Bitcoin Forum

I found a way to save any arbitrary files to namecoin blockchain.

I think this can be kind of big.

See: https://github.com/runn1ng/namecoin-files

Really cool, man! Another way to take an advantage of cryptos!

sounds good but if ppl start to store files in the blockchain, in a month from now we would need 50tb hdisks just for the nmc blockchain

It would probably be better to store the files somewhere else but use the blockchain to reference them somehow.

+1 for a distributed pirate bay though  :)

Edit: I wonder if you could use it to store GPG keys instead of on the server at MIT.

lol okay you must be joking right? If this gets popular namecoin would become unusable very quickly.

Time to raise spam fees I think  ;)

Although seriously I have been talking about supporting database usage in ppcoin for a while. Now you just made me think twice about current transaction fee model to regulate the demand on block chain storage.

well right now the only things there are my experiments :) so no need to panic

Yeah, I am very excited by this so excellent detective work running :)

Yeah sunny, my thoughts were that if it can be done to namecoin then surely it can be done to any coin?? so this poses a potential threat to all currencies right? just as much as someone could 51% attack a chain with enough hashing power... anyone could also now bloat the blockchain with enough power / time and kill anyone with small HDD right and ruin the blockchain for that currency?

Well what if you stored the link to the attachment, and the decryption key, so that the file can be stored, encrypted, somewhere else, and you can find the link via NMC?

Couldn't you then also save Torrent Trackers to Namecoin as well?

oh I hope that it doesnt work on other blockchains  :-[

not really, first you cannot sava arbitrary data to bitcoin transactions (in theory you can, but the nodes will not relay it, so you can't). Also, there is some anti-spamming protection in bitcoin client. And lastly, miners can just ignore the requests if the fees are low enough.

Which will probably happen anyway with namecoin if my way of saving files becomes popular. (people in general don't like illegal data on their disks. also it does not scale at all.)

I am thinking of making some simple GUI to this, though. It is still too complicated with the need to run namecoind from bash and so on

NMC paid storage?

It's much easier to do with namecoin via its API of 'name_new', 'name_firstupdate' and 'name_show'. With other coins there is no such api available so it needs to create the data transaction itself, and retrieve it back and parse it via maybe getrawtransaction, and it also needs to track transaction id and possibly embed some data structure to link multiple transactions for a file, or maintain its own persistent index. It's a lot more work but in theory doable.

The only thing preventing a flood of data/spam is the transaction fee and maximum block size. Altcoins are more vulnerable to these issues because the fees are much lower compared to bitcoin right now.

namecoin fee is 0.005 per KB, or 5 coins per MB, 5000 coins per GB. Given the current exchange rate, that's about $200~$300 per GB, not much money to cause real pain for the entire network.

I am not really too worried just kidding. Still most likely ppcoin will eventually support database use like namecoin. And kudos to Running for the excellent work  ;)

Please do NOT use namecoin as arbitrary storage. This is not its function; you are risking irritating people enough to hardfork. At the moment, namecoin's growth is small and measured. I am fairly sure that the current users are not interested in storing your data.

AFAIK, namecoin can be used as general persistent key/value storage. (It is even encouraged on the wiki - http://dot-bit.org/Use_cases )

If it can be used as such, it can be used to store files, too, if they are encoded correctly.

If miners won't want to accept these transactions they won't. Free market and so on.

I think it's time pools shut off NMC support...

Someone should upload a trojan horse.

 :D :D :D

this will be much to slow to be practical. links to encrypted torrent files or mega on the other hand...

That's dumb; there's 3GB of satoshidice crap on my hard drive because pools aren't shutting that off...

Experimenting is fine, but this brings up the point of setting a reasonable fee on Namecoin for name registration again: http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2954#p2954 and for pools to pick up such a new version when it is released.

The cost of a name is about 25 for a USD penny.

MEGACOIN

Most of the insertion slowness is probably the recursive IsFromMe / IsConfirmed checks in coin selection for unspent change in coin selection, as IsConfrimed recursively does that along the whole input tree with no-memoization. Commenting out lines 607 to 616 in wallet.cpp and I expect spending unconfirmed coins will become much faster.

What an awesome use case! What is the theoretical maximum growth of the NMC blockchain?

I still haven't sorted out what to do when some of the file parts expires.

It is possible to look at even expired domains, but I am not sure how.

One more argument towards storing the actual data in a faster place. Have you ever heard of bittorrent magnet links? The file itself could be encrypted so it would be some kind of do it yourself mega.

You need seeders for magnets, though.

hmmm....   https://cryptabyte.com/ ?

Use name_history instead of name_show, then fetch the last (i.e. latest) record of the result. If the domain has expired, the number of blocks found since the expiration time simply shows up as a negative number, e.g.


gives you

...
"expires_in : -144"
...

In other words: d/capitalism has expired yesterday.  :'(

you can see here how you are spamming the chain: http://nx.bit  (http://blockchained.com/namecoin)

When I look at it, some people dumped 2 nonsensical junk files, me and some other guy wrote something in plaintext and that's about it. So nothing important happened there.

Namecoin has nothing on bitcoin testnet:

 ???