Monero Sign up or log in to customize your list._ Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top up vote 7 down vote favorite As the title says, what data was used to seed Monero's genesis block?blockchain genesisblock up vote 7 down vote None afaik, Monero (then Bitmonero) was launched as a fork of Bytecoin.Not thats impossible as the Bytecoin blockchain is full of messages and cryptic data: /bytecoin-early-adopters-and-secret-messages /index.php?topic=512747.msg7126913#msg7126913 /index.php?topic=740112.0 Your Answer Sign up or log in Sign up using Google Sign up using Email and Password Post as a guest Name Email discard By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.Browse other questions tagged blockchain genesisblock or ask your own question.Every Bitcoin transaction is stored in the distributed database known as the Bitcoin blockchain.

However, people have found ways to hack the Bitcoin protocol to store more than just transactions.I've searched through the blockchain and found many strange and interesting things - from images to source code in JavaScript, Python, and Basic.If you're running a Bitcoin client, you probably have all this data stored on your system.The Bitcoin blockchain contains this image of Nelson Mandela and the tribute text.Someone encoded this data into fake addresses in Bitcoin transactions, causing it to be stored in the Bitcoin system.The data is stored in the blockchain by encoding hex values into the addresses.Below is an excerpt of one of the transactions storing the Mandela information.In this transaction, tiny amounts of bitcoins are being sent to fake addresses such as 15gHNr4TCKmhHDEG31L2XFNvpnEcnPSQvd.This address is stored in the blockchain as hex 334E656C736F6E2D4D616E64656C612E6A70673F.If you convert those hex bytes to Unicode, you get the string 3Nelson-Mandela.jpg?, representing the image filename.

Similarly, the following addresses encode the data for the image.Thus, text, images, and other content can be stored in Bitcoin by using the right fake addresses.bitcoin nvidia titanIt is well known that the , the very first block of data in Bitcoin contained a "secret" message.bitcoin investigation cnbcThis message was stored in the , a part of a Bitcoin block that is filled in by the miner who mines a Bitcoin block.ethereum new zealandAlong with the standard data, the original transaction also contains the message: 'The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'.cnn money bitcoin exchangePresumably this is a political commentary on Bitcoin compared to the insolvency of "real" banks.litecoin facts

People rapidly figured out how to encode arbitrary content into the Bitcoin blockchain by using hex data in place of Bitcoin addresses.One of the first uses of this technique was to store the Bitcoin logo in the blockchain.litecoin 101I extracted the following image from the blockchain, where it was hidden among normal transactions.Early on, the miner started putting Catholic prayers in English and Latin in the coinbase field of blocks they mined.Here are some samples: These prayers turned out to be surprisingly , leading to insults being exchanged through the blockchain: "", "", and a in response: "".The codebase technique has since been used by many other miners as advertising.Typical messages are: , For Pierce and Paul, , EclipseMC: Aluminum Falcon?, Happy NY!Yours GHash.IO, Mined By ASICMiner, BTC Guild, Made in China, BitMinter, /bitparking, hi from poolserverj, /ozcoin/stratum/, /slush/.[7]

I've found JavaScript code in the blockchain that demonstrates a potential XSS attack.A common security hole on websites is cross-site scripting (XSS), where an attacker can inject hostile JavaScript into a web page viewed by the victim.Surprisingly, such an attack was possible with Bitcoin.The transaction's output script was set to the hex corresponding to: Apparently some Bitcoin websites would fail to escape the tags, causing the script to run if you viewed the page.The above script just created a harmless dialog box, but a more malicious transaction could potentially steal the user's bitcoins stored on the website.A tribute to cryptographer was put in the Bitcoin blockchain a couple weeks after his death by Dan Kaminsky.I found a simple character-based simulator in Basic.The idea is 5 creatures wander around the screen eating food blocks and breeding or dying.Unfortunately the code has a bunch of bugs and doesn't work.In this transaction the Bitcoin blockchain contains the PDF for the original Bitcoin paper.

is a popular internet prank, and Bitcoin is not immune.One rickroll was described above as part of the prayer dispute.The lyrics to are found in a second rickroll.A third rickroll has the song metadata and lyrics encoded in Base-64.[12]Recently someone has built a message/storage system on top of Bitcoin that allows a growing sequence of messages, text, and images to be stored in the blockchain.Among other things, this system contains text from the Bhagavad Gita, 1000 digits of pi, multiple JPG and PNG images, a Shel Silverstein poem, a Rumi poem, and quotes from a random party.Here are some of the images stored in the blockchain using this system: A 2.5 megabyte Wikileak files ('cablegate-201012041811.7z') was embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain.The data is followed by a message explaining how to access it.Downloading the data from the blockchain is inconvenient since the download tool needs to be used on the 130 chunks of 20 KB separately.(It's much easier to download the file from the internet.)

The blockchain contains the source code for Python tools to insert data into the blockchain and to download it.[16]In a weird self-referential twist, the downloader can be used to download itself.The uploader/downloader puts data into the destination address, but extends the previous technique by using Bitcoin escrow / multi-sig to put three addresses in each destination.It also uses a checksum to make storage more reliable.Here's the code in the blockchain to insert data into the blockchain.While it says it was written by Satoshi Nakamoto (the pseudonymous author of Bitcoin), that's probably not true.And here's the code to extract data from the blockchain.The download tool is slightly buggy - the crc32 has a signed-vs-unsigned problem which suggests it wasn't used extensively.has a about a leaked private key, followed by 1K of hex bytes as text, which supposedly is the private key for some AMI firmware.The change from that transaction was used for this transaction, which references the Wikipedia page on illegal primes, followed by two supposedly-illegal primes from that page.

The change from that transaction was then used for the Wikileaks Cablegate messages, implying the same person was behind all these messages.It looks like someone was trying to store a variety of dodgy stuff in the Bitcoin blockchain, either to cause trouble or to make some sort of political point.The following email message allegedly from Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto appears in the blockchain.(It's almost certainly not really from him.)It seems to be referring to the removal of some Script opcodes from the Bitcoin server and making the to the server.My guess is this message is someone pointing out a bug fix for Electrum in a joking way.From a3a61fef43309b9fb23225df7910b03afc5465b9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Satoshi Nakamoto <[email protected]> Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 02:28:02 -0200 Subject:[PATCH] Remove (SINGLE|DOUBLE)BYTE I removed this from Bitcoin in f1e1fb4bdef878c8fc1564fa418d44e7541a7e83 in Sept 7 2010, almost three years ago.Be warned that I have not actually tested this patch.

--- backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py | 8 +------- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 7 deletions(-) diff --git a/backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py b/backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py index 6620583..89b9b1b 100644 --- a/backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py +++ b/backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py @@ -280,10 +280,8 @@ opcodes = Enumeration("Opcodes", [ "OP_WITHIN", "OP_RIPEMD160", "OP_SHA1", "OP_SHA256", "OP_HASH160", "OP_HASH256", "OP_CODESEPARATOR", "OP_CHECKSIG", "OP_CHECKSIGVERIFY", "OP_CHECKMULTISIG", "OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY", - ("OP_SINGLEBYTE_END", 0xF0), - ("OP_DOUBLEBYTE_BEGIN", 0xF000), "OP_PUBKEY", "OP_PUBKEYHASH", - ("OP_INVALIDOPCODE", 0xFFFF), + ("OP_INVALIDOPCODE", 0xFF), ]) @@ -293,10 +291,6 @@ def script_GetOp(bytes): vch = None opcode = ord(bytes[i]) i += 1 - if opcode >= opcodes.OP_SINGLEBYTE_END and i < len(bytes): - opcode <<= 8 - opcode |= ord(bytes[i]) - i += 1 if opcode <= opcodes.OP_PUSHDATA4: nSize = opcode -- 1.7.9.4 Bitcoin addresses are 34 characters long, so it is possible to put something interesting in the text address, although there are limitations.

The first option for putting text into an address is to test millions or billions of private keys by brute force in the hope of randomly getting a few characters you want in the public address.This generates a "vanity" address which is a valid working Bitcoin address.An example is Bitcoin Armory, which uses the donation address 1ArmoryXcfq7TnCSuZa9fQjRYwJ4bkRKfv.Note that only six desirable characters were found, and the rest are random.You can use the vanitygen command-line tool or a website like bitcoinvanity to generate these addresses.Many people have recently received tiny spam payments from vanity addresses with the prefixes 1Enjoy... and 1Sochi... addresses.These payments don't get confirmed by miners and the purpose of them is puzzling.The second option is to use whatever ASCII address you want (starting with a 1 and ending with a six-character checksum).Since there is no known private key for this address, any bitcoins sent to this address are lost forever.Despite this, some addresses have received significant amounts: 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE.

has received over 1.6 bitcoins (over $1000).1111111111111111111114oLvT2 (hex 0) has received almost 3 bitcoins.A very strange activity is the large-scale deliberate "burning" of bitcoins by sending them to 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr, where nobody can ever use them.Amazingly, this address has received over 2,130 bitcoins (about $1.5 million dollars worth) that are now lost forever.The motivation is that Counterparty is issuing their own crypto-currency (XCP) in exchange for destroyed bitcoins.The idea is that "proof-of-burn" is a more fair way of distributing currency than mining.There are many mysterious things in the blockchain that I couldn't figure out, that appear to be encrypted data.Between June and September 2011, there were thousands of tiny mystery transactions from a few addresses to hundreds of thousands of random addresses sorted in decreasing order.These transactions are for 1 to 45 Satoshis, and have never been redeemed.As far as I can tell, the data is totally random.

But maybe there is a secret message in the addresses or in the amounts.In any case, someone went to a lot of work to do this, so there must be some meaning.[20] One interesting thing is that the change address from the cablegate description was then used for three 86 kilobyte GPG-encoded files.[18]From the "magic numbers" at the beginning of these files I know that these are GPG files encrypted using CAST5, but what is in these files is a mystery.Without the passphrase, they can't be decrypted.By following the change addresses, we can see that after submitting the "Satoshi" uploader and downloader, the same person submitted the Bitcoin PDF.The same person then submitted five mysterious files.[19]These files appear entirely random, so they may contain encrypted data.There are a of Valentine's day messages in the blockchain from a couple days ago.I assume someone set up a service to do this.It's pretty easy to put your own 20-character message into the blockchain.The following steps explain how.

People have found a variety of ways to store strange things in the Bitcoin blockchain.I have touched on some of them here, but undoubtedly there are many other hidden treasures.The notes to this article provides hashes for the interesting transactions, in case anyone wants to investigate further.[1] Clients store the 16-gigabyte blockchain in the data directory.On Windows, this is C:\Users\userid\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin.The blocks are stored in a sequence of 128 megabyte files blknnnnnn.dat.Syncing these files is why a full Bitcoin client takes hours to start up.[2] In the Bitcoin protocol, every mined block has a transaction that creates new bitcoins.Part of that transaction is an arbitrary coinbase field of up to 100 bytes in the Script language.Normally the coinbase field has data such as the block number, timestamp, difficulty, and an arbitrary nonce number.The full coinbase in the genesis block is: PUSHDATA: 04 bits value (mining difficulty): FFFF001D PUSHDATA: 01 nonce value: 04 PUSHDATA: 45 'The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks': 5468652054696D65732030332F4A616E2F32303039204368616E63656C6C6F72206F6E206272696E6B206F66207365636F6E64206261696C6F757420666F722062616E6B73 [3] The message in the Genesis block is slightly different from the actual newspaper article: Chancellor Alistair Darling on brink of second bailout for banks.

[4] A brief overview of Bitcoin addresses will make this technique easier to understand.Normally, you start with a random 256-bit private key, which is necessary to redeem Bitcoins.From this, you generate a public key, which is hashed to a 160-bit address.This address is displayed in ASCII using a technique called Base58Check encoding.This ASCII address, such as 1LLLfmFp8yQ3fsDn7zKVBHMmnMVvbYaAE6, is the address used for transferring Bitcoins.But inside the transaction, the address is stored as the 160-bit (20 byte) hex value.In normal use, you have no control over the 20-byte hex value used as an address.The trick for storing data in the transaction is to replace the address with 20 bytes of data that you want to store.For instance, the string This is my test data turns into the hex data '54686973206973206d7920746573742064617461'.If you send some bitcoins to that address, the bitcoins are lost forever (since you don't have the private key matching that address), but your message is now recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain.

See my earlier article for details on how Bitcoin addresses are generated.[5] The Bitcoin logo was hidden in two transactions: ceb1a7fb57ef8b75ac59b56dd859d5cb3ab5c31168aa55eb3819cd5ddbd3d806 and 9173744691ac25f3cd94f35d4fc0e0a2b9d1ab17b4fe562acc07660552f95518.If you look at the first ScriptPubKey of the first transaction, the address is 3d79626567696e206c696e653d3132382073697a, which turns into the ASCII text =ybegin line=128 siz.If you do this for all the addresses, you get an ecoded file.This file turns out to be encoded in the obscure yEnc encoding, designed in 2001 for transmitting binaries on Usenet.I hacked together some code to extract and decode the file, resulting in the bitcoin.jpg file shown above.There was some discussion of this logo in 2011, but I don't know if anyone has actually extracted the image until now.[6] The prayers can be found in blk00003 and blk00004.Eligius is appropriately named after Saint Eligius the patron saint of goldsmiths and coin collectors.

The Rickroll is here.[7] For a while, the mysterious message /P2SH/ appeared in the coinbase field over and over.This string is an indication that the miner supports the pay-to-script-hash Bitcoin feature.The purpose of this was to ensure that more than 50% of the miners supported the feature before it was rolled out.[8] The XSS attack demo is in transaction 59bd7b2cff5da929581fc9fef31a2fba14508f1477e366befb1eb42a8810a000.The JavaScript for the attack was put in the transaction's output script.The blockchain.info website displays the contents of the output script, but apparently didn't escape it as HTML.Thus, the contents