Bitcoin Forum

Ever since merchants have started accepting Bitcoins, the value of a Bitcoin has only gone down in a hyperinflationary fashion, and for the very good reason that the merchants themselves have nothing to do with their BTC other then sell it back for fiat.

The fact is that up until now there has been no actual real world Use Value for Bitcoin.  You can pay taxes with dollars, you can make jewelry with gold, and you can feed your family with options in the corn market, but there is nothing you can use a Bitcoin for to give it a foundational value. So far.

The truth however is that Bitcoin has one giant Use Value lurking in the background, but one that the developers don't like - One can use Bitcoin to inject information into the blockchain, and that information will last for all of time (or at least so long as the blockchain exists).  In a word, it would mean you can use Bitcoin to save your files to the blockchain, in an uncensorable and inerasable form. 

Blockchain as file storage - it will cause Bitcoin to go back up in value, and it will give us a solid reason to give for why Bitcoin has value in the first place.

Is it time?

Money is still moving in and out of bitcoin so this is irrelevant.


And hopefully the rest of the world will realize the usefulness and mulch-purpose of the blockchain at some point. All we can do is keep spreading awareness and wait patiently.

I'm sure that is the right time that bitcoin will be bought and this drop price will make new consumers .
And also can get some investor.

I don't think this is really true. You can spend it on many things and that number is growing daily, and I also think I read somewhere that you can actually pay your taxes in bitcoin too ;D. But yes I agree there lies many other benefits in the blockchain that people are not exploiting yet.

Presently, this only requires an acceptable “null data” transaction. A singular “satoshi” (i.e., one hundred-millionth of one bitcoin) could fund this transaction.

I'm currently paying for a back-up plan for my files, and I have 500 Gb available for little money. Why would I bother with the blockchain to store inconveniently a few bits?

Your current Backup plan is likely dependent on either a counter party to maintain their servers even during a time of severe crisis, or on you keeping your data stored on a piece of physical technology that is liable to break, get corrupted, lost, or stolen. 

Storing on the blockchain isn't cheap enough for you to use it to store your several GBs of fun pictures and family videos, but for that core 1mb or so of truly important information that you simply cannot afford to lose, it can be the most enduring and most secure option.

Even if every “null data” transaction could only store one byte of information, the “one time” purchase of one megabyte of storage in the Bitcoin blockchain could still amount to a mere one million “satoshis” (i.e., one hundreth of one bitcoin).

I dont agree that merchants cause the price to go down. I think its the Mt.Gox closing down that killed the price coz in my opinion Gox also caused the price to go $1k.

Blockchain as file storage is a fundamentally bad concept because it is incredibly expensive and the ledger provides a poor compromise between redundancy and cost.  When you store or backup some data how many copies do you need.   The correct answer is one.   The only reason we use redundancy in some form is because failure is a possibility.  0 surviving copies is worthless and 1 copy is maximum value.   Since we can't know how, when, or why a copy will be destroyed the cheapest form of insurance is to maintain more copies.   The problem is that each additional copy provides a smaller incremental gain however the cost of that additional copy increasingly linearly.   The blockchain isn't partially redundant it is perfectly redundant for security reasons.   If there are 100,000 nodes you don't gain incrementally much more by having 100,000 copies of your data than you do by having say 100 copies but the true cost is 1000x more. That is a bad tradeoff for bulk storage.

Also it doesn't allow for decentralized competition, innovation, and diversity of offerings. Thus it is antifragile a.k.a. the antithesis of resiliency with incremental failure, i.e. fragile.

The utility of the block chain is for decentralized consensus. You don't need consensus about which files you want to store in the cloud.

The advantage is that due to the incentive structure, if you want to mine Bitcoins you will have to store all data in the blockchain. This means that while any other web service or data storage company may go belly up and shut down servers when they stop getting an inflow of customers, for Bitcoin as long as mining is profitable your data will always be stored on a large number of nodes which have good economic self interest in preserving it. It is really the only service that can offer that sort of economic guarantee.

The number of nodes (100, 100,000, etc) isn't what matters, but rather that Bitcoin nodes are actually getting paid to store data.

It actually allows for an incredible amount of competition.  You can store your data on Bitcoin, but you can also store it on Litecoin, Doge, etc. etc...  If Bitcoin wants to shut out data storage, Doge can always pick up the slack and become coin #1 among the file storage community. Coins will finally have a sound platform for excelling against each other in the economic arena.

Sorry but that is incorrect. To launch an altcoin and reach the level of mining that the network is secure is not a feat that happens very often. Your average entrepreneur can't launch that.

As I said, the level of diversified competition will be greatly inhibited.

A miner of bitcoins, or any derivative thereof that has not been made to do otherwise, can willfully exclude the “null data” type of transaction from the blocks he or she mines and still have the blocks accepted.

I personally don't use null codes when encoding data into the blockchain.  They may be the right way to go eventually with enough development support, but as you bring up for now it is actually best if one doesn't depend on any unusual transaction behaviors like null codes to encode data.

It doesn't matter how you do it, if it's unique enough, it can be filtered out.

Note that the transaction below contains the entire Bill of Rights encoded into the blockchain using only the normal methods of transaction formation.  How would you filter it out?

http://bit-comm.appspot.com/packet/d71e39e493a1eaa4eb7c39e5a34ceb002649315321b3cc6e9ea25fcc765de1c3?expanded=true

(Red colorization added.)

"[E]xclusive use of . . . pay-to-script-hash [P2SH] within all . . . transaction outputs" should do it.

Not being a core Bitcoin developer, I don't know what that actually means.  Questions that arise from it though:
1. What is a Great Empire Coin, Writcoin, and what do they have to do with Bitcoin?
2. Is the gist of your contention that the core Dev team wants to in some way take control of what we can and cannot spend our Bitcoins on, and vigilantly control our Bitcoin spending based on some "father knows best" algorithm?

It means what it sounds like: coins are addressed to hashes (double SHA-256 hashes?) of X-coin scripts instead of X-coin addresses.

A miner could also regulate the number of outputs he or she permits a transaction to have.

The latter point is of course true, and I fully expect that data transactions will pay their fair portion in miners fees to be seen as worthwhile from a miner's perspective.  It is after all only fair.

As to the former point though, I still don't really know what you are saying.  Also, I really do want to know what a Great Empire Coin is.

1. An X-coin transaction that is addressed to an X-coin address contains an X-coin "script" which includes the actual address and some related commands. An X-coin transaction that is addressed to an X-coin "script hash" contains an X-coin "script" which includes the message digest of the aforementioned kind of script and some related commands.

2. Great Empire Coin (GEC) is the official currency of Great Empire of Earth (https://rgeo5wj7gneidzh3.onion.lt) in much the same way the United States dollar (USD) is the official currency of the United States of America (http://USA.gov).

1. You need to explain to me why I care about the scripts - are you saying that transactions can been erased, that the network will start rejecting ones it doesn't like, or what?

2. I feel like I know less then before, but I'm pretty sure that "Great Empire of Earth" is not something that should show up in technical documentation for Bitcoin, or any other ostensibly serious endeavor.

1. A message digest produced by a cryptographically secure hash function cannot be run through the algorithm in such a way as it reproduces the data that was used to generate it. Therefore, the data hashed by one or more of these functions for the sake of fulfilling an X-coin network's requirement for transactions' addressing their outputs to, ultimately, message digests will not be useful for storing information but, merely, the message digests derived therefrom by practically "irreversible" means.

2. a) Bitcoin Core for Writcoin™ (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=776426.0) is a Bitcoin Core derivative specificaly designed to transact digital GE coins over Writcoin™ (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=776426.0), a network.
2. b) Great Empire of Earth is an empire whose imperium is an Earth-centered celestial sphere of a radius of about eight hundred seventy thousand kilometers.

I see, I apologize for encouraging your trolling. 

How, then, do you intend to recover data from its cryptographically secure message digest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_digest)?

So long as one can look at the inputs and outputs of every single transaction going back to the very first transaction, which one can currenly do in Bitcoin (https://blockchain.info/tx/f4184fc596403b9d638783cf57adfe4c75c605f6356fbc91338530e9831e9e16), then the data will be available. 

Those base58 message digest of "public keys" will have been replaced with base58 message digests of cryptographically secure message digests. That's what you're not understanding: all the output scripts would contain would be cryptographically secure message digests and their required data, and inputs would still be required to be able to sign the outputs they spend.

I am very much doubting your claim to the implementation of transaction destruction, as that is not how Bitcoin currently works, is mentioned by no one other then yourself, and it would make a mockery of the Proof of Work model.

Here's how it works:
[sender]
1. Get hash of recipients "regular" script.
2. Create transaction addressed to hash of recipients regular script.
3. Broadcast the transaction.

[recipient]
4. Receive the transaction.
5. Sign my regular script whose message digest (hash) I gave out.
6. Create transaction with that signature.
7. Broadcast transaction.


It works because someone can still check the signed script for whether or not it actually corresponds to the given message digest or not. As well, since the full script would have been in the signature anyway?, it actually reduces the size of a given block since transaction outputs would always contain scripts of a certain, relatively small size.

That wouldn't prevent the encoding of non-txn data in blockchain.   Those who want to would simply place the encoded data in place of a valid script hash in the output.   One can't verify the 256 bits provides represents a hash of a valid script and not some other arbitrary data.  The script hash isn't verified until the output is spent by hashing the input script hashing it and comparing it to the recorded output ScriptHash.   Compared to the existing network this would actually be a step backwards because unlike OP_RETURN the network wouldn't know the output is unspendable (it just would never be spent).   This means it would bloat not only the blockchain but the UTXO set as well.

Also while I like the "script hash only" concept (although not for the incorrect reasons you give) it doesn't make blocks any smaller.  The script will not be in the output however it will not mean the script is in the input so outputs become smaller but inputs become larger.

1. I will concede your foremost assertion.

2. Actually, since Writcoin™ (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=776426.0) doesn’t require its transactions to have inputs (each client is, essentially, a branch of the GE’s central bank), its “script hash only” design could ensure its blocks remain comparatively small.

Wouldn't this cause the problem of bloat in the blockchain? As it already is, takes forever to download the entire 6 years worth of blockchain.

Success and growing adoption are the single largest factors that cause the "bloat" of the blockchain.  How long will it take you to download the blockchain if Bitcoin actually catches on and 1% of online sales are made through it?