In a curious development, an anonymous Bitcoin user recently invested around $64,000 in transaction fees to embed nearly 9 megabytes of unprocessed binary data onto the Bitcoin blockchain.
The Ordinals explorer posted on X that a huge amount of Bitcoin was used to create a large number of inscriptions in the blockchain. The inscriptions, composed of raw binary data, were created on January 6th, 2023, at approximately 11:20 UTC.
Despite the attention that this event has garnered, no one has yet been able to discern the meaning of the data inscribed in the blockchain. One user even tried to use a language model developed by OpenAI called ChatGPT to decipher the meaning of the data but without success.
“Some people are saying it may be encrypted so potentially impossible/very hard to decrypt FYI,” remarked Leonidas, host of The Ordinal Show, in a Jan. 7 post.
Crypto natives have also been speculating about the identity of the person or entity that inscribed the data in the blockchain. The Bitcoin wallet associated with the enigmatic data embedding spree, identified as “bc1pnp…zwd0th,” is labeled as “Unnamed“ on Ord.io.
An analysis of the encrypted data has revealed that it contains a variety of symbols from the English alphabet, the Greek alphabet, and the symbols of mathematics. Two of the 332 inscriptions include a digital representation of a pepperoni pizza, indicating that the sats involved originated from the 10,000 BTC famously used by Laszlo Hanyecz to purchase two Papa John’s pepperoni pizzas on May 22, 2010.
The recent mysterious inscriptions occurred just one day after a significant transaction involving Bitcoin’s Genesis wallet. On January 5th, a large amount of Bitcoin, worth approximately $1.17 million, was sent to the Genesis wallet, causing a stir among industry pundits.
Conor Grogan, a director at Coinbase, considered the possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, may have been behind the transaction. Alternatively, he speculated that someone may have simply destroyed a large amount of Bitcoin by transferring it to an inaccessible address.
Pro-XRP lawyer Jeremy Hogan suggested that the Genesis wallet transfer may have been an attempt to force the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, out of hiding. According to Hogan, the transfer of such a large amount of Bitcoin would require the owner to either report the funds to the IRS or risk breaking the law by failing to do so.
Nevertheless, others highlighted that the hypothesis would be valid only if Nakamoto were bound by U.S. tax regulations.
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