[Project] Written in Bitcoin: everything written into Bitcoin since 2009

[SpyderVepr]

Hi all,

I've been building Written in Bitcoin, an archive of everything people have written into the Bitcoin blockchain since the genesis block: writteninbitcoin.com

Bitcoin has never been just about payments. Satoshi put a newspaper headline into block 0, miners have been leaving messages in coinbase transactions ever since, and in April 2013 someone stored the whitepaper itself as a PDF inside a transaction. I wanted one place where you can actually open and read all of it, straight from the original transactions instead of screenshots.

What's in it (counted from the site's own index at block 972,307 on 20 Oct 2026):

• 15,210 miners' coinbase messages
• 3,877 hidden messages and files from the pre-Ordinals era (the whitepaper PDF, the Nelson Mandela tribute, the Len Sassaman ASCII tribute, the Eligius prayers...)
• 273,066 OP_RETURN messages
• Counterparty, Bitcoin Stamps, Atomicals and other protocols
• all 128+ million Ordinals inscriptions

What you can do there

• Explore: search by text, inscription number, date or block
  
• Chronicle: the history in chapters, from the genesis block to today
  
• Hidden messages and files: the best finds from 2011-2014, each one loaded straight from its original transaction
  
• On this day: what was written into Bitcoin on today's date in past years
  
• Puzzles: riddles announced on-chain with a BTC prize. As far as I can tell, the prize from the 2017 bitaps quest is still unclaimed.
  

Free to browse. No account, no ads.

About inscriptions
I know a lot of people here consider inscriptions spam. The archive doesn't take sides. It just records what was written and when, including the arguments about it. You can also write your own message into Bitcoin as an Ordinals inscription (paid by card or Lightning), and that's how the project pays for itself.

Feedback I'm looking for

• Factual errors. This forum is one of my sources (the 2011 Eligius prayer debate, for example), so many of you know this history better than I do.
• Missing finds: messages, files or puzzles you remember that should be in there.
• Speed and usability, especially on mobile.

[Yamane_Keto]

Does this include sending messages using "vanity addresses" which some might use as an alternative to OP_RETURN messages given that "everything written into Bitcoin" encompasses such messages.

[SpyderVepr]

Good question, and an interesting idea. Right now the answer is only half yes.

Yes for the trick where the "address" is not a real address at all, but 20 bytes of text or file data put into the pubkey hash. That is how the Len Sassaman tribute and the Nelson Mandela files were stored, and the scanner picks those up because it reads every output of every transaction and looks for readable text or known file headers in the hash fields. They are under Hidden messages and files, loaded from the original transaction.

Not yet for real vanity addresses, where the Base58 string itself spells something, like 1BitcoinEater... or the 1HKGame... addresses from the 2019 riddles (the riddles were in OP_RETURN, so those are in the archive, but the addresses next to them are just shown as addresses). The scanner looks at the bytes behind the address, not at the readable string.

Since the scanner already sees every output, adding a rule for readable address strings is doable and I plan to do it. New blocks would pick it up automatically; the history needs one more pass over the old blocks, so it will not be instant and I will not promise a date. The tricky part is the rule itself: constructed burn addresses like 1BitcoinEater... are easy to spot, but a short vanity prefix on a normal wallet address is not a message, so I would rather be strict than fill the archive with noise. If you remember transactions or addresses used this way, I would be glad to use them as test cases.