Most people think of crypto as serious stuff: whitepapers, price charts, regulation debates. But underneath all the tech talk and market noise, there’s a playful side that’s easy to miss. The world of crypto is full of easter eggs – hidden messages, inside jokes, and surprises left behind by developers, miners, and sometimes even major companies.
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The Genesis Block Message
Let’s start at the beginning – literally. Bitcoin’s first block, known as the Genesis Block, wasn’t just a piece of code. It carried a secret – buried inside was this line:
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
That wasn’t a random string of text. It was the front-page headline of The Times, a British newspaper, published the same day Bitcoin was born. Satoshi didn’t explain it, but he didn’t have to. The message was clear: the old system was broken, and Bitcoin was meant to be something different.
More Hidden Messages
The Genesis Block wasn’t the only time someone left a message in a blockchain.
Over the years, Bitcoin users and miners have used the blockchain as a digital message board. With a little creativity, people started embedding messages into transactions. A few memorable examples:
- Catholic prayers, added by the Eligius mining pool in the coinbase fields of their blocks. Some were in Latin, others in English.
- A tribute to Len Sassaman, a cryptographer who passed away in 2011. His friends left a message in the Bitcoin blockchain that said: “We dedicate this silly hack to Len, who would have found it absolutely hilarious”.
- Julian Assange’s response to rumors of his death. In 2016, WikiLeaks used several Bitcoin addresses to post “were fine 8chan post fake”. They didn’t trust social media to get the message out, so they used the blockchain instead.
- In May 2020, during the Bitcoin halving event, the mining pool F2Pool added another newspaper headline to block 629,999: “With $2.3T Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue”.
- Bible verses placed in symbolic blocks. One of the strangest was at block 666,666, which included Romans 12:21: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good”. It was paired with transactions to two wallets named “GoD” and “BibLE”.
- ASCII art also made its way in. On December 19, 2014, someone posted a Christmas message made entirely of characters: a little art piece encoded into a transaction.
It’s not all emotional or poetic, though. People have also used the blockchain to leave insults, political slogans, or Rickrolls. And once something’s written into the chain, it’s basically impossible to remove.
The Bitcoin Whitepaper Hidden in macOS
Buried deep inside macOS – every version since Mojave in 2018 – was a hidden file. Its name was simpledoc.pdf, and when opened, it turned out to be… a full copy of the original Bitcoin whitepaper.
You had to enter a specific Terminal command to open it, or navigate through five levels of system folders.
Nobody knows why Apple included it. Theories range from a developer slipping it in as a joke, to someone using it as a placeholder test file and forgetting to remove it. Apple never explained – and eventually removed the file in a later update. But for about five years, millions of Macs were quietly carrying Bitcoin’s origin story.
Read also: Satoshi Nakamoto’s Identity? HBO Documentary Raises Doubts
The Secret in Uniswap’s Contract
If you’ve ever looked at Ethereum smart contract addresses, you know they’re long and messy – strings of letters and numbers that don’t look like anything.
But Uniswap, one of the biggest projects in DeFi, managed to sneak in a subtle joke. Take a look at their token contract:
0x1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984
The contract address for its token starts and ends with 1f984 – which, if you look it up, is the Unicode for the 🦄 emoji.
Was it planned? Almost definitely. It fits Uniswap’s branding, which proudly uses a pink unicorn as its mascot. And since Ethereum addresses are generated from hashes, it would have taken quite a bit of effort to get those digits exactly where they wanted.
And the same secret is also hidden in Uniswap’s NEAR token contract:
1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984.factory.bridge.near
