Since the genesis block — whose coinbase carries Satoshi's “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” — people have written into Bitcoin's ledger: memorials for the dead, wedding proposals, prayers, protests, jokes, and graffiti. Whatever gets into a block is copied to tens of thousands of machines and cannot be edited or deleted afterwards. Bitcoin Remembers collects those messages and makes them readable and searchable, from 2009 to the block mined a few minutes ago.

Where the words live

OP_RETURN outputs — the designated place for arbitrary data (80 bytes was standard until Bitcoin Core 30 lifted the cap in Oct 2025), and coinbase scriptSigs — the free-form field in the transaction that pays the miner, where pools leave their tags and the occasional headline.

Sorting people from machines

Most of what goes into OP_RETURN is not people talking. In recent years the overwhelming majority is Runes protocol data — on some days 99% of every OP_RETURN output. So each payload is classified, and nothing is ever deleted; the tabs simply show different slices:

• Messages — what people wrote. The default view.
• Coinbase — miner and pool messages, one per block.
• Bulk/Spam — text posted mechanically thousands of times: slogan campaigns, promo drops, scam notices.
• Machine — recognised protocol traffic: Runes, Omni, Counterparty, THORChain and cross-chain swap memos, bridge anchors, Bitcoin Stamps, embedded files, JSON, bare addresses and binary.

Identical messages collapse into a single entry with a ×N badge, so a note posted ten thousand times takes one line instead of ten thousand. The filter errs toward showing too much rather than too little — when in doubt, a payload stays in Messages.

How it is built

The full history came from the Bitcoin dataset published through the AWS Open Data programme: every block since 2009, read and classified locally. From the chain tip onward the archive keeps itself current, polling public Esplora APIs and ingesting each new block within a couple of minutes of it confirming.

Only confirmed blocks are archived. Transactions still sitting in the mempool can be replaced or dropped and may never make it onto the chain — and this is a record of what actually happened.

A caveat about what you will find

These messages were written by strangers to a public ledger over sixteen years, with no moderation of any kind. Alongside the memorials and the wedding proposals there is spam, hostility, and worse. Nothing here is endorsed — it is shown because it is part of the record.

Some messages contain what look like personal details — email addresses, phone numbers — written into the chain by people who may not have understood that it was forever. Those are kept out of the shuffle button and are never rendered into share images, though they remain in the archive.

Contact & feedback

Found a bug, a mistranslation, a message that deserves a story, or a machine pattern the classifier misses? Write to mostquanted@proton.me — corrections and story tips are especially welcome. Press and research enquiries go to the same address.

Supporting this archive

Bitcoin Remembers is free, has no ads, and never will have a paywall on the archive. It runs on one server and a lot of curiosity. If it gave you something, you can give a little back:

Asking for something to be removed

First, the part that matters most: nothing can be removed from the Bitcoin blockchain. Not by you, not by us, not by anyone — that is the entire point of the design. Every message on this site exists on tens of thousands of computers worldwide and will keep existing there regardless of what this site does. Anyone claiming they can delete it from the chain is mistaken or lying.

What can change is this site. If a message concerns you, it can be removed from the archive here — from browsing, from search, from the shuffle button, and from share images — so that it is no longer indexed and surfaced by us. The words stay on Bitcoin; they stop being convenient to find through this particular door.

Write to the same address — mostquanted@proton.me — and include:

• the link to the message (or the text, or its block height), and
• briefly, why — for example that it contains your contact details or personal information.

Requests concerning personal data, doxxing, or illegal content are acted on; you do not need to prove ownership of an email address or phone number to have it taken out of the index. Requests to remove someone's inconvenient but lawful words are weighed more carefully — this is an archive, and quietly editing the historical record is its own kind of harm.

If you are in the EU or UK and are exercising a data-protection right, say so and it will be handled on that footing.