Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys!
I have a question for you. I'm thinking about that Can we keep any information in the blockchain? So I mean, photos, voice records, weather report, locations etc. can keep in the blockchain? If It can, Can we categorise and handle this information in the blockchain? Thanks!

The way I see it, blockchain is only a way to ensure no data is tampered with without the acknowledgement of all users.

So, its a public ledger - a public book of all transactions or changes.

Which would mean, if suppose I make a company that organises all land-owners records in digital format, and make a transaction in the blockchain, it would not tamperable until all of the users of the blockchain conscent to the change.

So, to change any land-record, I would need approval of all or majority of users to make the change. Or else, its not going to be changed.

Could be wrong here, if so, someone please explain.

Is your question about legal issues or technical ones?
As daserpent wrote, the blockchain is public and immutable, hence you should pay attention not to store private information.

From the technical point of view, the blockchain is replicated on each network node. That means that, in order to store big files, like pictures or audio files, you will need to pay a high fee, as your file will be hosted on all the network nodes.

Some workarounds exist, e.g., IPFS, https://ipfs.io/ (https://ipfs.io/). In this view, you could store a file on a peer-to-peer network, and save on the blockchain only the hash (the "summary") of the file, e.g. to guarantee the existence of the file at a given time.

Hope this could answer to your question.

Thank you for your great response. I want to build my own blockchain for my project. If I can do this, I think it can be great work for me. Thank you again!

You could but it's usually not the most effient place to store large amounts of data. Blockchains strength is its immutable nature which makes it ideal as a ledger but considering the cost and bandwidth for mirroring large chunks of data to ever node it isn't ideal.

You are right but If these datas are very very large amount, I mean "Big data", I think this methode can more usefull than keeping in the database ha?

What would you expect to be the benefit of storing media files and other binary data on the Bitcoin blockchain -- or, any blockchain for that matter?

If it's the distributed aspect that you are after, there are other, more efficient ways to do so. IPFs has already been mentioned and is not the only one of its kind. Storj and MaidSafe are similar projects. If you're looking for something that is proven and widely used you need to look no farther than BitTorrent.

Which blockchain ? Current one ? No.You want to write your own chain,cool.You can code it however you like provided it keeps  the core concepts of blockchain intact.Also I don't understand why would you want to keep private videos,photos,locations on a public chain ? Breach of privacy ? That's not what a blockchain is suppose to be.

Maybe you should describe your idea in brief and I would know what you actually trying to do.

It's definitely possible to store messages in the blockchain using the OP_RETURN script.
You can find more info about that here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/OP_RETURN

There are several services on the internet which allow you to store messages on the Bitcoin Blockchain and I'm pretty sure there are many ways to do this.

Here are some threads and articles of other ways to store data in the blockchain, along with some examples:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33618.0
http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html
https://medium.com/@inthebitcoin/how-to-store-a-message-in-the-bitcoin-blockchain-8d5ac0a8ea88

So, think like that, You have a few autonomous cars and you want to keep the photos and voice records which are saved by cars. Is it clear enough?

It really depends on how you code the blockchain and what kind of data structure you would use to the store data. There are a lot of projects out there that addresses the different ways to use the blockchain.

I have heard that you can store photos but its limited and it will cost you to pay a huge transaction fee.

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The technology advancement of smart contracts makes the blockchain such a powerful tool.
The blockchain will soon be universal in use as the computer.
Medical records etc.

You can make a contract in ethereum, deploy it, and then you will be indeed able to store text strings / links to pictures.

There have been some guys that indeed stored pictures on the ETH Chain, see here, https://boobies.surge.sh/#after - / NSFW-ish, Pretty funny, that this is so easily possible, and can be stored indefinitely.

yes its dapps technologie, it can stor any kinf of data

It's still difficult to store big amounts of data in a public blockchain, but it is easier for private blockchain.
For example, IPDB will not allow you to write more than 100MB/month for now.

Check out https://www.bigchaindb.com/, you can use their architecture on your own nodes.

Yea, like everyone is saying. It is possible but for large amounts of data it isnt feasible - and most definitely isn't feasible for confidential data. I think there is potential for this capability in the future. Technology is something which is constantly evolving and developing but as of now it isn't a viable idea to store large amounts of data on the blockchain.

The very blockchain itself is keeping information as we speak. We can keep all sorts of information in it including everything that you mentioned. But everything that you place in it is right there forever. Can you categorize? It depends on the blockchain you are using.

So Is there any solution for this? I want to solve this problem and I think If a person can solve this problem, He can be HERO!

Yes. I have to categorize this data and I thought that I can use SVM(Support Vector Machine) for categorizing this data. Is it possible ha?

There are lots of ICOs already that allow us to prove the authorship of the files that means they are stored in Blockchain. It may be wrong, but I definitely saw such things on b-talk

I know everything is possible with blockchain technology.
you can do whatever you want with software just imagine

Yes of course and as I know there are some attempts by BitFury on it. Georgia is going to make something similar like storing information of home owners, building owners, place owners and etc. It's high standart of security and as you know blockchain technology, no one can edit anything because information is store and confirmed by every user.
I bet you'll see (OP) that features in very near future.

Thank you so much for your great response!  :)

The way I see it, blockchain is only a way to ensure no data is tampered with without the acknowledgement of all users.

In other words, it is a public ledger - a public book of all transactions or changes.

So I think you could record that information but you cannot change it when the transaction is made.

So where would this “big data” be stored at? Would you have an offchain database to write your large datasets to?  For instance, a medical records company that is producing 300GB of data a day

Yes, blockchain is a database and you can keep all information that you want (in case if you build your own blockchain). If you want to use some existing blockchain like ethereum, you need check that this blockchain support. More existing blockchains is not designed to store large files in one block.