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.
The appearance
The output script is OP_IFDUP OP_IF OP_2SWAP OP_VERIFY OP_2OVER OP_DEPTH. That is not a template anyone teaches. Convert the opcodes to bytes and you get 0x73 0x63 0x72 0x69 0x70 0x74 — ASCII for 'script'. The outputs are unspendable. The same pattern appears 182 times up to block 290,000.
Case file sealed
Investigation notes, the reconstruction, and sources sit behind this seal. Open it when you have sat with the raw transaction.
Open the case file
The investigation
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01 A pool, not a person
Quantabytes’ survey of Bitcoin transaction types traces the first instance to transaction fa735229… and attributes the whole family to a bug in P2Pool. Share-based mining software constructs coinbase and payout scripts programmatically. A string that was supposed to be a comment or a template name was emitted as raw opcodes.
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02 Why it mined
In 2012–2013, relay policy was looser and P2Pool miners included their own payouts. A non-standard script in a coinbase-related output does not need the mempool’s blessing the way a relayed payment does. Once one share settled, the bug kept reproducing.
Reconstruction
Not a puzzle by a cryptographer — a software bug. P2Pool encoded the literal word 'script' as Bitcoin Script. The resulting outputs can never be unlocked, and the coins on them are burned. The museum keeps it because it is what a scanner is for: the chain recorded a malfunction more faithfully than any bug tracker.