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14 exhibits. Filter by the kind of impossibility, or search a height, a miner, a tag.

14 files

001 Sealed
Probable

Someone 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.

Fee disasters 23 Nov 2023 Block 818,087
002 Sealed
Solved

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.

Fee disasters 26 Apr 2016 Block 409,008
003 Sealed
Solved

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.

Hidden text 30 Jul 2011 Block 138,725
004 Sealed
Solved

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.

Consensus 15 Aug 2010 Block 74,638
005 Sealed
Solved

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.

Strange scripts 1 Jan 2012 No canonical height
006 Sealed
Solved

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.

Size extremes 1 Jul 2015 No canonical height
007 Sealed
Solved

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.

Unspendable 1 Jun 2011 No canonical height
008 Sealed
Unknown

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.

Unspendable 15 May 2026 No canonical height
009 Sealed
Probable

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.

Resurrections 5 Sep 2026 Block 965,639
010 Sealed
Probable

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.

Sweeps 28 Dec 2020 Block 662,000
011 Sealed
Solved

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.

Unspendable 1 Jun 2011 No canonical height
012 Sealed
Solved

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.

Hidden text 10 May 2025 Block 896,088
013 Sealed
Solved

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.

Dust 1 Nov 2013 No canonical height
014 Sealed
Solved

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.

Hidden text 8 Apr 2013 Block 230,203