[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.

[joniboini]

Is there a way to filter messages that looks meaningless for human reader? For example, I don't think I'll find message like "ir ndasbxh oadisuhnajd saadeggrr" interesting, even though it might contains encryption and whatnot.

I also noticed that the web always load the next pages automatically, so if it has a lot of contents it might take a while to load fully. Maybe this can be changed so users don't have to load the whole 30 pages of random texts or images just because they wanted to pick other categories.

[SpyderVepr]

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.

Thanks, both points were fair and both are fixed now. The random-letter texts were OP_RETURN spam from the last few weeks. The site now checks whether the letter combinations occur in real languages; texts that fail are hidden like mass copies, still in the archive and visible with "Show spam". Your example is hidden too. The gallery now loads five pages and then waits for a "Load more" button.

[SpyderVepr]

Is there a way to filter messages that looks meaningless for human reader? For example, I don't think I'll find message like "ir ndasbxh oadisuhnajd saadeggrr" interesting, even though it might contains encryption and whatnot.

I also noticed that the web always load the next pages automatically, so if it has a lot of contents it might take a while to load fully. Maybe this can be changed so users don't have to load the whole 30 pages of random texts or images just because they wanted to pick other categories.

An update on your question: readable addresses are in the archive now, 3,152 of them, burn addresses like 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend… and vanity addresses with a word in them: https://writteninbitcoin.com/en/explore?src=addresses. New blocks are checked automatically. If you know one that is missing, let me know.

[SpyderVepr]

A short update after a week. Some of this came out of this thread, some I did on my own.

Our own node for Ordinals
Until last week we read new inscriptions through ordinals.com's public API. On 22 Oct it started refusing our automated requests, so I set up our own server with Bitcoin Core (txindex) and ord. Since 25 Oct every inscription is read from our own node, and since this morning the rest of the chain data for new blocks (coinbase messages, OP_RETURN and the older formats) comes from our own Bitcoin Core too, with a public block API only as a fallback. Document previews and the 18+ content check are made on our own servers too.

Mass mints no longer flood Explore
Explore used to show hundreds of near-identical images from a single mint in a row. Now the default view shows one item per collection, and the rest is one click away. Together with the random-letter filter from joniboini's feedback, browsing is much less spammy.

Playground
A page just for interactive HTML inscriptions: games, 3D scenes, sound toys and small tools, filterable by library (three.js, p5.js, Tone.js...). Each one runs sandboxed on a separate domain, with no access to a wallet or the wider web, and anything that asks for a wallet or a seed phrase is left out. So you can click around safely: Playground

Faster homepage
On phones and computers without a graphics card, the 3D book is now drawn flat, so the page loads much faster.

Current numbers (block 973,207, 26 Oct 2026): 15,212 coinbase messages, 463,884 OP_RETURN messages, 5,188 hidden messages and files from before Ordinals, 128,232,926 inscriptions.

Feedback is welcome as before, especially on anything that still feels like noise when you browse.

[joniboini]

I'm still not sure if some of the visible texts are intended (your algorithm decide it has readable meaning) or another noise. For example, stuff like this one[1]. Another thing I noticed is that some image link aren't rendered so the text shows its url address for example. Not sure if that happens because it takes some time to load or not. Btw, I think you can simplify the home page too. I feel like having too many graphs or info in one page makes it a bit crowded, not sure how many people will like it. Just my 2 cents.

[1] https://writteninbitcoin.com/en/block/973244

[SpyderVepr]

I went through block 973,244. The link from the block page opens the explorer with everything in that block, protocol data included, and this block is almost all BRC-20: token transfers, JSON “circuits” and one brc20-prog blob that is also wrongly shown as text. The only readable thing in it is one OP_RETURN slogan. So it’s not the random-letter noise from before, it’s token data, and I agree it shouldn’t be the first thing you see when you open a block. I noted two things: treat that kind of JSON as data rather than text, and open a block with the data hidden behind a switch. No date yet.

About the images: in this block all three OP_RETURN images show up for me. Previews are made after a record is written, so a fresh one can be without a preview for a while, but I couldn’t find a bare URL instead of a picture. If you run into a specific record, please send me the link and I’ll look at it.

The home page: I reworked the lower part just yesterday, but I take the point that there is still a lot on it. I’ll try to make it simpler.

Thanks for your feedback.