An anonymous wallet address has spent approximately 1.5 BTC, valued at $66,000, to write nearly 9 megabytes of encrypted data onto the Bitcoin Blockchain, creating an inscription. Despite the cost, the content of the data remains unreadable to anyone as it is encrypted.
The expensive transactions, with some costing thousands of dollars each, were part of a total of 322 transactions by the anonymous wallet. The majority of these transactions cost around $200 each, contributing to the hefty total expenditure.
The Ordinals protocol facilitated the process, attributing the data to specific Satoshis, Bitcoin’s smallest unit. Ordinals are typically used to store art directly on the Blockchain, but they also allow for any type of data, including encrypted text, to be written to the network.
This inscription is not the only unusual activity on the Bitcoin Blockchain recently. Another anonymous wallet transferred approximately $1.2 million to a wallet address holding the rewards from the first Bitcoin block mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, known as the Genesis block.
The BTC in Nakamoto’s wallet has remained untouched since 2010, suggesting that the $1.2 million sent from Binance to Nakamoto’s wallet is likely irretrievable, adding another layer of mystery to Bitcoin’s history.