Topic: Can I use the Blockchain to store infinity messages? (Read 446 times)

You also can use https://coinb.in/#newTransaction to create transaction with OP_RETURN, although you need to specify the input & output manually. See this guide if you're curious (i haven't tested it), https://btcleak.com/2020/06/26/guide-push-any-data-on-to-the-blockchain-forever/.

Additionally, IIRC there are few Bitcoin library with capability of creating transaction with OP_RETURN, but you need better understanding of Bitcoin transaction and know a bit about programming.

P.S. I tried blockcypher, but it always return message "Server Error (500)".

You should compare it with forum/article which can be read by anyone, not private/personal message.


I think it's problem with almost all blockchain application. Even on Bitcoin, you could do similar thing by using OP_RETURN and input illicit message.

You can embed data into the block-chain via this website:  ^{(Not sure if there are any other websites out there that do so - anyone?)}

https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/embed-data/

You can search embedded data in the block-chain such as this example:

https://blockchair.com/search?q=timelord2067

     

But what would be the purpose of this blockchain in the first place? This would be good if you are writing educational materials but if we are talking about personal messages I don't think a permanency or even its feature of being public that can be shown to anyone is something that a person would like, that's why the messaging apps we have have its own "private mode" or ways to delete in both ways as these messages are intended to be kept personal. I remembered a while back that someone was worried that a personal message in their transaction was labelled for "child porn" and I can only imagine this kind of thing can be abuse by a lot of people to use in libel or incriminate someone just for the fun of it.

if a project like this ever became successful it would quickly become a victim of its own success. there must be a cost for blockspace otherwise you will always be subject to DoS attacks

This was already discussed enough when the OP code was introduced back in the days, there is no need to create a BIP. The majority think it is needed and in fact one of the reasons why it was kept is as you guessed:

I don’t think it is appropriate to try to regulate how people should use bitcoin. That really goes against the ethos of why bitcoin was created, at least in my opinion.

If you don’t want people to be able to add arbitrary data in OP_RETURN transactions, you should create a BIP that makes these transactions invalid.
That is obviously not true, people have been including random data in the blockchain for years. I am saying a cryptocurrency whose sole purpose is to store arbitrary messages is not going to have value.

I would also point out that if OP RETURN transactions could not include data, people would start sending minimum output amounts to vanity addresses that send some kind of message. This would both increase the blockchain size and the UTXO set.

And it is heavily criticized because of what it offers.
The only valid utility I see for OP_Return is when it is used for colored coins, for example Tether where it treats the OP_Return data as a script and by executing that script it can transfer its token from one address to another all built on top of bitcoin. Although that is still parasitic and spammy...

Then it proves that this feature is not something people want or care about.

The reason OP_RETURN transactions are valid is to allow people to store data in the blockchain.
I think we both know such an altcoin would not give the same authority that the message is unchanged as bitcoin would.

I don’t care what some American court (or really, any court) says.  It is not cryptographically secure.

This provides proof of existence in time, at least, albeit not strong proof of authenticity:


Unfortunately, the link to the database page seems to be 404:
https://opentimestamps.org/internet-archive/

I don’t know if there has been any project to continue timestamping Internet Archive records.  I guess probably not.  There should be.

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Other good replies earlier... fell behind here.

With the amount of data we're talking I believed he used hard disk RAID (5/6/10?) so not only are SSDs economically infeasible here but with the networking lag I described ("crosstalk", as in someone else's IPFS site traffic being passed through you), I get the impression it's not designed for that volume of data.

The IPFS service in question was even sparely used so it's not like this is a case of several dozen people requesting a resource at once.

That still doesn't justify storing any random messages in bitcoin's blockchain though. A specialized cryptocurrency could be created to store data like this (eg. altcoins such as storej) for this matter. You never go to your bank and tell the clerk you want to deposit a bag of potatos in your bank account!

I get the impression that the OP wants to store a message that he can prove is unchanged. There is nothing stopping an operator of a website from changing content, or back dating a blog post.

This is not quite right. Each (unpruned)node had to download the entire blockchain to work. The data is copied many times, and each node has to store the same information.

OP, You should ask yourself what you want to achieve with the "storage on the blockchain". Just distributed storage? Then use IPFS or BitTorrent like suggested. Or pay the fees of an established blockchain - which will not be cheap, but the fees are totally justified. Because if you really use a blockchain, lots of people (9K+ full Bitcoin nodes) will store information on their drives, which is really not necessary in the case of "messages".

Blockchains (and the Bitcoin blockchain in particular, because it is the one with most security) are much better suited for ensuring data integrity instead - i.e. to verify that you stored a message or document at a specific moment. And this can be achieved in much more elegant ways than simply storing the data in a transaction via OP_RETURN.

The most interesting way to do that is to use OpenTimestamps. They use a Merkle Tree and thus can store the hashes of several documents or messages in a single Bitcoin transaction. You then may store the original data in other networks, like IPFS, BitTorrent or ZeroNet, but you can be sure that they weren't altered if they're always verifyable via OpenTimestamps.

I don't know if a service like you suggested already exists for OpenTimestamps - while OpenTimestamps let you timestamp documents in the browser, they will not be visible publicly. I guess you're aiming more at a variant of Steemit, but Steem has all the problems mentioned here (only that they're pretty centralized, and so there are not so many nodes storing the data).

Many people are not technical, don't know nor understand nor care about what's all that; for them it's some soft of magic with a buzz-word attached.
And since it's magic, it can be used for anything now, since it's trending.

Just to be clear, my intention is not to be mean, instead it's to show that different people do think different and we have to understand that and have the patience to explain, even if they may not have the patience to read or understand the explanations.



Also the illegal ones are transferred great. And those are the problem. Those made the officials put the "tied to illegal stuff" stamp to bittorrent protocol, making average Joe think twice before using it (and usually giving out).

I'm a member of a discord group that stores archives of old stuff (we're talking magazines, siterips, video documentaries etc) on an open directory, who currently possess several hundred TB of historic data, and they know a guy who tried to host all that stuff on IPFS.

Long story short, it split all the hosted data into many chunks which caused extreme throttling on his HDDs and he also got a bunch of unnecessary traffic from the rest of the IPFS network who are trying to go to other locations. He ended up decommissioning it.

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Videos are transferred great (the legal ones) along P2P torrents, I don't get why that isn't used more.

Why do so many people misunderstand blockchain, specifically decentralization?
Preservation of data forever, transparency, and the absence of a central authority are criteria for decentralization in financial systems and are not a general term for all central problems.

Blockchain is not a magic solution for all problems, and one of the disadvantages of decentralization is slowness, a feature that centralized platforms have.

Suppose, for example, that you want to hold a conversation with someone who is expensive and you need to wait for several minutes before you can get a response, would you use that service?

The above does not mean that decentralization in messages cannot be applied, but we need to define the term decentralization.

If you are talking about projects like Storj, I don't think that the data is stored on the blockchain (although I don't know how it works).
I'd expect the blockchain only records transactions, like adding and removing files from the distributed cloud.
The blockchain, if done properly, doesn't allow past data to be changed. And that may not suitable for files. And that's expensive to store. Movies don't need all nodes store them.

Nobody will store any videos on the blockchain.  It is completely infeasible.  Look at the data storage prices in the gas schedule for Ethereum, or even for any of its more-efficient competitors.  —Then remember that those gas costs are supposed to be based on real-world resource costs.

“web3” stuff can use IPFS, which I linked to in my prior post, among other options for storing data that are too big or otherwise unsuitable on the blockchain.

It does not necessarily have to be bitcoin blockchain, that is the approach towards achieving web 3.0, in which blockchain will be used to store data like vidoes or any of such, rather than relying on centralized organizations.