“Help me bro.” That three-word plea has been tacked onto dozens of tiny bitcoin transactions sent to the 19 wallets holding 18,270 BTC allegedly stolen from Binance. Although none of the coins have moved since Thursday, the addresses continue to receive micro-payments — each carrying a short, permanent note on the blockchain. Bitcoin supports small, permanent messages via an output type called OP_RETURN, which lets a sender embed up to 80 bytes of data in a transaction. Using that feature, someone paid 1,000 satoshis (roughly $0.78 at current prices) to each of the 19 suspected hacker wallets on Friday at 11:43 UTC, did the same again at 16:03 UTC, and then sent 1,111 satoshis apiece early Sunday, a CoinDesk analysis found. The first two rounds came from the same wallet — the change from the initial round funded the second — suggesting a single sender behind those appeals. All told, the three rounds cost about 59,109 satoshis (roughly $46 plus fees) to deliver the repeated “help me bro” message to a thief the FBI says is tied to North Korea. The episode underscores how cheap, immutable blockchain annotations let anyone leave messages — from pleas and taunts to labels and memos — attached forever to transactions. For now, the 18,270 BTC remain parked, while strangers continue sending tiny, permanent notes to the addresses that hold them. Read more AI-generated news on: https://app.chaingpt.org/news