There's a romantic idea about Bitcoin's chain: that it's a wall of human messages. Proposals, memorials, "Vahe was here," pizza jokes, the occasional protest note pinned into the world's most expensive append-only log.

I wanted to know if that was actually true. So I counted. Every OP_RETURN output, from the genesis block to block 958,893, no sampling.

The answer is no, and it's not close.

The one number

All human-readable OP_RETURN text ever mined into Bitcoin: 3,827,227 outputs.