I wish to put a 5 mb file and preserve it on the blockchain, I will also pay.

[redhawk979]

How much child porn is in  this 5 MB file you want to store?

[cr1776]

Its basically 5 full blocks.

If only, OP_RETURN only takes 40 bytes.  So if you made a smallish transaction it would be 10% of it.  So something like 50 MB to do it.

If you did it 3 times a day you have consumed the more than entire block bandwidth.

It could also be encoded in addresses AFAIK which takes less space. I was assuming perfect use of block space, which of course is not realistic and an actual solution would waste even more space. The white paper by satoshi is said to be in this transaction[1] which has only ~7% overhead.


[1] https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/tx/54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713

Yes.

The problem for any of these solutions is that then the reassembly and decompression algorithm has to be stored somewhere. Eg. Which blocks? Or at minimum, which op_returns to combine in which order.

At 40 bytes each, that is 125,000 transaction - ordered, one per block.  Then you'd just need to know the address to reassemble.  It might take 250,000-500,000 blocks since you wouldn't want to do them out of order, so they'd have to be spaced out to avoid orphan out of order issues. And you run the risk of op_return going away later.  edit:  If you waited every 6 blocks to submit a transaction (even assuming it is mined in the next block) that is 24 per day or 5000 days total to encode it, about 13.6 years.

[cr1776]

Perhaps a better solution might be Google's Nearline or Amazon Glacier.  With Nearline, at a penny/month/gigabtye, you could prepay 12000 months (1000 years) for about $120.  (Assuming they are still around then, allow it etc).  Or use both, plus Microsoft's version, a torrent, and Freenet for ultimate redundancy.

Then encode a link in the blockchain, or a proof-of-existence etc.

[calme]

A blockchain could be a brilliant way of preserving family traditions. Like if you could get your dad to screw a dog and then you also find a dog to screw, the photos of each could be separate events. You could be the first on the chain of a family tradition that goes on for thousands of years. You don't have to involve your parents with it, but they could think badly of you for seeking family fame and not including them. A family tradition can help keep a family together.

[johnyj]

Yeah, me too. I want to sequence my DNA and then encode it on the blockchain so my DNA is on millions of computers around the world. I hope you don't have a problem with that.

That's a great idea when clone technology is ready in future, but maybe winklevoss twins can afford that 

[AtheistAKASaneBrain]

Maidsafe will solve problems like this in the future, decentralized file storage is finally here, no need to mess with the blockchain.

[KawalGrover]

I wish to preserve this file for later generations.  I have no technical know how to do this,  any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

Look into the Factom project. I believe what they are doing will solve this problem.

[CaptainHerpDerp]

Would it be possible to create an altcoin with a blockchain capbable of holding a 5mb file at a time?

[OROBTC]

...

bitproof.io will hash just about any document and place it on the blockchain.  They also store the original at their website.  Here is an experiment that I recently did, making a document with a photo, some links and a small table of data from MS Excel.  Total size of the document is +/- 530 KB.  The doc can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M-vO0h0W_nLy-Z1Sz8xiYAhaCbmTMThL8FnW7hcoCkw/

I hashed that with bitproof, they placed it (the hash) on the blockchain, and my document is also at their website, it can be opened by the account owner at bitproof (in this case me).

You also need to have the document stored on your (local) computer to hash it, at least for now.

Here is the transaction no. on the blockchain to see what bitproof.io did:

f33e63974710ea830cb8d5126afbac14b1f5dd3ee3a4dc33cb9e4fba59697aaa

If you view this with blockchain.info, you can see the interesting looking coding (near the bottom of the page) for the "OP_RETURN" output mentioned above.

So, by hashing your document (can be large, makes no difference), and placing the HASH on the blockchain (a similar service is offered by proofofexistence.com), and putting in one or more links to whatever it is you want preserved (at Google Docs, Dropbox, etc.).

*   *   *

Someone (IMO) is going to make a lot of money doing this...

factom.org looks like the big player in this space as of now.

*   *   *

Re paying something, bitproof may (or may not) ask for a small fee, they are a new service.  You could also pay (donation) to the Bitcoin Foundation (working on enhancing Bitcoin) or even a small donation to one or more miners (I am going to try and do all of this the next time I put up a doc on the blockchain), probably the key players most affected by "blockchain bloat" feared by the purists...

[nutildah]

I have no affiliation with this website but perhaps something like this would more feasibly suit your needs:

http://storj.io/

Right now it looks like they are still in beta testing but they hope to accomplish the very goal you are trying to achieve.

[funtotry]

I wish to preserve this file for later generations.  I have no technical know how to do this,  any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

http://cryptograffiti.info/

5MB is quite large. Can't you compress it?

What is this website? Is it just scraping all txs for messages? I can't really see but it seems like just a big bitcoin message list.

[amaclin]

I wish to preserve this file for later generations.  I have no technical know how to do this,  any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

1) Do you want to place this file as one piece? (This is not possible today)
2) Do you agree if the data in this file will be split for several (a lot number) pieces?
3) How much can you pay for it? (Today 1kb costs 0.00001...0.0001 btc. So, 5 mb is not very expensive, but not free)

[funtotry]

I wish to preserve this file for later generations.  I have no technical know how to do this,  any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

1) Do you want to place this file as one piece? (This is not possible today)
2) Do you agree if the data in this file will be split for several (a lot number) pieces?
3) How much can you pay for it? (Today 1kb costs 0.00001...0.0001 btc. So, 5 mb is not very expensive, but not free)

This is actually insanely expensive. 1mb is 1000 kb, so that would be multiplied by 5000, so would be 0.5 btc, about 150 US dollars, to store one file...

[amaclin]

This is actually insanely expensive. 1mb is 1000 kb, so that would be multiplied by 5000, so would be 0.5 btc, about 150 US dollars, to store one file...

any whim for your money 

[funtotry]

This is actually insanely expensive. 1mb is 1000 kb, so that would be multiplied by 5000, so would be 0.5 btc, about 150 US dollars, to store one file...

any whim for your money 

And how would this work anyways, you can't "download" txs or something like that, theres no file storage availability in bitcoin, maybe to store small text or something than yea but how would you store a file like an image or video??

[amaclin]

And how would this work anyways, you can't "download" txs or something like that, theres no file storage availability in bitcoin, maybe to store small text or something than yea but how would you store a file like an image or video??

http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html

[redsn0w]

I wish to preserve this file for later generations.  I have no technical know how to do this,  any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

1) Do you want to place this file as one piece? (This is not possible today)
2) Do you agree if the data in this file will be split for several (a lot number) pieces?
3) How much can you pay for it? (Today 1kb costs 0.00001...0.0001 btc. So, 5 mb is not very expensive, but not free)

This is actually insanely expensive. 1mb is 1000 kb, so that would be multiplied by 5000, so would be 0.5 btc, about 150 US dollars, to store one file...

The purpose of this actual bitcoin blockchain is not to "store" a large file, but only a max. of 40 byte of data (like someone has said in the previous posts). If the OP wants to store 5 Mb in one transaction then it will be impossible for the moment (due the limit of the block size ~ 1 MB) maybe in the future if the block size will rise to 10 or 20 MB someone can start "to think" about this function.

Remember that your file will be on each device/pc that has downloaded the entire blockchain (so it could be better to protect it with a password, but if the OP wants to save a file on the bitcoin blockchain then it means he want that information will be "public").

[funtotry]

And how would this work anyways, you can't "download" txs or something like that, theres no file storage availability in bitcoin, maybe to store small text or something than yea but how would you store a file like an image or video??

http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html

Thanks for the good read, funny to see people even having conversations hidden in the blockchain. Very cool how you can embed stuff in the blockchain hidden in plain site. There is some code for storing and removing some files from the blockchain.

[AlanX]

I wish to preserve this file for later generations.  I have no technical know how to do this,  any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

Look into the Factom project. I believe what they are doing will solve this problem.

Factom can *secure* the data, so you can validate and verify data in the future.  It would be expensive to try and store 5 Meg into Factom.  1K = .1 cents, so about $100 dollars to put 5 Meg into Factom.  Then you would need a app to break up your data into ~10K chunks and reconstruct them.

[juju]

I wish to preserve this file for later generations.  I have no technical know how to do this,  any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

Check out - https://github.com/openname/blockstore