On January 3rd, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto famously included a newspaper headline in the coinbase of the Genesis Block. It read:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Because of the blockchain’s permanent and inalterable nature, this message is now preserved for eternity (
https://blockchain.info/tx/4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b?show_adv=true), and the newspaper headline that Satoshi chose to include is now quite well known among those in the bitcoin community.
This February 7th-8th, AntPool invites you to make your own mark on history by embedding a custom message inside the blockchain forever!
As we cannot predict in advance the exact number of blocks that we will mine on a given day, we will be auctioning off the coinbase slots in a dedicated auction thread beginning on February 7th at UTC 0800. The auction will be for all of the blocks mined by AntPool on February 9th. If we mine seventeen blocks on February 9th, then the seventeen highest bidders will all have their message included, in order (highest bidder = first block found).
The starting bid amount will be 1mBTC (0.001 BTC), and the minimum bid increase is also 1mBTC.
The text included in the coinbase script must not exceed 30 bytes. The coinbase script supports the alphabet, arabic numerals, and Chinese characters (UTF-8, each character is 3 bytes). You can put a URL in your text, but URLs may not contain inappropriate language, or point to anything related to gambling, illegal drugs, pornography, or obvious scams. Approval of all messages is at the sole discretion of AntPool.
Your text probably won’t become as famous as what Satoshi wrote back in ‘09, but you can still enjoy the satisfaction of having permanently made your mark on bitcoin in its infancy. That’ll be a story for the grandkids one day!
