Calvin,
son to Jim and
Dana Hartshorn,
coauthor and
cofounder and
Shmoo and so much
more.  We dedicate
this silly hack to
Len, who would have
found it absolutely
hilarious.
--Dan Kaminsky,
Travis Goodspeed
P.S.  My apologies,
BitCoin people.  He
also would have
LOL'd at BitCoin's
new dependency upon
   ASCII BERNANKE
:'::.:::::.:::.::.:
: :.: ' ' ' ' : :':
:.:     _.__    '.:
:   _,^"   "^x,   :
'  x7'        `4,
 XX7            4XX
 XX              XX
 Xl ,xxx,   ,xxx,XX
( ' _,+o, | ,o+,"
 4   "-^' X "^-'" 7
 l,     ( ))     ,X
 :Xx,_ ,xXXXxx,_,XX
  4XXiX'-___-`XXXX'
   4XXi,_   _iXX7'
  , `4XXXXXXXXX^ _,
  Xx,  ""^^^XX7,xX
W,"4WWx,_ _,XxWWX7'
Xwi, "4WW7""4WW7',W
TXXWw, ^7 Xk 47 ,WH
:TXXXWw,_ "), ,wWT:
::TTXXWWW lXl WWT:
----END TRIBUTE----
Code 1.
Len Sassaman tribute
.
Figure 2.
Official portrait of Ben Bernanke (2008)
Source. Reference image from Wikipedia for the ASCII art.
Video 1.
Black OPS of TCP/IP by Dan Kaminsky (2011)
Source. Presented at the BlackHat 2011 conference. Dan unveils the Len memorial at the given timestamp around 8:41. The presentation was done on 2011-08-03 or 04, so very few days after the upload to the blockchain.
From the JSON transaction we understand the encoding format:
   "out":[
      {
         "spent":false,
         "tx_index":0,
         "type":0,
         "addr":"1CqKQ2EqUscMkeYRFMmgepNGtfKynXzKW7",
         "value":1000000,
         "n":0,
         "script":"76a91481ccb4ee682bc1da3bda70176b7ccc616a6ba9da88ac"
      },
      {
         "spent":false,
         "tx_index":0,
         "type":0,
         "addr":"157sXa7duStAvq3dPLWe7J449sgh47eHzw",
         "value":1000000,
         "n":1,
         "script":"76a9142d2d2d424547494e20545249425554452d2d2d2088ac"
      },
...
      {
         "spent":false,
         "tx_index":0,
         "type":0,
         "addr":"157sXYpjvAyEJ6TdVFaVzmoETAQnHB6FGU",
         "value":1000000,
         "n":77,
         "script":"76a9142d2d2d2d454e4420545249425554452d2d2d2d2088ac"
      }
So it is really encoded one line at a time in the script of the transaction outputs.
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