Genesis block headline
Genesis coinbase; identified by block 0.
Blocks 0–965,470 · every artifact verified against the chain
Every Bitcoin transaction carries fields that can hold arbitrary bytes, and for as long as the chain has existed people have used them to store things meant to outlast any server: photographs, source code, love letters, protest anthems, leaked documents, prayers, insults. The ledger is replicated by every node and can never be edited, so whatever goes in stays in.
Every artifact below has been confirmed against the chain, and 164 have been rebuilt from their raw bytes so you can see the file itself rather than a description of it. Read the timeline top to bottom, browse the gallery by type or by method, or open the Archive for every readable message found in blocks 0–965,470 (September 2026).
Genesis coinbase; identified by block 0.
One of the earliest images ever put on the chain, from May 2011 — an 8,776-byte JPEG of the Bitcoin logo, split across two transactions and wrapped in yEnc, the encoding Usenet used for…
Base58Check checksum demo (user ByteCoin, 2011): two near-twin vanity addresses differing by a single character ('1kpCWN…' vs '1kpCxN…'), both valid because Base58Check recomputes the…
By Dan Kaminsky & Travis Goodspeed.
The 'prayer war' (2011-08-05 to 09-03): Luke Dashjr set the 'random' coinbase data of his Eligius pool to prayers - the Divine Praises, then the Trinitarian formula, Act of Contrition, Act…
The first merged-mining commitment on Bitcoin. Merged mining lets a miner secure a second chain with the same work, by committing that chain's block header inside the Bitcoin coinbase.…
An umbrella entry for the AuxPoW ecosystem that Namecoin's 2011 merged mining set off. First merge-mining dates: Namecoin 2011-09-19 (the first, visible on the Bitcoin side from block…
Base58 vanity-address tribute: the fake P2PKH address '1MartinHaferkorncii112o11HdkMrtttD' spells the name (read directly, not byte-decoded; the 'cii112o11HdkMrtttD' tail is padding to a…
Base58 vanity-address dedication (2011-11-24): '1EricLombrozoXXX…' (Bitcoin Core developer Eric Lombrozo) plus '1969SandraSandicXXX…' (a wedding/birth note). Read directly; the trailing X's…
Base58 vanity address by Matthew N. Wright, repeated ~12×: '1BitTaLkTVChristmasSpeciaLXXRix9Ea'. Read directly; a ~300× variant '11Bitta1ktvchristmasspecia1…' also exists on-chain.
But I don't want to go among mad people...
It is true, without error, certain and most true...
Base58 vanity-address tribute to Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler ('LeonhardEu1er' substitutes '1' for 'l'). Read directly, not byte-decoded; the leading 1's and trailing chars are…
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
RULE 1 We are to admit no more causes of natural things...
When in the Course of human events...
Archimedes was a native of Syracuse, Sicily...
etchablock.com gives you blockchain immortality. Visit etchablock.com now.
txid placeholder; coinbase artifact identified by block height.
A leaked private signing key for American Megatrends firmware, published to the chain where it cannot be recalled. It is the clearest demonstration of what permanence means when the content…
link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime + the prime 4856507896...
Bitcoin's founding document, stored inside Bitcoin itself. The 184,292-byte PDF was split across the fake public-key fields of a bare-multisig transaction in 2013 — a technique that burns…
Chunk txids beyond the first not yet enumerated (phase 2).
A transaction with 3,075 outputs, 3,073 of them holding a single satoshi — a shape that costs far more in fees than the value it moves, so it was built to carry something. The payload is in…
Files encrypted with GPG's CAST5 cipher, still unread. The ciphertext is public and permanent, and will stay that way unless someone produces the passphrase — a reminder that putting…
Index pages from the Hidden Wiki — a directory of Tor onion services — written into the chain in 2013 across two transactions. Placing a link directory somewhere no authority can delete it…
The original Proof of Existence encoding (Araoz & Ordano, 2013), predating the DOCPROOF OP_RETURN method. 115 transactions share this exact signature (2 one-satoshi P2PKH outputs = 32-byte…
The protocol genesis is the Exodus fundraiser (block 249498, 2013-07-31) — the first metaprotocol on Bitcoin — which long precedes the first text-detectable OP_RETURN marker (block 292316,…
A git diff distributed as an on-chain message rather than a mailing-list post. Early Bitcoin development happened over email, and this preserves a patch in the one place no list archive can…
<script>window.alert("If this were an actual exploit...")</script>
EMBII upload-test format: a <CG SZ="1156"> container wrapping base64-encoded <MG> metadata and a <FL NM="NGGUP.txt"> lyrics file (Never Gonna Give You Up). Complete in one AtomSea P2FKH tx…
Never Gonna Give You Up lyrics
Skynet went online on August 4th 1997... (output); washing machine note (input)
The first upload made with AtomSea & EMBII, the publishing system that carried much of the chain's early art. It is broken — the software had bugs on its first outing — and the operators…
I WONDER WHAT HISTORY WILL THINK ABOUT THESE FIRST FEW BUGS...HA HA HA. NOBODY IS PERFECT.
HugPuddle Testing Apertus Disk Drive
My Dearest Chiharu....I Love you more. <3 Eric
Two-level AtomSea text object framed '?758"...': the continuation index spans txs 78f31f03+29f30b99 with a leaf txid (cae03a10) straddling the boundary, so per-tx walks drop a stanza;…
Two-level AtomSea object: toplevel 70fd2899 -> a 2-tx index (4c8cf0e6, fc0bb7ed) -> 5 data txs holding 1000+ pi digits framed as |1002*3.14159...
"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." - Nelson Mandela
Single-tx AtomSea text; the message really is this short (51 bytes).
The full 773-byte poem (attributed to Rumi) is spread across a chain of three 240-byte P2FKH chunks, each spending the previous one — so the poem is read by following the spends rather than…
The Python source of the tool that put many of the earliest artifacts on the chain, stored using the very technique it implements. It is a self-hosting act: the instructions for embedding…
The companion to the uploader — the Python source that reads the data back out. Together the pair make the archive self-describing: anyone with a copy of the chain has both the files and…
Non-functional/buggy BASIC.
A test upload made while multi-file support was being added to the publishing software. Its content is the message 'MULTIFILE SUPPORT TEST' — the engineering equivalent of tapping a…
bitfossil root id used as txid here is a related root, not the original logo tx; verify.
The protocol's first on-chain footprint is this proof-of-burn (block 278319, 2014-01-02). The first decodable CNTRPRTY-marked protocol message followed ten days later — see…
Ten days after the proof-of-burn genesis (block 278319, 2014-01-02), this is the first transaction carrying a decoded Counterparty protocol message. Not yet chain-verified against the…
2014-02-25: The day Mt.Gox shut down. Farewell, may even you rest in peace!
Base58 vanity *burn* address '1FuckMtGoxFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUQXW5ikw' (the 'FFFUUU' is the rage-face meme) reacting to the Mt. Gox collapse. Unspendable; as of 2025 it still holds ~0.0145 BTC…
ASCII art of a nude seated female figure, via cryptograffiti.info (P2FKH). Among the earliest ASCII art on the blockchain; also reproduced off-chain at asciiart.eu.
First DOCPROOF-prefixed OP_RETURN timestamp in the scan. NOT the first Proof of Existence proof — the service began in 2013 with an address-encoded method [[proof-of-existence-genesis]] and…
The complete drawing is the largest pushed field in a custom output script.
<script ...>document.write(... trollbot.org/xss-blockchain-detector.php ...)</script>
FoldingCoin (FLDC) rewards contributors to the Folding@home distributed-computing project with a Counterparty token, created by Robert Ross. This bare-multisig Counterparty issuance at…
My Dearest Chiharu, I will love you forever. Taken Aug 6th 2014 in Ipswich, SD.
An audio file stored on the chain in 2014, split across many transactions and indexed by a root transaction that records the order of the pieces. Sound was an unusual choice: audio is…
"Even if we tried to do it on purpose, never would have we succeeded." My beloved Vincent.
Chain says block 319450 (~2014-09); catalog's 450516/2017-01-29 was a different (SatoFamily) block. Date pending.
EMBII's earliest audio-upload attempt (Sep 2014, before Spock). The bio/profile wrapper and 48-chunk index are on Bitcoin; one audio chunk (index #62) is off-Bitcoin, so the mp3 has a…
Allen Lee Vandever artwork. The AtomSea object packs an 'ALLEN LEE VANDEVER' artist statement, a 180x180 avatar (a meditating figure in a snake-circle), then the 593x768 Bike Lady piece. A…
The artist's 180x180 avatar/logo (a meditating figure inside a snake-circle), bundled in the same tx as BikeLady.jpg (after the 'ALLEN LEE VANDEVER' artist statement). Shares txid 2c4b9497…
University of Nicosia (Cyprus) — the first university to anchor academic certificates on Bitcoin, for its DFIN-511 'Introduction to Digital Currencies' MOOC. Beyond timestamping, UNicDC is…
#!/usr/bin/env python3 ... CryptoGraffiti tool
hello, it's the Internet
ASCII art of a nude reclining female figure, via cryptograffiti.info (P2FKH), signed 'fsc' (credited to artist Marcin Glinski). Reproduced off-chain at asciiart.eu.
A spoofed Western Union image, gzip-compressed before upload — compression being the standard way to make a picture fit a medium that charges by the byte.
A word set in a box of ASCII characters — brief, rude, and permanent.
1. Do not give opinions or advice unless you are asked.
The cluster's payloads are OpenSSL symmetric encryptions: base64 blobs starting 'U2FsdGVkX1' (the base64 of 'Salted__', OpenSSL's salted-encryption header). Without the passphrase the…
if you like it, leave a tip: 1MDBHLGV7WX9viRG9X4LfDQfCX8oZ9wTO
A marijuana plant drawn in ASCII, spread across several transactions.
The Hashling @BraveTheWorld @petertoddbtc
Possibly original; likely by cryptograffiti.info creator.
MERRY CHRISTMAS! & HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
EW Hitler did nothing wrong. / 1HitLerDidNothingWronggggggh...
The Arecibo message — the 1974 radio transmission beamed at globular cluster M13, describing human DNA, our solar system and the telescope that sent it — re-transmitted into Bitcoin in…
Two-level AtomSea object: toplevel 1bc87dbf -> a 2-tx index (>-delimited) -> 17 data txs holding an author/SIG/translations wrapper then 'Spock_Live_Long_And_Prosper.mp3?27193|' + the…
FDCARD is the first Spells of Genesis card and the first blockchain-based trading card in a video game, issued by EverdreamSoft with FoldingCoin. On-chain Counterparty asset genesis at…
A small JPEG uploaded as a size test, from the period when the practical limits of on-chain storage were still being worked out.
Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks
Time to roll out bigger blocks
I like big blocks and I can not lie
The Economist's logo, stored on the chain.
The crest of the City of London School.
A photograph of Bitcoin researchers and developers at dinner with Nick Szabo, each face tagged with a Twitter handle, stored as base64 inside an input script in 2015. It circulated as…
Bitcoin-dev IRC log dump (SHA-3/Keccak, block-size, etc. discussion)
A photograph taken in Auckland, New Zealand, uploaded in 2015 through the AtomSea & EMBII system. One of the many ordinary images that make up most of the chain's art: not a statement, just…
How to Play Chinese Hats - A Short Story - 2015
if you like it, leave a tip: 1P675gRxNwhFXgfuDu5yXwGDgwLDbXNJqz
Paved With God And Some Teension
The message continues in b33812c4…, followed by two P2PKH spend chains. Face 1 runs from 1890addb… to f06ae6f4…; face 2 runs from cacf8b73… to ad5e4afd…. Each visual row is split across…
A 69-transaction P2PKH spend chain across blocks 378735 and 378736; payloads concatenate in spend order.
Crude one-line ASCII (penis + breasts) embedded via OP_RETURN. On-chain payload is 'EW B====D ( . Y . )'.
The Super Mario coin sprite — a few dozen pixels of one of the most recognisable images in video games, made permanent by someone who thought it belonged there.
Other OP_RETURN protocols (Counterparty, Omni, Open Assets, Factom, ...) are documented in catalog/08 by prefix but lack single representative txids here.
Mr. Spock rendered in ASCII characters.
Crude one-line ASCII (breasts) embedded via OP_RETURN. On-chain payload is 'EW ( . Y . )TIDDIES( . Y . )'.
Hello world! Return blob protocol v1: MAGIC = 0x62, PACKAGE = uint16, SEQUENCE = uint16, PAYLOAD = up to 35 bytes
503: Bitcoin over capacity!
#Chiharu #embii & the #AtomSea #Fargo #ND
mini camera test #Wilson #Chiharu #embii #Broadway #Fargo #ND
EMBII's largest known inscription (his own claim, twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1655969645927563266). The '4 MB' is from EMBII's inscription label, not measured on Bitcoin: the index is on…
A 2016-2020 series of read-directly Base58 vanity/burn addresses about Craig Steven Wright (who claimed to be Satoshi). 1NakamotoSatoshiCraigWright on 2 txs (blocks 416073, 416703); then…
Hyena was here on the 16th of June 2016. Hi mom! I love you.
Cryptograffiti.info now allows you to attach JPEG images to your messages.
Smart Heating, Bitcoin Mining For You - en.hotmine.io
I have come here to chew bubble gum and dance on Ethereum's grave. And I'm all out of bubble gum.
Subscribe, I will be glad to see you! www.youtube.com/c/dobcryptocurrency
A scarlet gemstone hides quietly in the midst of the mountains...
You will be here forever
Superbuffo the first comedian on the blockchain
No alcohol and smoking since 07.07.2016. Love girls!
txid placeholder; coinbase by block.
cryptograffiti.info inscription: a small (45x128) animated GIF of a clothed woman pole-dancing (blue leotard, seen from behind) - revealing/suggestive but not explicit. Embeds 'GIF…
Explicit JPEG image (NOT ASCII art) of a sexual sculpture (a snake/vagina motif), via cryptograffiti.info (P2FKH carrying a JFIF JPEG). Withheld: the data is on-chain and reconstructable,…
A wedding invitation in Cyrillic. The chain is used here as a registry office of last resort — the invitation will exist long after the venue, the guest list and the paper copies are gone.
Wedding Wallled 15Nz214yv76BmkKLCi8kAVssa5C7nQHLjx
Wedding date: Jul 17, 2016 proof link goo.gl/photos/2GToBx1WqRyiQtxQ6
2016, painting, 135.7 x 130.7 cm (18 DPI)
A hand-written wedding contract in Czech, photographed and uploaded. A private agreement given the most public and least revocable form of witness available.
Danila a Pavel se prave vzali!
@Onshape - The Future of Professional CAD
The first Rare Pepe card ('RAREPEPE', the Nakamoto card, Series 1 Card 1), created by an anonymous user known as 'Mike'. On-chain Counterparty asset genesis at block 428919 (2016-09-09), an…
GUARDIANCARD ('Woodcoin's Guardian') is the first Age of Chains trading card, among the earliest Bitcoin NFT game cards; 777 copies. On-chain Counterparty asset genesis at block 436596…
This transaction contains the five-line apple and “APPLE BAKE '16”. The separate large letter-A inscription is catalogued as “Augie A”.
The 'Hello. Yes, this is dog.' meme, preserved on the Bitcoin blockchain.
!Study Math and Computer Science at Augustana College!
Silk Road saved lives that would have otherwise been lost on the streets. freeross.org/
A #father could not ask for more perfect daughters.
NASA: A purple nebula, in honor of #Prince, who passed away today.
Is #Satoshi #Nakamoto #CraigWright?
Dr. Bill Maurer / Economic anthropologist
In Pepe We Trust #BITCOINPEPE
EMBII's mother. The assembly lost ~40 bytes of the optional ICC color profile, so the APP2 segment's declared length (540) overran the next marker and hid the luminance DQT (component 1…
The Sato Family Arrives from Japan! Taken Aug 2. 2014 in Minneapolis MN. (Keiko, Chiharu, Hideaki, Katsuhiko)
A photograph of a couple, one in a tuxedo with a rose.
Entre tus brazos y los mios no hay espacio...
The photograph of the unidentified man standing before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in June 1989 — an image censored in the country where it was taken. Storing it on the chain…
Don't forget, you're here forever
Augustana College Old-Main.jpg Reconstruct with data preceding redeemscripts
Adobe Acrobat PDF Files ...
Unicode test: Ae Oe Oe Ue ... Uploaded from http://cryptograffiti.info to demonstrate Markdown rendering.
Disincentivizing Double-Spending by Making it Unprofitable (Erich Ertsu, 2017)
RSK (Rootstock) is a Bitcoin sidechain secured by merged mining. Its mainnet launched 2018-01-02, and this coinbase at block 506,612 — about four weeks later, when the first pool began…
A JPEG stored inside a single input-script constant, damaged in the process. The header identifies it as an image but the data does not decode — a failed upload, preserved with the same…
See the full picture at TDAmeritrade.com/Blockchain
An advertisement entered for the Cannes Lions TITANIUM award, placed on the chain as part of the campaign itself — a rare case of on-chain data made for a commercial jury.
Your free GrrCon ticket; code OPRETURNISMYFRIEND
The transactions form a spend chain. One on-chain line omitted by the cited source reads “That show: We are together” with control bytes around the quoted phrase.
A photograph of a woman with her arms crossed.
txid placeholder; coinbase by block.
Yang, Yiping ... Wir vermissen dich!
Nested AtomSea object (#Seikilos #epitaph). The 8 data chunks are indexed on Bitcoin; the MIDI (format 1, 2 tracks) is complete in the first 5 on-chain chunks. Chunks 6-7 are off-Bitcoin…
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good - Romans 12:21
Van Gogh's The Starry Night, uploaded to the chain. The painting has been public domain for decades; this copy is simply the one that cannot be taken down.
A mirror selfie taken in a kitchen, the subject wearing swimming goggles. Among the most ordinary things anyone has made permanent.
The logo of Gulagu.net, the Russian anti-torture organisation founded by Vladimir Osechkin, stored in 2021. The group publishes evidence of abuse in Russian prisons, and its material is…
A photograph associated with Gulagu.net and Vladimir Osechkin, uploaded alongside the organisation's logo in 2021. Both were stored using P2SH outputs, a technique that hides data in what…
Forty-three lines of ASCII art whose subject has not been identified.
BTGC:satoshi.gif
Inscription #0 in ord's sequential numbering: the first satoshi ever inscribed, made about five weeks before the Ordinals launch by its creator Casey Rodarmor as a test. It marks where one…
data:image/jpeg;base64,...
Inscription #652 by ord's global numbering, but Taproot Wizards' own first on-chain artifact (confirmed via the project's official account, which stated inscription #652 was "the first…
repeated " and 3 with sparse other chars
About nine megabytes of data whose contents cannot be identified. Its size makes it one of the largest single payloads on the chain, and its encryption makes it one of the least understood.
A photograph by Sahil Chaturvedi of a man and his cactus.
A first-anniversary letter, written to be permanent: 'Diese Nachricht lebt nun ewig' — this message now lives forever. The author chose the chain for exactly the property that makes…
The 2019 protest anthem, placed somewhere it cannot be taken down. A Hong Kong court granted an injunction banning its distribution in 2024, which makes the choice of medium the point…
AI-generated (deepfake) MP4 impersonating Bitcoin Core developer Gloria Zhao to criticize OP_RETURN relay policy; inscribed via OP_RETURN (Oct 2025, taking up most of the block).…
A protocol proposal published entirely on-chain rather than linked from it: perpetual creator royalties framed through the Chinese tradition of the 傳家寶 (heirloom passed down a family).…
A working correspondence protocol, written directly into OP_RETURN outputs across three months of 2026. It tracks no ledger and issues no tokens — it uses the chain the way a mail server…
Mined 2026-07-04 — the 250th anniversary of the document, to the day. The whole text fits in one OP_RETURN output because Bitcoin Core v30 removed the 80-byte data-carrier limit; at 9,285…