New Discovery: Bitcoin Whitepaper Stored as a Single OP_RETURN

Hey all, First post here, hope I'm doing it right. Been running some old Python scripts to find large outputs in transactions. Mostly see big OP_RETURNs lately since the limit got raised. Just found this TX: 00000000000ad99639585eb5fb0dc0bb093575719ecd78cfede972637b65de07. It has the whole whitepaper in one OP_RETURN output (vout=1).

Wow, it’s wild someone dropped 1.25 million sats ($958.24) to MARA slipstream for this TX! Someone did it ages ago with P2MS on an old transaction too. Why pay again?

We don’t really know what it cost them, just the fee is 1.25 million sats. Could have been a MARA employee testing or maybe some deal they had. Or it could even be someone who mined a ton of 50BTC blocks back in the day and just doesn’t care about the cost... I mean, to them, that’s like me skipping a U-turn for coffee.

Yeah, sure the whitepaper's been added before but I think this is the first time as one block of bytes. Still, 1.25M sats is insane! I’d spend that on something way cooler, lol. Got it from my node like this: Vout=1. Starts with 1 byte for OP_RETURN, then OP_PUSHDATA4 (1 byte), then 4 bytes for length, and the rest is the whitepaper.

Nice throwback! 13 years ago, back in a block with 134 transactions, around April 2013. Remember those days when @real_satoshi played with mysterious numbers and symbols? Maybe it’s all about Feng shui. At least it’s not just random garbage.

For real, compared to some junk in the chain, the whitepaper is a solid use of space for sure. And now it’s easier to extract. The potential for blockchain in data storage is pretty wild. IPFS is decent too, but not quite the same as Bitcoin.

Sad but true, most data stored isn’t really important. With block size and node costs, I’d prefer people use OpenTimestamp for verification and keep actual data elsewhere. IPFS is better for data storage, plus there are projects like Filecoin that incentivize node operators. And don’t forget about BitTorrent.