Show SN: BTC Scribe - an open source tool for storing text on Bitcoin \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Hi all!

I’d like to share a small open source project I’ve been working on: BTC Scribe (btcscribe.org) - a simple website for storing text permanently on Bitcoin.

BTC Scribe is akin to the inscription service run by Unisat, except it stores only text, has no receive address or service fee, and runs purely in the browser, using the public mempool.space API. Users simply type a message and submit payment to the generated taproot address. BTC Scribe takes care of the rest.

Under the hood, BTC Scribe generates the payment address using a dummy private key and listens for payment through the mempool.space API. Once payment is submitted, BTC Scribe submits the reveal transaction, which contains the message as a taproot inscription. Since there's no receive address, the transaction contains a single OP_RETURN output, which minimizes fees. Messages can be viewed using any inscription-aware block explorer, such as ordinals.com or mempool.space.

Here is an example message I inscribed last week: https://btcscribe.org/?msg=TABConf6

Some use cases might include:

Simple timestamping / proof of existence (akin to https://opentimestamps.org)
Storing a multisig output descriptor, encrypted using its own xpubs for safe backup
Celebrating your favorite sports team
Leaving a eulogy for a loved one
Anything else worth leaving for eternity

Source code is available on Github: https://github.com/joshdoman/btc-scribe

Thoughts, feedback, and ideas for improvement are all welcome!

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 30 Oct

Is not the same as https://opreturnbot.com/ ?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @josh OP 31 Oct

I wasn't familiar with opreturnbot.com before - thanks for sharing! Looking at it, I'd say the general idea is the same, except the message is stored in a taproot inscription rather than in a OP_RETURN output, so you're not limited to 80 characters.

Two other minor differences:

opreturnbot.com requires payment by lightning and takes temporary custody of your funds, whereas btcscribe.org is purely non-custodial
Since there's no server or lightning node to manage, btcscribe.org is probably simpler for someone to clone and run locally.

Hope this helps!