[HN Gopher] Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain
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Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain
Author : kens
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-04-13 23:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cirosantilli.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cirosantilli.com)
| nixass wrote:
| No "Epstein didn't kill himself". Sad.
| wyck wrote:
| Blockchain pollution.
| drcode wrote:
| For those who don't know, Bitcoin Maximalists generally view
| all non-monetary uses of Bitcoin as a bad thing.
|
| This is different from the Ethereans, who believe that most use
| cases are fine, as long as people pay the requisite transaction
| fees.
| stevehawk wrote:
| is there potential for a denial of service attack on the
| blockchain if people just started inundating it with useless
| data entries?
| retrac wrote:
| Yes, this happened very early on with Bitcoin. Casinos
| where every wager was a transaction. Then some started
| actively just spamming.
|
| It led to the transaction pricing mechanism. Every
| transaction includes a bid on how much you'll pay to have
| it included in the chain. Miners pick the highest bids from
| recently broadcast transactions. There's no _requirement_
| to do so but it 's economically incentivized, as the miner
| receives the transaction fee. Any sustained attack becomes
| very expensive. And other users can still pay the asking
| price to get their transaction in the next few blocks.
|
| Bitcoin has in practice maxed out the great majority of
| blocks (about 1 MB per 10 minutes) for a while now, and so
| many cheap transactions just never get processed as they're
| always outbid.
| reidjs wrote:
| That happened on Ethereum with a game called exit.scam
| where the last person who buys a token wins, but every time
| someone buys one the timer resets. In order to win the game
| a bunch of miners colluded to make it impossible to get a
| transaction through, guaranteeing they bought the last one.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I did this to namecoin for fun with a bash script for 36
| hours in a loop once. This is a true story. Back in the
| merge mining days they gave them out for free and no one
| knew what to do with them.
|
| I took all the public namecoin addresses I could find and
| put them in a text file and sent everyone dust. Fun times.
| bombcar wrote:
| This has basically already occurred IIRC - the entire
| bitcoin blockchain is now too massive for most people to
| entirely download and authenticate; most people rely on
| exchanges, etc to do it for them.
| spinny wrote:
| Not really that big yet. i keep a full copy that is a few
| weeks behind, i'm running the client with the -txindex
| argument, which indexes all transactions (and takes up a
| little extra space), currently is at 414 GB.
|
| The initial sync from block 0 can take a while, but after
| having an almost synced copy, getting it up to date is
| fast
|
| I remember thinking "this will never work" after reading
| the bitcoin whitepaper, i assumed that at some point only
| supernodes would exist. We might be getting there, be we
| are not there yet, and definitely moving at a slower pace
| than my initial prediction. Holding 400-500 GB is still
| very attainable today at a small cost
| sashimi-houdini wrote:
| It only "worked" by not actually being useful as a
| globally distributed currency for microtransactions
| (which was the original promise)
| jude- wrote:
| They all paid the tx fees. Therefore, not pollution.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Just because you paid a fee to dump your waste doesn't mean
| it's not waste.
|
| Yes, they paid the transaction fee to get put into a block,
| but now their data sits in the blockchain and eats up storage
| space on every device that maintains a copy of the chain. For
| a financial transaction you can at least comfort yourself
| with the knowledge that the "pollution" is an entry in a
| finance ledger, but not so here. The transaction fee is set
| based on how much people are willing to pay _right now_ to
| get a transaction through, it doesn 't factor in the long-
| term cost to store that transaction on every machine that
| needs to host it in the future... that cost is ignored.
| crazypython wrote:
| > every device that maintains a copy of the chain.
|
| Of the full chain. You can run a Bitcoin full node in
| pruned mode, only using the most recent 5GB, with more or
| less the same security. (A 3-day chain reorg would be
| needed to reduce the security of your full node.)
|
| It does make it take longer to set up a pruned node,
| though.
| mike00632 wrote:
| Does a copy of the entire chain need to be stored
| anywhere?
|
| I'm thinking this is more relevant to the vision of ETH
| being a computer. I can't imagine every memory ever
| processed being stored into perpetuity.
| [deleted]
| jude- wrote:
| Miners decide which transactions are "pollution" and which
| are not. Not you, and not the parent.
|
| Seriously, who are you to tell _anyone_ what data is
| "pollution" and what data isn't? Like, do you go around to
| people on their laptops in cafes and tell them to delete
| their files off the Internet because you think they're
| wastes of space?
|
| EDIT: Having a bespoke data field (OP_RETURN) in a Bitcoin
| transaction is an _improvement_ on this front, because it
| provides a cheaper alternative to people storing the same
| data encoded as potentially-spendable UTXOs.
| kjrose wrote:
| Oh this is barely scratching the surface. This is a ton of random
| information on the blockchain, including stuff which is highly
| illegal globally. In fact, I remember when a group was actively
| putting certain photos and such as an attempt to see if they
| would make having large chunks of the blockchain become illegal
| because you would possess this data.
|
| I didn't follow it for too long, but I'm pretty sure no one found
| a way to remove it.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Once you need a custom client that's programmed to stitch
| together arbitrary bytes stored across N transactions to
| reproduce a bad image, it doesn't seem to be much different or
| any less savory than writing one that can find the same bytes
| from specific offsets across N articles on nytimes.com or one
| that plucks them out of a stream from /dev/random.
|
| The inaccessibility of viewing this data seems to make the
| world of difference versus, say, looking at the images that
| appear in your web browser when you go to badsite.com.
| sneak wrote:
| Indeed. Schneier even made this bogus "illegal data in the
| blockchain" style claim recently.
| kart23 wrote:
| Eh, some explorers do show op_return data in ASCII, so you
| could definitely see messages in a browser without too much
| work or a 'custom client'.
|
| From an example thats in the article, click on details and
| look at OP_RETURN: https://mempool.space/tx/0540b5dda23ee8703
| 30c6b1e18a88c592cf...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yes, but that's just ASCII. What is your idea of a 80 byte
| globally illegal ASCII message that isn't just a URL
| elsewhere?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controv
| ers...
| sneak wrote:
| X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-
| TEST-FILE!$H+H*
|
| I haven't scanned the blockchain lately but I'd be
| surprised if this isn't in there already.
| spinny wrote:
| it is, just like many other sig that will trip the AV and
| delete the blockchain. if running on windows it's a good
| idea to add the btc data dir to the av exclusion list
| eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote:
| Not necessary, Bitcoin Core obfuscates the data on disk
| for the very same reason which we're discussing here :)
| kjrose wrote:
| well, and you'd need to know all the places they put them.
| twox2 wrote:
| I think the difference is that the bitcoin blockchain might
| outlive a certain article being accessible on nytimes. The
| nytiems article can be edited, blockchain data not as much.
| cirosantilli wrote:
| Not doubting you, but I'm really curious how that highly
| illegal data is encoded, because for the life of me, I couldn't
| find it :-)
| sneak wrote:
| "Highly illegal" always sets off my breathless sensationalism
| detector in the same way that "heavily encrypted" does.
| saagarjha wrote:
| (Child pornography.)
| mike00632 wrote:
| Was it in Austin Powers?:
|
| "How fatal?"
|
| "Completely"
| john37386 wrote:
| It's very interesting and funny in a way. What is more
| interesting though is the website of the OP. Wow! It's the
| perfect marriage between old school and new. I'm amazed!
| cirosantilli wrote:
| CONVERT TO CIRODOWN TODAY: https://cirosantilli.com/cirodown/
| reidjs wrote:
| I wrote a similar article on this for Ethereum a few years ago:
|
| https://reidjs.medium.com/top-6-weird-innovative-and-hilario...
|
| Sorry for the clickbaity title (it was for work)
| _wldu wrote:
| This is similar to the PGP key server poisoning. All write-only
| systems that are publicly accessible will have this
| vulnerability.
| timdaub wrote:
| Ah good times...
|
| during college I encoded a few things into Bitcoin. I wrote a
| small script myself [1]. I started by sending a love letter to my
| girl friend back then. It didn't age well haha.
|
| Next, for an application, I sent a cover letter through a
| transaction [2] but they never replied!
|
| - 1: https://www.npmjs.com/package/string-to-btc-addresses
|
| - 2: https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-
| txids/b...
| cirosantilli wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your story!!! That's the spirit.
| justinzollars wrote:
| My roommate scared me away from bitcoin in 2010 because it was
| filled with child pornongraphy. I wish I would have never had
| that conversation because it was trading for like 1 dollar.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/bitcoins-blockchain-caught-loaded...
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Assuming you wouldn't have sold all of it at $2.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Assuming you didn't lose it to MtGox, to Quadriga or myriad
| other ways. Crypto is just a digital obstacle course designed
| to transfer "wealth" to the "strongest hands" lol.
| mike00632 wrote:
| Today I tried to find my old Doge coins we were sending
| around as tips on Reddit. That's all gone too.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/reddit-users-lose-real-money-after-
| meme-...
| retrac wrote:
| I cashed it all out at $31. Just a bubble. I was shocked it
| ever reached $1. Clearly it was a fluke. After the crash I
| doubted it would ever break $10 again.
|
| I do somewhat regret the used video card I bought for 115
| BTC. But I would have probably sold it at the $2 peak anyway,
| and definitely at the $31.
|
| Lol. Sigh. I can't really complain. Never made enough to even
| really impact my taxes. But still a decent bit of pocket
| money from distributed magic Internet bucks over the last
| decade.
| sneak wrote:
| Links to child pornography are not child pornography.
|
| It's quite inaccurate to say that bitcoin is loaded with CP.
| lucasnortj wrote:
| there is no cool data in the blockchain, cryptos are pointless
| tech for pointless people
| cirosantilli wrote:
| While I disagree with the statement that there is nothing cool
| in the blockchain (as suggested by my article ;-)), I have made
| a critique of its actual practical value at:
| https://cirosantilli.com/cryptocurrency But I'm not an expert,
| do let me know if I have missed any key technological
| developments or benchmarks. So for now, I treat it only as art.
| spicybright wrote:
| Thanks for contributing to the discussion.
| quenix wrote:
| Your comment misses the point completely.
| ExcavateGrandMa wrote:
| WoW that's a clever and wide study from the surface of bitcoin...
|
| after, meeting ken sherrif's (long ago...) post about BTC... I
| spawned VMs and played a little around sources & bin behavior...
|
| I made a testing blockchain into my network... mined firsts
| blocks with some antminer U1... and then... I was successful in
| recovering testing wallet using a "fixed" length random hash...
| the only problem I met were that throwing this hash repeatedly
| into the testing blockchain led to a high delay while the btc
| wallet reading blockchain...
|
| Oh and one day... cryptsy were unavailable and my hardly mined
| coins...
|
| It's life...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I love the site, love the dingy underworld feel of the junk
| inserted into the ledger, and wish I had more of this in my life.
| cirosantilli wrote:
| That's exactly how I feel about the aesthetics of the
| blockchain. The medium itself really contributes to the final
| effect. Special kudos to AtomSea and EMBII for the significant
| part they've played in this, thanked them directly at:
| https://twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1382080760774033415
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(page generated 2021-04-15 23:01 UTC)