8 ms·

Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain

96 points by kens 6y ago

wyck 6y ago
Blockchain pollution.
- drcode 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    is there potential for a denial of service attack on the blockchain if people just started inundating it with useless data entries?
    - bombcar 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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 6y ago
        It only "worked" by not actually being useful as a globally distributed currency for microtransactions (which was the original promise)
    - retrac 6y ago
      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.
    - jcpham2 6y ago
      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.
      - pontifier 6y ago
        I spammed several portions of NEM and ground things almost to a halt several times. That coin sucks, and their new one probably isn't much better. I'm sure it's just a way to erase the connection to my spam and cash out a bit while changing the name. What jerks.
    - reidjs 6y ago
      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.
- jude- 6y ago
  They all paid the tx fees. Therefore, not pollution.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    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.
    - jude- 6y ago
      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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - crazypython 6y ago
      > 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.
      - 6y ago
lucasnortj 6y ago
there is no cool data in the blockchain, cryptos are pointless tech for pointless people
- spicybright 6y ago
  Thanks for contributing to the discussion.
- quenix 6y ago
  Your comment misses the point completely.
- cirosantilli 6y ago
  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 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.
kjrose 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - kjrose 6y ago
    well, and you'd need to know all the places they put them.
    - nefitty 6y ago
      What about some sort of index placed at different intervals for easier discoverability
  - kart23 6y ago
    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/0540b5dda23ee870330c6b1e18a88c592cf8d847c47f1dc1d5328f46115b12b3 https://mempool.space/tx/0540b5dda23ee870330c6b1e18a88c592cf...
    - 6y ago
john37386 6y ago
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 6y ago
  CONVERT TO CIRODOWN TODAY: https://cirosantilli.com/cirodown/ https://cirosantilli.com/cirodown/
reidjs 6y ago
I wrote a similar article on this for Ethereum a few years ago: https://reidjs.medium.com/top-6-weird-innovative-and-hilarious-findings-in-the-ethereum-blockchain-83dbbca461ca https://reidjs.medium.com/top-6-weird-innovative-and-hilario... Sorry for the clickbaity title (it was for work)
justinzollars 6y ago
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-with-child-pornography https://www.pcmag.com/news/bitcoins-blockchain-caught-loaded...
- sneak 6y ago
  Links to child pornography are not child pornography. It's quite inaccurate to say that bitcoin is loaded with CP.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  Assuming you wouldn't have sold all of it at $2.
  - retrac 6y ago
    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.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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-currency-bot-di-1795125165 https://gizmodo.com/reddit-users-lose-real-money-after-meme-...
ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1382080760774033415
nixass 6y ago
No "Epstein didn't kill himself". Sad.
_wldu 6y ago
This is similar to the PGP key server poisoning. All write-only systems that are publicly accessible will have this vulnerability.
timdaub 6y ago
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 https://www.npmjs.com/package/string-to-btc-addresses - 2: https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-txids/blob/2f1358ad7cb20dd9298746d9bde1cedcda1fe1e3/data/out/0332.txt#L388 https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-txids/b...
- cirosantilli 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story!!! That's the spirit.
  - timdaub 6y ago
    Thanks for crawling and making it all available! Looking back at this data is quite personal for me as I ended up getting hired by ascribe.io in that process of finding a job. At ascribe, we an stored art work's hash on the Bitcoin blockchain using the OP_RETURN value. Looking at your crawled data, it's registration calls are hard to miss [1]. It's crazy to think that some of this data is now stored in there forever. - 1: https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-txids/blob/2f1358ad7cb20dd9298746d9bde1cedcda1fe1e3/data/out/0357.txt#L1 https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-txids/b...
    - cirosantilli 6y ago
      Ahh, so you were the ones doing that pollution of the ASCII ;-) Just kidding. OP_RETURN is fine.

96 points by kens 6y ago

wyck 6y ago

Blockchain pollution.

drcode 6y ago
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 6y ago
  is there potential for a denial of service attack on the blockchain if people just started inundating it with useless data entries?
  - bombcar 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        It only "worked" by not actually being useful as a globally distributed currency for microtransactions (which was the original promise)
  - retrac 6y ago
    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.
  - jcpham2 6y ago
    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.
    - pontifier 6y ago
      I spammed several portions of NEM and ground things almost to a halt several times. That coin sucks, and their new one probably isn't much better. I'm sure it's just a way to erase the connection to my spam and cash out a bit while changing the name. What jerks.
  - reidjs 6y ago
    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.
jude- 6y ago
They all paid the tx fees. Therefore, not pollution.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  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.
  - jude- 6y ago
    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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - crazypython 6y ago
    > 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.
    - 6y ago

lucasnortj 6y ago

there is no cool data in the blockchain, cryptos are pointless tech for pointless people

spicybright 6y ago
Thanks for contributing to the discussion.
quenix 6y ago
Your comment misses the point completely.
cirosantilli 6y ago
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 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.

kjrose 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- kjrose 6y ago
  well, and you'd need to know all the places they put them.
  - nefitty 6y ago
    What about some sort of index placed at different intervals for easier discoverability
- kart23 6y ago
  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/0540b5dda23ee870330c6b1e18a88c592cf8d847c47f1dc1d5328f46115b12b3 https://mempool.space/tx/0540b5dda23ee870330c6b1e18a88c592cf...
  - 6y ago

john37386 6y ago

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 6y ago
CONVERT TO CIRODOWN TODAY: https://cirosantilli.com/cirodown/ https://cirosantilli.com/cirodown/

reidjs 6y ago

I wrote a similar article on this for Ethereum a few years ago: https://reidjs.medium.com/top-6-weird-innovative-and-hilarious-findings-in-the-ethereum-blockchain-83dbbca461ca https://reidjs.medium.com/top-6-weird-innovative-and-hilario... Sorry for the clickbaity title (it was for work)

justinzollars 6y ago

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-with-child-pornography https://www.pcmag.com/news/bitcoins-blockchain-caught-loaded...

sneak 6y ago
Links to child pornography are not child pornography. It's quite inaccurate to say that bitcoin is loaded with CP.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
Assuming you wouldn't have sold all of it at $2.
- retrac 6y ago
  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.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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-currency-bot-di-1795125165 https://gizmodo.com/reddit-users-lose-real-money-after-meme-...

ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago

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 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 https://twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1382080760774033415

nixass 6y ago

No "Epstein didn't kill himself". Sad.

_wldu 6y ago

This is similar to the PGP key server poisoning. All write-only systems that are publicly accessible will have this vulnerability.

timdaub 6y ago

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 https://www.npmjs.com/package/string-to-btc-addresses - 2: https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-txids/blob/2f1358ad7cb20dd9298746d9bde1cedcda1fe1e3/data/out/0332.txt#L388 https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-txids/b...

cirosantilli 6y ago
Thanks for sharing your story!!! That's the spirit.
- timdaub 6y ago
  Thanks for crawling and making it all available! Looking back at this data is quite personal for me as I ended up getting hired by ascribe.io in that process of finding a job. At ascribe, we an stored art work's hash on the Bitcoin blockchain using the OP_RETURN value. Looking at your crawled data, it's registration calls are hard to miss [1]. It's crazy to think that some of this data is now stored in there forever. - 1: https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-txids/blob/2f1358ad7cb20dd9298746d9bde1cedcda1fe1e3/data/out/0357.txt#L1 https://github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-strings-with-txids/b...
  - cirosantilli 6y ago
    Ahh, so you were the ones doing that pollution of the ASCII ;-) Just kidding. OP_RETURN is fine.