The blockchain technology is really one of the most innovative creations of the past hundred years and its implications have just begun to unfold. The blockchain technology has out-grew processing of payments and is now being used in legal documentation, even David and Joyce Mondrus were the first couple to get married over bitcoin’s blockchain. To my surprise, I also discovered that some can store pictures and other interesting data on the blockchain, so how can this be done?
The Nelson Mandela Image:
The blockchain includes a picture of Nelson Mandela and some tribute words. This data has been encoded via bitcoin addresses in minor bitcoin transactions so this is stored forever on the blockchain.
Most probably, this data has been stored on the blockchain after encrypting it to hexadecimal values into bitcoin addresses. The image below contains one of the bitcoin transactions used to store Nelson’s image and tribute text. This transaction involves sending a some satoshis to this address 15gHNr4TCKmhHDEG31L2XFNvpnEcnPSQvd which is stored on the blockchain in a hexadecimal format. When this hexadecimal code is decrypted to Unicode, you will get the string 3Nelson-Mandela.jpg? which represents the file of the image. Accordingly, it is possible to store pictures, text and other forms of content via using some bitcoin addresses to send few satoshis worth of bitcoin transactions.
The idea of using the blockchain for storage of data is as old as bitcoin itself,as the Genesis block, which is the first ever mined bitcoin block, included a coded message; however, we still haven’t seen major applications deploying the blockchain for storage of data. The most interesting thing about the blockchain is it can also help protect Copyrights of various forms of content as once data is stored on the blockchain, it can never be changed. Accordingly, musicians, movie producers and even hobbyists can benefit a lot from the blockchain revolution.
“When this hexadecimal code is decrypted to Unicode, you will get the string 3Nelson-Mandela.jpg? which represents the file of the image. Accordingly, it is possible to store pictures, text and other forms of content via using some bitcoin addresses to send few satoshis worth of bitcoin transactions.”
That makes no sense. If you store data and get some filename then the file name is in the blockchain and not the image itself.
Look at you, patronizing people to pretend like you know what you are
talking about… so cute. Or wait, the other thing… tedious.
Regardless of whether or not the image was stored, the point that Milly
mentions is valid. Likewise, to send any image would require a significant
number of sitoshis to store anything of interest. In addition, the
article says “when this hexadecimal code is decrypted to unicode [sic]”
about a string which isnt hexadecimal. Definitely not a super-technical
article, as the author uses the word “decrypts” rather than “converts”.
Hex isnt necessarily encrypted by nature, and I dont think that the
aforementioned conversion would qualify as an encryption of any kind.
the article says :
“(…) this address
15gHNr4TCKmhHDEG31L2XFNvpnEcnPSQvd which is stored on the blockchain in a
hexadecimal format. When this hexadecimal code is (…)”
“hexadecimal” was refering to the hexadecimal format of the address … so it was refering to an hex