Bitcoin Forum

I am looking for help in creating a website on blockchain. Can someone please tell me how such a website can be created by a layman who does not have much technical knowledge.

Please provide a little bit more context :)

You can in theory "embed" a very simple, static, compressed HTML web page in OP_RETURN data. But you would need a tool to retrieve it.

You're aware that a bigger website would need lots of space on the blockchain, which (at least in Bitcoin) you will have to pay with transaction fees?

For bigger websites I would recommend a protocol like ZeroNet (https://zeronet.io/) or IPFS (https://ipfs.io/), but that's not "on blockchain". WebTorrent (https://webtorrent.io/) is also a cool tool to experiment with. You can combine the two approaches, using a blockchain to point to a website which "lives" on a P2P filesharing network like Torrent or IPFS, like demostrated in the Web2Web (https://github.com/elendirx/web2web) experiment.

A website "on blockchain" or about blockchain ?

If you want to create a fully decentralized web, you won't come far without much technical knowledge.
There are already a few projects out there which aim to do exactly that, creating a distributed, trustless web.

Maybe you could be a little bit more specific what exactly you are trying to accomplish?

@d5000, thank you for the reply. What would you recommend between zeronet and ipfs. And is it easy to create a website using these platforms.

ZeroNet is definitively easier, IPFS is more technical (but has some nice properties for complex websites, as you address pages like in a "file system").

In ZeroNet there are already some tools like ZeroBlog (https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroBlog) where you can create a blog without HTML knowledge. To create a totally independent site with custom HTML you can follow this tutorial (https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using_zeronet/create_new_site/), there is also a easy web interface for that.

Thank you for the information. If a user has to access a decentralized website, then can he access it just like an http website typing domain on the browser?

In the case of ZeroNet, not directly. The user must either:

- install the ZeroNet software. He/she then will be able to connect to the BitTorrent network and download sites with his browser. Sites are identified with a Bitcoin address. Namecoin domains are also possible.
- or use a proxy (see here for a tool to access them (https://zero.acelewis.com/)). In this case he can access the site like a "regular" webpage with the browser, without having to install the software. He also needs to know the Bitcoin address or Namecoin domain associated with the site. The drawback: The proxy is obviously centralized, a single point of failure.

Important: The Bitcoin addresses used for ZeroNet sites are completely independent from the Bitcoin network. They don't need balance on it, they're only an identifier to access the site in the ZeroNet network. However, this concept has a very nice property: You can send donations or other payments directly to the website's Bitcoin address. As the owner will have access to the private key associated to it, he will be able to access the paid Bitcoins. The drawback is obviously privacy, as you always will know which site belongs to a specific address.

Like unstoppabledomains.com? They use the Ethereum's network to store the content, and deliver it through some gateways around the world. But, I personaly think that is no longer decentralized, once I don't have hardware to directly download the chain and retrieve my site(they chain is very big, if you download the whole data), I have to trust in third parties, like cloudfire. ZeroNet and similars are very better

There's also Beaker Browser (https://beakerbrowser.com/). It uses the dat protocol, and since there are extensions that let you view websites that use dat:// for both chrome and firefox, people don't even necessarily need to download Beaker.

I have experience with ZeroNet, it's definitely cool. You essentially downloads the whole resources when you open a website tho, including video and things like that. But it's still not that popular, so I doubt your web will get a large traffic even if it's interesting. At least for now.

This is a bad idea. Imagine if you have a functioning website, and it's successful. AND it has visitors. All it would take for someone to screw with you is to get your current version of the website with your customer data and create a spoof website, by essentially forking you.

Which is why I wouldn't recommend you to do this. Just my opinion.

There are already similar things going on with Steem and Hive, but you generally find that the quality of content there isn't great, so it's rarely anybody's main source of information.

Good point, but it doesn't mean that descentralized websites are pointless. "Customer data" or other personal data should never be exposed in a public way. So yes, you should never create a "decentralized website" with personal information of anyone (besides of the site owner if he really wants to).

Decentralized websites should be treated the same way than static HTML websites. Everything what you publish there is public. If someone forks your site without your authorization, essentially it's a copyright violation, but other harm would not be done. (A CC-BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license would be an interesting option to prevent this, at least legally. It would only allow non-commercial forks, and forking without commercial intentions is kind of pointless. Even better would be a custom "no fork" license which only allows redistribution of the original, not a fork.)

So what would be the use cases? Mainly, blogs and other informational sites, and open-source/open content projects. One of the prime examples, which is often mentioned of decentralized web advocats, are "uncensorable" blogs for opposition activists in authoritarian countries.

Sites which sell something can also be built with this technology, but they cannot include customer data. Communication must be established via other means, an example could be tools like Retroshare.