Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / AtomSea & EMBII (2013-)

An upload system for various media types includeing text, images, HTML pages and audio.

bitfossil.org is an indexer website created by EMBII for it.

Each AtomSea payload has a toplevel transaction which links to other transactions. All the linked transactions together make up the payload. The most common payload type is a text plus image, as is the case of Nelson-Mandela.jpg, which can be seen at bitfossil.com/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e/ where 78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e is the toplevel transaction ID: www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e

See Section 1.2. "Nelson-Mandela.jpg" for a detailed reverse engineering of the format, and Section 3. "AtomSea & EMBII data format" for a summary of it.

Holy crap, they actually support:

apertus.io/ is the system to upload/index locally, and therefore likely part of the backend of bitfossil: github.com/HugPuddle/Apertus

The system shows the messages and the images on a single page: bitfossil.org/4cbb32cd27b5b5edc12d3559bdffc1355ac2a210463d5cfaadc7ce9b06675b2b/index.htm It is basically a blockchain-based Twitter.

Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain by Ken Shirriff (2014) suggests that AtomSea & EMBII are the creator's aliases. The following online profiles of the creators feel authentic:Tried saying hi to them at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1382080760774033415 and they replied: twitter.com/AllenVandever/status/1563964396656812034

Somewhat related projects:

At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1762501350997233976 (2024) EMBII mentions that he was inspired by the Satoshi uploader.