Read out of real blocks by two Bitcoin nodes, one in Canada and one in Romania. Every message below has its block number, so you can check it yourself.
Every Bitcoin transaction can carry a few bytes of text. Most people never use it. Some do, and when they do, the words stay in the ledger for as long as Bitcoin exists. There's no delete button, no moderator, no server to shut down.
Explorers show that text as hexadecimal, which is another way of saying they don't show it. My nodes decode it. What follows is what I found while reading through them: not the loudest ones, the ones worth your time.
“If you read this, I existed”
Someone wrote this into a block on 2 April 2026. That's the whole message.
“If you read this, I existed. I learned, I loved, I kept going, just like you will :)”
People carve their families into the halving blocks
Roughly every four years the reward for mining a block is cut in half. Those blocks get remembered, and it turns out people want their names inside them.
“We love your forever Mills, Emmett, Fischer, and Hannah”
block 840,000 · 20 April 2024 · eight years and one halving later, four more names
And the best part is the miner. Whoever found block 420,000 got to sign it: every block has a small field only the miner can write in. Instead of a company name, that block is signed: “Chandler Guo loves YangYang Jin.” A love note in the one spot on the whole page nobody else could touch.
Births, birthdays, promises
The ledger is full of ordinary life. These are all real, all still there.
“Welcome Neil, little cloud of joy! Proud dad, your heart overflows. Love, Fede”
Somebody put the Declaration of Independence in a block
Not a quote from it. The document, line after line, inside a single Bitcoin block: 171 messages in one go.
“IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776 · THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE THIRTEEN UNITED STATES · When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
block 956,984 · 7 July 2026, 03:04 UTC · 172 transactions, 171 messages · mined by OCEAN
Three days after the Fourth of July, in a block found by a mining pool. You can't take it down. That is presumably the point.
And then there are the ones that just hurt
Not everything in there is a celebration.
“I hit rock bottom with 0.25 BTC; I'll get back on my feet. Thanks.”
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good — Romans 12:21”
block 666,666 · 18 January 2021 · someone waited for that block number on purpose
What I'm not showing you, and why
This part matters more than the pretty ones.
I read through every message my nodes had decoded before writing this page. Most of what is written into Bitcoin is not worth reading, and some of it should not be repeated:
There is an automated campaign that fills entire blocks with dozens of near-identical rants, slurs included. There is plain obscenity. There is a message that reads like a death threat. And there are begging messages that look heartbreaking until you notice the same story appears twice in nearby blocks asking for two different amounts: it's a script, not a person.
None of that is censored. It can't be, and I wouldn't want it to be. It's in the chain, permanently, and the search tool on my globe will show it to you if you go looking for it. But there's a difference between answering someone who asked, and putting something in front of people who didn't. This page is the second kind, so it's hand-picked.
Don't take my word for it
Type any block number above into the search on the globe and read it yourself, straight off a node. Try 420000. Or 0, the very first block ever mined, and the message Satoshi left in it.