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Blockchain of Love: Someone Proposed Using Bitcoin

But is it too good to be true?
Image: Flickr/Judit Klein

The only thing more uncomfortable for friends and close relations than filming your marriage proposal and putting it online is being really, really into bitcoin.

On Tuesday, somebody decided to go all-in on both of these modern horrors and became the latest person to propose using the bitcoin blockchain, the publicly viewable ledger that's stored on every bitcoin user's computer forever and ever.

This decision could have very easily ended up being nothing more than a permanent digital reminder of one of life's more depressing failures, but thankfully for everyone involved she said yes, god help both of these people.

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The initial message was added to the block reward (a handsome 25 bitcoins, or $17,182 USD by today's price) sent to Chinese bitcoin company HaoBTC because they'd successfully "mined" a block of bitcoin transaction data and uploaded it to the blockchain. It read: "Sun Chun Yu: Zhuang Yuan, will you marry me?" The response, which came in the next block mined by HaoBTC, was: "Zhuang Yuan: YES!"

It's worth noting that this tale of crypto-love might be too good to be true. The messages were added by HaoBTC itself—both the proposal and the response. Either two people working at the company are about to get hitched, or the whole thing was cooked up by HaoBTC itself to promote its new mining pool, which people can join for a fee and get a cut of the reward coins.

HaoBTC has not responded to Motherboard's request for comment.

This isn't the first time that somebody has included a message with a block of transaction data and stored it for posterity on every bitcoin user's machine. Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's anonymous inventor, used a similar method to include some text in the first batch of coins ever generated in what's known as the "genesis block." The message read: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." Not very romantic.

Whatever happened in this situation, an apparent love story come true is even more pleasant news for bitcoiners, as the currency's value continues to soar ever closer to its all-time high of over $1,000 USD per coin—right now, the value of a single coin is nearly $700.

Baby, it's the blockchain of love.

UPDATE: HaoBTC confirmed with Motherboard that the marriage proposal came from inside the company, since the mining pool agreed to give each member one chance to sign the "coinbase," which new coins emerge from when a block reward is generated, with a message. In this case, the message was a marriage proposal from a member of the pool.