How a Bitcoin user celebrated 100th anniversary of Irish Easter Rising.
This spring Ireland is celebrating a 100 years anniversary of Easter Rising, a rebellion that 100 years ago was quickly extinguished by the British. In 1916 streets of Dublin were destroyed and most of the leaders were executed. The Rising lasted only 6 days but it started a longer process which only after 3 years, in January 1919 gave Ireland independence.
This is how todays O’Connell Street, in Dublin looked like 100 years ago, after the Easter Rising.
The Rising
Early on Monday morning, 24 April 1916, roughly 1,200 Volunteers and Citizen Army members took over strongpoints in Dublin city centre. About 400 Volunteers and Citizen Army gathered at Liberty Hall under the command of Commandant James Connolly.
The rebel headquarters was the General Post Office (GPO) where James Connolly, overall military commander and four other members of the Military Council: Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Seán Mac Dermott and Joseph Plunkett. After occupying the Post Office, the Volunteers hoisted two Republican flags and Pearse read a Proclamation of the Republic.
The Proclamation
This is the most important document about the Rising (which every Irish person knows about). The Proclamation was read first time outside of GPO in Dublin on 24 April 1916. Below a picture of the document (source: wikipedia)
The Price
Irish people payed a high price for their independence. Both sides did. The British Army reported 116 dead, 368 wounded. The Irish side reported 318 dead and 2,217 wounded. After the Rising many more got arrested but subsequently released. Some things were more complicated as some of the casualties were Irishmen who fought in British army or work in police forces. The majority of the casualties, both killed and wounded, were civilians. The leaders were executed shortly after.
The celebration
Since few weeks this is the most promoted topic in Ireland and all Irish people are encourage to remember and celebrate it this year. Media are organising series of shows, students are preparing projects about it and presenters in the radio are asking people — “How You are going to celebrate this important anniversary”. Even Google helped creating fantastic presentation using their street view technology. (I encourage you to check it out as this is really great piece of work).
As someone who love Irish People and lived in Ireland for the last couple of years I’ve decided to celebrate the Easter Rising on my own special way. I’ve stored the text of the Proclamation inside Bitcoin’s Blockchain.
Why ?
Why not? Bitcoin’s blockchain has one very interesting property. Information stored in it is public (everyone can read it), but no one can change it. In this way the text I’ve stored will be there unchanged forever. I think it is a great way to pay respect to all brave people who fought for their freedom 100 years ago. It is my own special way to say Thank You.
Technical TL; TR;
To store the text I’ve used inthebitcoin.com service. If you would like to save something into the Bitcoin’s Blockchain here is another post with detailed instructions how to do it.
The text was stored in a chain of transactions, starting from transaction c08b3ebf553ce2f933a481bda4972832195f942a988e36bdc4edd73e908e9c5e. Each transaction has OP_RETURN script to store a 80 bytes long piece of text. It took 40 transactions to store the full text.
Below the full list of transactions:
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Disclaimer
I’m the author of inthebitcoin.com service