Text on chain \ stacker news ~bitcoin

How about a little bitcoin look back? A look at where we've come from and things now.

Then...

Do y'all remember from 2014-15ish the web-based tools where you could pay sats to inscribe text onto the bitcoin blockchain?

There were a two tools that I knew of:

https://cryptograffiti.info - to write text to the chain
https://bitcoinstrings.com - to read text from the chain

cryptograffiti.info started in 2014. (Note: I believe the .info site was run by "Hyena", see GitHub repo, and is not connected with the current artist known as "CryptoGraffiti" with a cryptograffiti.com URL.) The .info website has since gone kaput, and, unfortunately, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine won't load the early years for me (2014 and 15).

A semi-working version is captured in the Archive from 2016 at https://web.archive.org/web/20160701022828/http://cryptograffiti.info/ and looks like this:

You entered your text, paid the fee (I forget how much, but searching suggests the cost was about 0.001 BTC), submitted it, and it was inscribed onto the blockchain forever.

Below is a screenshot from 2015 in the "Read" view:

Of course, people being people, this tool was used for everything and anything: fooling around, advertising, chronicling something in perpetuity, general stupidity, and blockchain spam!!!!

The second tool listed above was https://bitcoinstrings.com which is still around. I give the owner of that site credit for keeping it running for so long. Basically, it's a bitcoin blockchain explorer for text. You likely are familiar with Satoshi's text inscription from the Genesis Block about the "Chancellor on brink..." It's listed in https://bitcoinstrings.com/blk00000.txt (Note that the block numbers on bitcoinstrings are not the same as bitcoin blockchain block numbers. Block 0 is the same for both because that's the start. But after that, they begin to differ.)

I still find it kind of interesting to look back at some of the earlier text that was inscribed on the chain. It's rather varied and random stuff.

Now...

There are apparently ways to use the OP_RETURN method to get a message on chain nowadays. However, they seem much trickier than the old cryptograffiti.info was. Getting a message on chain now, at least without mining the block yourself, is now likely done through Ordinal inscriptions or Runes through something like https://unisat.io.

It's a bit hard (at least for me) to determine dates from the bitcoinstrings.com txt files, but looking at https://bitcoinstrings.com/blk03560.txt as an example, we start to see lots of brc-20 (Ordinals) info.

The personal messages are now few and far between. Look at the most recent bitcoinstrings.com block and you'll almost assuredly see nothing but metadata. Of course, most recently, there was this:

https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000010c05038d08c742d28a7a248e9d0f94ebe5102f366c8e?audit=false&showDetails=false&view=actual#overview Article: https://cointelegraph.com/news/mara-trump-47-block-anticipation-pro-bitcoin

The point

I realize many are very much against blockchain bloat. So, what's the point? I don't know. But, I guess the point here is to reminisce a bit, to see how far we've come and how things have changed, and to ponder where we might go next.

31 sats \ 2 replies \ @nym 18 Jan

I can't find any good websites that are like an OP_RETURN search engine anymore. Do you have any recommendations?

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @crrdlx OP 18 Jan

Unfortunately, I do not. Writing this, I looked around for such a thing, though only with a half effort. Maybe another stacker has some insight here.

16 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 18 Jan

Public Indexing of spam only encourages it.

Set up your own block explorer and extract the strings. It’s boring tho, like reading grafiti in a bathroom.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @OriginalSize 19h

Nice post. The point for me is that the Bitcoin blockchain is valuable to the extent that people want to read what's on it, whether that's if they received money or an asset, or if someone writes a no holds barred scandalous blog to it. The fee market provides objective if imperfect spam protection. The worsts thing that could happen would be disinterest. Your post helps and for that you have my sats.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 18 Jan

The point is that folks will always abuse the commons, given the opportunity.

This is an intractable technical problem, as we cannot have both indistinguishability and distinguishability simultaneously. Any attempt to enforce behavior leads to indignation and further abuse.

People will always spam the Bitcoin Blockchain. It is very important that the lessons of the past be known to those who are newly discovering it. They will lose money.

Abuse of the commons is a people problem, not a digital one.