How to store a message in the bitcoin blockchain

Below is a step by step guide how to store a message in the bitcoin’s blockchain using inthebitcoin.com service. In this post I will show you how to store birthday wishes for someone.

After putting inthebitcoin.com in the browser bar you will see a simple form with just a single input to put your message in. The current theme is St. Patrick’s Day, and users are encourage to store messages which has something to do with that day, but we can store any message we want.

After crafting the best wishes we press Record it forever. On the second screen we see our message and some payment options. At the moment of writing this post there are two options to pay for the service. First we can use a coupon to store the message for free. Information about such coupons is posted on inthebitcoin social channels. Unfortunately at this moment no coupons are available and storing our message is going to cost us 0.0022 BTC which is about $0.89 — not bad for an original birthday card ;-)

There is an optional email input which for someone light-minded like myself might be quite important. I’m going to explain why a bit later in the post, but now let’s press Save.

On the third screen we see the payment detail and a what is called a status link. This link is quite important as it is the only way to check the status of our message. If you provided an email address a step earlier you have nothing to worry about as you will receive an email notification at the moment your message will land in the blockchain. However if you did not provide an email you better store this link in the safe place.

Lets make the payment. I will use the classic bitcoin core client.

Lets choose fast confirmation time and confirm the payment.

Payment done. Now we just have to wait for an email notification or visit the status link from time to time to check how is our message doing. As we did not provide an email address lets look at the status page.

At the beginning as our payment did not make it yet the status page looks like:

After a while the status will change. In normal conditions it should take no more than 30 min. The exact time can not be predicted and depends on few factors like the current condition of the bitcoin network and the fee we’ve chosen to give away with our transaction. In rare cases it could take up to few hours.

Waiting… waiting… BANG !!!

Few minutes later

Few minutes later

This is the final status page.

The message ended up in the block we can now share the link with our good friend or even better we can share the video. :)

https://inthebitcoin.com/13HgoGKVU3HQFbbyJRTFodmSr3VTb6eui9.mp4

Verification TLTR

Lets verify that the message is really there. For this I’ll use the chain.so page. On the final status page inthebitcoin.com gives us a transaction id/ids. This are transactions used to store our message. In our case as our message was quite short there is only one transaction. Lets look at the details.

We can see our message stored there. But how exactly it was stored? In the input output scripts section we can see one OP_RETURN script. The decoded value of the script contains the message.

I hope you liked my tutorial and now you are going to store a lot of messages forever in the blockchain.

Here another tutorial how to certify digital assets in the blockchain