Besides ASCII art, the huge majority of images is encoded with the AtomSea & EMBII system/format. All images in that system will be documented in that section.
Rickrolling lyrics were mined several times into the blockchain.
The first currently known instance is as a link right during the prayer wars on block 142573 (2011-08-25) as the miner message:
Militant atheists, bit.ly/naNhG2 -- happy now?"
which redirects to www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGDuExhS6Nw&blockchain
Around block block 246k (e.g. 27b7c526489dac8245747fa1c425a2e3eb07dea57b294eb4ae583fec9b859fcf, 2013-10-17) we note several transactions starting with a XML format <CG SZ="1156"><MG>... the first one being 0b4efe49ea1454020c4d51a163a93f726a20cd75ad50bb9ed0f4623c141a8008 As mentioned not very clearly at www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html#ref12 the content of the first <MG><payload></MG> is a Base64 encoded string
Catagory: Poetry
Title: Never Gonna Give You Up
Performer: Rick Astley
Writer: Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, Pete Waterman
Label: RCA Records
followed by lyrics also base64 encoded as part of the XML metadata. Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain by Ken Shirriff (2014) was not able to identify the exact format either. At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1655831533750562816 EMBII mentions that this was part of an upload test.
tx 15b11e8d4e5b9425f024b381ba0cb7a54a35e52389bb4855f505772ce685b39c (2014-06-24): starting from this transaction, the lyrics were inscribed several times via input scripts. Then again:
  • 8bb9db70e24202fdfd0e48b57a11a407e6c8c0e76d879634b801b4345b8810b2
  • b881afa519804a3c93a3c99481517ca8ae070b84c04e8e7a2bfb808e043f9771
  • 70c8405bd0ec10bea49b78a819dfbf46c1082e7e620588f9da65a90b71e52bbd
  • fc4e382793757858bec4b87527caa4bf2e6f71bb2f5a77bb41a45ddb9ed9d409
  • f011e71b711aa54a0c824244fff83fb8b1e1921804624fa0523a6e61612b7f6f
  • a8691cdbca5b82e4e48812e48b7a09e4757801fd3909a09975de957d1bfb52dc
  • d8946aa464be464674bba6d15729d75572ec75dda49fe7ff0ede1a25ca054941
  • d02864cd57c9d041dbd9d6f24327f347b92697a8bc3c86cdf8b738063c6ad002
  • 9b78962d840f1ff681e5042264e4d0359cda98ce49d97569df14ce956622b966
  • 7bdc22fb35f0a8eb6241782a306a8904fb6f793126ff106a04a96f9f223cb8e1
  • e24a4085c54a6362e615f8eab758c12d80e488b73757e6d2b8ab6bfc8be7007e
  • 4257f4980955d8376ee1c6bccb4396da726e4ae13d758e47dc4e0775019723f5
  • a09b49e9374d43386a6a986944e3dcf515c7e1c38324836df5333b8adbe57797
  • 03096688dbb874f7c571691e4241a298284bf4184be339b148f1b48f383a1d7c
  • 62f8b228b6126354736d36d9f3b91882bb81eca7702b74fba6471abc7db96a03 (2015-09-30)
They were mega obnoxious!!! Who does this kind of crap for more than one year!!!
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. . 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:
Protesters were posting large chunks of text multiple times into the blockchain as a way to protest against the controversial increase of block size.
tx 08893442680a20c4d0548dec2c8c421fa43336528b4e274dbf2652774f9c9f2d has the first copy of:
I like big blocks and I can not lie
which is the first line of a parody on:
I like big butts and I cannot lie
from the Baby Got Back hip-hop song.
tx 52159222289cd0a5afe0644150d0e23d5d272a57365627d5e869fdb458289858 has the first copy of:
Time to roll out bigger blocks
which is likely a copy of an email from the bitcoin development mailing list. This message is repeated dozens of times in other transactions.
  • bb41a757f405890fb0f5856228e23b715702d714d59bf2b1feb70d8b2b4e3e08 999,657 bytes. Joins a bunch of tiny inputs into a single output
  • 623463a2a8a949e0590ffe6b2fd3e4e1028b2b99c747e82e899da4485eb0b6be and 5143cf232576ae53e8991ca389334563f14ea7a7c507a3e081fbef2538c84f6e both have 3,075 outputs of 1 satoshi each and a single input. We were not able to identify any meaningful data in it, file just says data, and there aren't long ASCII strings. However, the outputs were unspent as of 2021, which suggests that they might actually be data.
Analysis of some of them follows.
Other Bitcon analysis:
By others:
Proof that the probability 1 is conserved by the time evolution:
It can be derived directly from the Schrödinger equation.
Bibliography:
So, by taking , we understand that two matrices being congruent means that they can both correspond to the same bilinear form in different bases.
Xerox PARC Updated 2025-07-16
What a legendary place.
Parasites tend to have smaller DNAs Updated 2025-07-16
If you live in the relatively food abundant environment of another cell, then you don't have to be able to digest every single food source in existence, of defend against a wide range of predators.
And likely you also want to be as small as possible to evade the host's immune system.
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) section "Gene loss as an evolutionary trajectory" puts it well:
One of the most extreme examples of gene loss is Rickettsia prowazekii, the cause of typhus. [...] Over evolutionary time Rickettsia has lost most of its genes, and now has a mere  protein-coding genes left. [...] Rickettsia is a tiny bacterium, almost as small as a virus, which lives as a parasite inside other cells. It is so well adapted to this lifestyle that it can no longer survive outside its host cells. [...] It was able to lose most of its genes in this way simply because they were not needed: life inside other cells, if you can survive there at all, is a spoonfed existence.
and also section "How to lose the cell wall without dying" page 184 has some related mentions:
While many types of bacteria do lose their cell wall during parts of their life cycle only two groups of prokaryotes have succeeded in losing their cell walls permanently, yet lived to tell the tale. It's interesting to consider the extenuating circumstances that permitted them to do so.
[...]
One group, the Mycoplasma, comprises mostly parasites, many of which live inside other cells. Mycoplasma cells are tiny, with very small genomes. M. genitalium, discovered in 1981, has the smallest known genome of any bacterial cell, encoding fewer than 500 genes. M. genitalium, discovered in 1981, has the smallest known genome of any bacterial cell, encoding fewer than 500 genes. [...] Like Rickettsia, Mycoplasma have lost virtually all the genes required for making nucleotides, amino acids, and so forth.
GlobalFoundries Updated 2025-07-16
AMD just gave up this risky part of the business amidst the fabless boom. Sound like a wise move. They then fell more and more away from the state of the art, and moved into more niche areas.
SMIC Updated 2025-07-16
TSMC Updated 2026-05-27
One of the companies that has fabs, which buys machines from companies such as ASML and puts them together in so called "silicon fabs" to make the chips
As the quintessential fabless fab, there is on thing TSMC can never ever do: sell their own design! It must forever remain a fab-only company, that will never compete with its customers. This is highlighted e.g. at youtu.be/TRZqE6H-dww?t=936 from Video "How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards by Asianometry (2021)".
Video 1.
How Taiwan Created TSMC by Asianometry (2020)
Source. Some points:
  • UCM failed because it focused too much on the internal market, and was shielded from external competition, so it didn't become world leading
  • one of TSMC's great advances was the fabless business model approach.
  • they managed to do large technology transfers from the West to kickstart things off
  • one of their main victories was investing early in CMOS, before it became huge, and winning that market

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