Can I use the Blockchain to store infinity messages?

[afriace]

Hi All,

I was thinking if its possible to run a website where everybody can leave a message/story on the blockchain.

If I understand the blockchain correctly, the data storage is decentralized and theoretically the blockchain could run infinitely.

So maybe people in the future can read what we did in our time

Thanks in advance if someone bothered to give me an answer.

Nas

[Charles-Tim]

Literally anything can be stored on blockchain, but stored not for privacy, but for easy accessibility and robustness internet. This seem more like young for now, but there are more approaches towards achieving decentralized internet (web 3.0) which will make your aim fulfilled. In this case, there will be miners that will make use of their computers or maybe other powerful equipments to store the data on blockchain which will be available for public to access.

[FinneysTrueVision]

I think Bcash used to have something like this called memo.cash. With Bitcoin you can do the same thing but there is a limit to how much arbitrary data can be included in a transaction. Your message will be stored on the blockchain forever but I am not sure why it is necessary to do this. It is not what the Bitcoin blockchain is intended to do and it creates bloat.

[ranochigo]

Your idea isn't new there are sites that can already help their user to embed messages into the Blockchain.

It is not cheap however. Transaction fees are fairly huge and even for 1 KB of data, it'll take up to 10K satoshis. Each transaction can have up to 80bytes of arbitrary data in the form of OP_return. If you were to split the file, it'll take quite a few transactions which will inflate your costs significantly regardless.

[nc50lc]

I was thinking if its possible to run a website where everybody can leave a message/story on the blockchain.

It is possible but I wouldn't advice it since it adds unnecessary bloat to the blockchain aside from the limitations explained above.
In addition to that, here's a reply from stackexhange about OP_RETURN: Maximum size of data Bitcoin OP_RETURN tx can handle?

[bitmover]

Hi All,

I was thinking if its possible to run a website where everybody can leave a message/story on the blockchain.

If I understand the blockchain correctly, the data storage is decentralized and theoretically the blockchain could run infinitely.

The problem with this idea is that all the messages, running and recording infinitely, will be replicated to all bitcoin nodes.

You will need mine each block with useless "infinity" messages.  And mining a block costs energy, and energy is a world resource. You are basically wasting world resources. This is why ranochigo said it isn't cheap. You are going to pay for all that energy.

Alternatively, there are people storing messages is not in the blockchain, but they use lightning network to communicate


https://www.coindesk.com/how-bitcoins-lightning-can-be-used-for-private-messaging

Jager told CoinDesk:

“Lightning is a peer to peer network in which anyone can participate. There is no central entity that has the ultimate power to decide on [what] users are allowed to communicate.”

Private messaging is a hot topic in the digital age, as it’s easy for bad actors to intercept messages that aren’t encrypted. Apps such as Signal and Wire give users more privacy, but private messaging is still far from everywhere.

[pooya87]

So maybe people in the future can read what we did in our time

It is possible but the real question you need to ask yourself is "wouldn't a blog or a website achieve the same thing?" You could write "messages" in that blog/website and it will remain on the internet for a very long time so that people in the future can read what you wrote.
The difference however is that a blog/website is designed to "store messages" while bitcoin blockchain is not.

[NotATether]

If I understand the blockchain correctly, the data storage is decentralized and theoretically the blockchain could run infinitely.

It's not actually infinite.

The blockchain is located on each node's hard drive. Many people are running nodes using hard drives like the ones you have, so, if we let a large amount of messages get written on the blockchain, here node's will run out of disk space.

Also, real people who are trying to send money now have to wait longer for their transactions to confirm because of a bunch of message "transactions" in the mempool (unconfirmed transaction waiting list).

[willoweb7]

Maybe infinite was meant figuratively if you read anything by Marvin Minski you know that an "infinite machine" is not really infinite at all. It should have been called perpetual as infinite is just a value-judgment (that is an ethical injunction) rather than an actual calculable value (something quantifiable as opposed to something of ethical consequence).

[nullius]

Hi All,

I was thinking if its possible to run a website where everybody can leave a message/story on the blockchain.

If I understand the blockchain correctly, the data storage is decentralized and theoretically the blockchain could run infinitely.

So maybe people in the future can read what we did in our time

Thanks in advance if someone bothered to give me an answer.

Nas

It depends.  Do you have infinite money to pay infinite fees to store your infinite spam in the world’s slowest, most inefficient, most expensive database?


My gentle suggestion for you:

• Go to https://ipfs.io/ (off-topic for discussion here, unless your use case relates to Bitcoin).
• Don’t use hammers to cut wood, or saws to drive in nails.
• Understand that the blockchain is not magic pixie dust that can be sprinkled onto any problem.  The blockchain is a tool.  For some jobs, this tool is better than any other—the best tool ever invented!  For others, it is the wrong tool for the job.

HTH, HAND.

[Charles-Tim]

Also, real people who are trying to send money now have to wait longer for their transactions to confirm because of a bunch of message "transactions" in the mempool (unconfirmed transaction waiting list).

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.

[nullius]

Also, real people who are trying to send money now have to wait longer for their transactions to confirm because of a bunch of message "transactions" in the mempool (unconfirmed transaction waiting list).

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.

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.

[NeuroticFish]

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.

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.

[hugeblack]

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.

[NotATether]

“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.

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.


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

[NeuroticFish]

Why do so many people misunderstand blockchain, specifically decentralization?

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.

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

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).

[d5000]

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).

[Quickseller]

So maybe people in the future can read what we did in our time

It is possible but the real question you need to ask yourself is "wouldn't a blog or a website achieve the same thing?" You could write "messages" in that blog/website and it will remain on the internet for a very long time so that people in the future can read what you wrote.
The difference however is that a blog/website is designed to "store messages" while bitcoin blockchain is not.

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.

If I understand the blockchain correctly, the data storage is decentralized

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.

[pooya87]

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.

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!

[NotATether]

Do you know whether it' hardware limitation or limitation of IPFS software which isn't designed to host hundred TB data? If it's hardware limitation, using SSD would solve the problem, just like how you run ETH full node.

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.