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by new299
4794 days ago
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The "encoding method" is ASCII text. The data can be extracted by running "strings *.dat" on the block chain on any UNIX system. After that you can grep through the output. This is not like XORing data, or as some people have said "everything occurs somewhere in the digits of pi". The blockchain in no sense encodes all possible values, or a fraction thereof, the data is trivial to extract. This is much more like, it's sitting on the webserver, but not indexed by google. It's actually even worse than that because you can still just grep through the blockchain and find what your interested in. This may or may not be a problem for bitcoin, but I think it is legally problematic at the moment. This may move us toward a world where it's not illegal to store any particular data or even distribute it. The illegal act might be the viewing or "distribution with intent" or the data. I think that would be an interesting development. Personally as a user of Bitcoin I've deleted the standard qt client, I personally don't want that data on my computer. I now use a blockchainless client (Electrum). |
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An encoding method is ASCII text. You could use ASCII compressed with gzip, or bzip2, or lzma. You could use Unicode. You could use a previous block as the key and encrypt with AES, or Blowfish, or 3DES. You could store an IP address and port rather than a URL as the first six binary octets. Or encode the IP using base64, or hex.
No matter what you use, you have to convey that to the party you're trying to communicate the information with -- you at least have to convey the fact that you've encoded something in the blockchain so that the receiver knows to look for it there. How is it easier to convey "you should download the bitcoin blockchain and run strings against it and the URL is the 352nd one you find [out of the six thousand URLs various unrelated people will have encoded]" than to just send the damn URL directly to the person you're telling where to look for it?
>This may or may not be a problem for bitcoin, but I think it is legally problematic at the moment. This may move us toward a world where it's not illegal to store any particular data or even distribute it. The illegal act might be the viewing or "distribution with intent" or the data. I think that would be an interesting development.
I think it would be a welcome development. Right now people are too afraid to be distributors, which makes things difficult for whistle blowers and democracy advocates in oppressive regimes and others who have legitimate reasons to want anonymous censorship-resistant publication methods.