Bitcoin Blockchain Museum · Catalog 001–014
Transactions that should not exist.
Each exhibit starts as a raw transaction and a puzzle. The chain is the primary source. Forum posts, wallet bugs, miner policy and contemporaneous news do the rest — when they can.
On the floor
Full catalogSomeone sent $2.1 million and paid $3.1 million in fees. Why?
On 23 November 2023 a brand-new wallet spent 139 bitcoin and left 83.65 of them on the table for Antpool. The fee was one and a half times the payment.
Someone sent 0.0001 bitcoin and paid 291 bitcoin to do it. Why?
In April 2016 the network’s typical fee was about a cent. Block 409,008 contains a fee of 291.241 BTC — then $136,000, now a small fortune.
A transaction paid 1 bitcoin to a hundred addresses. None of them look like addresses. What was being bought?
On 30 July 2011, three weeks after cryptographer Len Sassaman died, Dan Kaminsky encoded an ASCII portrait into Bitcoin itself.
A transaction created 184 billion bitcoin. The cap is 21 million. Where did they go?
On 15 August 2010 block 74,638 contained two outputs of 92.2 billion BTC each. Five hours later the chain decided they had never existed.
A lock script that is just the English word “script”. Who would ever be able to spend it?
P2Pool, a decentralized mining pool, repeatedly wrote the ASCII encoding of the word 'script' into output scripts. Nobody can satisfy them.
One transaction has 20,000 inputs. Was this an attack, a mixer, or housework?
Most payments have one or two inputs. Transaction 52539a56… has twenty thousand. It still fits in a block.
People keep sending bitcoin to an address that says, in English, not to. Who owns it?
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE is a valid address. Nobody has the private key. About 13.4 BTC have gone in anyway.
After twelve years of silence, five old wallets sent 107 bitcoin to an address that cannot spend. Then they stopped. Why?
In May 2026 someone destroyed about $8.5 million in bitcoin they had held since 2014. A $1 million round-trip through a custodian happened first. Nobody has a good answer.
Twelve coinbase outputs from March 2010 moved in one night, 16 years late. Was it Satoshi?
On 5–6 September 2026, 600 BTC mined when a block paid 50 coins woke up and walked into native SegWit. Whale Alert ran the Patoshi patterns. They did not match.
137,000 bitcoin in apparently unrelated wallets emptied in two hours, all paying the same fee. Who had the keys?
On 28 December 2020 a silent cluster of weak-random wallets was drained. Years later an OP_RETURN begged a 'whitehat' to talk.
2,609 bitcoin were sent to a public-key hash of zero. How do you unlock a hash that no key can produce?
In 2011 someone — researchers point at Mt. Gox — paid thousands of bitcoin to a P2PKH script whose HASH160 payload is the number 0.
A 97-kilobyte PNG appeared in a single OP_RETURN in May 2025. Relay policy capped OP_RETURN at 80 bytes. How did it get mined?
MARA mined block 896,088 with a 97,446-byte picture stuffed into one OP_RETURN — months before Bitcoin Core v30 lifted the relay cap.
In 2013–2014 thousands of wallets received 1 satoshi they never asked for. Who was paying to watch them?
Dust attacks do not steal coins. They stain them. A 1-satoshi output is a tracking pixel paid for in bitcoin.
In April 2013 a transaction’s 'public keys' decoded to a WikiLeaks archive pointer. Who was the librarian?
Before OP_RETURN was standard, people hid files in fake keys. One of them pointed at Cablegate.
Puzzle first
Case files open sealed. You see the raw facts and the question before anyone’s reconstruction.
Honest confidence
Solved, probable, or unknown. Some mysteries remain open on purpose. The chain does not owe us a motive.
The scanner
Fee-rate outliers, ancient UTXOs, unspendable scripts, extreme sizes. Story leads generated by the blockchain, not an editor’s mood.