A tweet is free, which is why posting one proves nothing. Every message in this archive cost its author real money — a miner fee, paid in advance, non-refundable, at whatever the network happened to be charging that day. That price is the best evidence of sincerity in the whole dataset. Nobody spends real money on a throwaway remark by accident.

The price has moved enormously. On 22 December 2017, at the peak of the fee crisis, the median OP_RETURN transaction paid 280,235 satoshis — around $39 at the time. In July 2026 the median was 49 satoshis, a fraction of a cent. Writing one sentence into Bitcoin was roughly 5,700 times more expensive in 2017 than it is now.

Who kept paying. To find out what survives a price shock, we scanned every OP_RETURN transaction paying more than 200,000 satoshis across Bitcoin's five most expensive months — 90,409 transactions in all. The result is lopsided beyond anything we expected:

88.7% were Omni — that is Tether, moving USDT. A further 8.6% were unreadable binary, 1.3% Open Assets, 0.9% cross-chain swap memos. Messages written by a person for other people: 29 transactions. 0.03%.

So the 2017 fee crisis was not a period when personal messages got pricier. It was a period when they very nearly stopped, while a stablecoin issuer with a commercial reason to pay carried on regardless. High fees do not slow down business. They silence individuals — which is worth remembering whenever block space is discussed as a purely technical matter.

The most expensive message ever written into Bitcoin. We have since priced 502,690 messages — 96.7% of every human message in the archive, across all of history — and the record is not close. On 22 May 2025, in block 897,818, a single transaction paid 108,467,972 satoshis: 1.08 BTC, about $103,000. It carries two messages. One reads Payment got Gemini Pizza Block to MARA. The other reads Gemini is awesome :D, repeated until the space ran out.

That is an exchange paying a mining company six figures to own a block on Bitcoin Pizza Day. The second-place message cost 8 million satoshis — less than a thirteenth as much. The most expensive thing ever said on Bitcoin is an advertisement.

What people paid. Strip out the corporate stunts, the test transactions and the automated payouts, and the most expensive thing an individual has written cost 3,682,719 satoshis — roughly $921 in 2022. It reads: you'll run cln. and you'll be happy. — a jab in the argument over competing Lightning implementations, borrowing the phrasing of a Davos slogan. Nearly a thousand dollars, for a joke aimed at a few hundred people who would get it.

Behind it: New Century - Money can buy happiness, about $624 in December 2023 — a claim that cost six hundred dollars to make and disproves itself in the making.

Others are cheaper and better. On 21 December 2017, with fees at their worst in history, somebody paid roughly $150 to write This is gentlemen. — a garbled fragment of the Zero Wing meme. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, someone spent about $39 on Raccoon ama Leoncina :) - Natale 2017: Raccoon loves Leoncina. In the most expensive week Bitcoin has ever had, that is what the block space went to.

In April 2024 two of the priciest messages came within a block of each other. One paid ~$256 to say HAPPY HALVING DAY inside block 840,000 itself — the byte equivalent of a front-row seat. The other, mined nine days later, paid 377,777 satoshis (the sevens are not an accident) for DOJ Shall Goeth And Fucketh Thyself, written days after the US Department of Justice indicted the developers of Samourai Wallet. It is a protest placed somewhere no prosecutor can take it down.

And above even that, something that says nothing. The most expensive OP_RETURN transaction in the high-fee months we scanned paid 799,987,800 satoshis — almost 8 BTC, around half a million dollars — for 27 bytes in block 840,000. It says nothing. It is a Runes etching, a claim on a short token name in the first block where the protocol existed. Eleven of the next twelve most expensive are the same thing.

That is the shape of the whole archive in miniature. The largest sums are speculation. The messages worth reading were written by people paying, in the worst possible week, to say that they loved someone.