8 ms·

Surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they are stored (2014)

106 points by picture 5y ago

floodle 5y ago
My immediate thought is that this can be abused: to store revenge porn, inflammatory comments, defamation, and so on, in a way that is more "permanent" than the way this stuff is usually stored online. Is that a valid concern, or no?
- gjs278 5y ago
- human 5y ago
  If you could store Pi (3.14159..) with all its digits on your computer, it would contain all past and future revenge porn. I wouldn’t really make anything of it but I wonder what a judge might want to do.
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    That's not a good faith response. Show me the digits of pi that contain the image of Nelson Mandela that is as easy to find as the one described in this article. Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and find it's corresponding representation in pi that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
    - vivegi 5y ago
      I am not making any claims about digits of pi, however, one can take an arbitrary bit string (eg: an image of Nelson Mandela's representation), treat it as a number and extend its digits to generate a prime number or a perfect power. See: https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/015/10/0941-0947 https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/015/10/0941-0947 So, one could in theory create a list of primes (or perfect powers) populated them with hidden content using the aforesaid method and claim they are only a list of primes (or perfect powers).
      - deanCommie 5y ago
        Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and do the calculation you discuss, and share the output, that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
        emteycz 5y ago
        https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/pifs https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/pifs
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    People throw this claim around, but note that: 1. It's only theorized that pi has this property. 2. Storing the starting index of the digit would likely be larger than any computer right now can hold, and possibly bigger than the estimated number atoms in the universe. 3. What a judge cares about is that you used the number with the intention of accessing the file, not the particular sleight of hand method by which you accessed it. If you cheekily share your favorite number that just so happens to be the starting digit index for "Limp Bizkit - Nookie.mp3", that's what the judge cares about. No need to outlaw pi, no need to outlaw numbers, it's all about intent. That's why they're called judges. They judge people and their intentions.
    - tromp 5y ago
      A number that provably contains all finite bit patterns is X = . 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 0000 0001 ... (the binary version of Champernowne's constant [1]) but the index at which any pattern occurs takes more bits to write than that pattern itself, and the same would hold (on average) for patterns in pi, assuming it actually is normal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant
  - onpensionsterm 5y ago
    If true then the index of the data would be the file. That's called encryption.
- seibelj 5y ago
  I would say it’s physically impossible to restrict what an individual can do, regarding basically anything, without severe restrictions in freedom. However you can make fierce penalties for entities and organizations that promote, advertise, profit, etc. from actions which has a tendency to reduce it happening. For example it is trivially easy to film the TV at a bar, then tweet out the video of a sports game - millions do it every day. But if a company did that without the rights and earned money from it - an easy lawsuit.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Yeah, and there's the difference - putting it on a blockchain is incredibly permanent, and might not be easily attributable to a person.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      In these cases the miners and the orgs who run the blockchains are the vulnerable parties hosting the content. I suspect it flies below the radar for enforcement mostly because offending material is basically there as a stunt rather than a place used for active proliferation. In the same way Roblox is full of IP infringement.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    The issue is that the damage here is almost irreversible - short of taking the whole blockchain down (which might be used as an excuse to do it ?). I guess that the penalties could be correspondingly high - like the difference between rendering someone temporarily unconscious versus killing them ?
- pontifier 5y ago
  It's an attack I've contemplated. If you started sending a whole bunch of plain text Tiananmen Square remembrance stuff you'd very quickly have China cracking down on whatever it was.
  - david_allison 5y ago
    An image of tank man is already embedded in the blockchain.[0] CSAM links are there too.[1] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_image_on_bitcoin_blockchain/hnt2yje https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_ima... [1] > Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman. In an online forum this image is claimed to show child pornography, albeit this claim cannot be verified (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation). Notably, two of the explicit images were only detected by our suspicious transaction detector, i.e., they were not inserted via known services. https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf [SFW]
    - kragen 5y ago
      Maybe this explains PRC's new hard-line anti-Bitcoin stance (over the last year).
      - TremendousJudge 5y ago
        Yeah, that's definitely it. I can't think of any other reason.
        kragen 5y ago
        I can think of a couple.
  - 5y ago
- missblit 5y ago
  I don't see why bitcoin nodes would be immune to DMCA takedown notices or other legal remedies. Sure it'd be a pain and (so far) not usually worth the hassle, but it'll have to come up eventually right? What's that? It's impossible to take down a block without messing up the entire blockchain? Well maybe Mr. Bitcoin should have thought of that when making the data so disturbingly entangled!
  - jeppesen-io 5y ago
    A massive, multi-national takedown across the planet for 12k nodes? Thats well beyond the DMCA I can only imagine the cost to do that
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      Would you have to do that or would putting the squeeze on nodes in jurisdictions you could reach be enough? Not complying comes with a cost so presumably they would ultimately be forced out or to convince their peers to fork.
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        extra-territorial enforcement? would you personally enjoy taking orders from China, or whoever the next global hegemon happens to be? Isn't it great to have some very remote and entirely unaccountable overlord telling you what to do, and then prosecute you criminally on a whim? Sounds like utopia.
        herbst 5y ago
        Or just like America.
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        two wrongs dont make a right. america should stop doing that.
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  In the engineering sense this has already happened. I'm not sure "abused" is the correct term, though. It's an immutable data store, like IPFS with a server in a jurisdiction you don't control. It stores data. Is it "abusing" ext4 if you use it to store a movie rip?
  - Traster 5y ago
    I would say it's pretty clear cut that this is abuse in a different way than ext4 because the blockchain has a format for how it stores various fields and you store data by putting different data in those fields. For example the fake addresses to which they send bitcoin to generate transactions. It's also worth thinking about how this is used in the context of leaking data. Imagine if instead of posting Jennifer Lawrence's nudes on reddit, hackers had put them on the blockchain and just told people it was there. You now have an immutable copy of those photos stuck in a billion dollar speculative asset.
    - throwaway22032 5y ago
      I agree that Bitcoin wasn't explicitly designed to store data. It was, however, designed to be uncensorable. Your second sentence there is - well, indeed. It _is_.
      - iszomer 5y ago
        Or worse, all the nuanced forms of a dead man's switch. [0] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_happened_with_the_julian_assange_dead_mans/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_h... [2] https://sarcophagus.io/ https://sarcophagus.io/
        throwaway22032 5y ago
        "Worse" in what way? To me that sounds beneficial. I'd do it myself if I had some blackmail on someone!
- tirpen 5y ago
  Yes it's a very valid concern. And you don't even have to go into porn territory, if the blockchain containans personally identifiable information, and it does, then it's probably in violation of the GDPR in the EU. Immutable data is almost never a good idea in practice.
  - iszomer 5y ago
    This reminded me of Keybase where they signed and published [0] their root Merkle tree to the Bitcoin blockchain, as part of their server security mechanism. It was an ingenious idea at first until when it came to signature revocations. Even though they have the mechanism for that too, the data itself is still stored onto the blockchain forever with no "garbage collection" on deprecated data, outside of Keybase's control. [0] https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-blockchain https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-b... [1] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stellar_blockchain https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stell...
- usrusr 5y ago
  If the article wasn't as old as it is (almost eight years), I'd take it as a given that the author deliberately omitted a whole lot of things that might put BTC in a bad light. Considering that even in 2014 the days of whole-number BTC amounting to play money had long been over, I wouldn't be surprised if there was self-censoring due to being personally invested even back then (but I wouldn't have suspected it back then)
  - kens 5y ago
    I'm somewhat offended by your comment. For the record, I did not deliberately omit things that would put BTC in a bad light. I was not personally invested in Bitcoin (beyond a dollar or so for experiments). I wrote plenty of things negative about Bitcoin, enough to be disliked by part of the community.
pininja 5y ago
Fascinating way to make a puzzle for people, post a digital message for someone to stumble upon, or make a tribute. This was from 2014, I wonder if someone has posted a follow up.
dools 5y ago
[flagged]
can16358p 5y ago
Well, we must be careful about what goes into blockchain. I've once publicly announced my love for my geeky GF in the transaction data of my Ethereum transaction, which was cool at the time... Then we broke up.
- saurik 5y ago
  Did you at least update your relationship status, or were you dating long enough for the transaction fees to have gone up enough to make that unreasonably expensive? ;P
- arvinsim 5y ago
  Could be worse, you might have gotten a big tattoo
  - rgrmrts 5y ago
    Tattoos can be removed these days :p edit: this is not a value statement about blockchains
- dna_polymerase 5y ago
  And isn't that just great? In order to verify my $1 payment to McDonalds all we have to do is acknowledge that can16358p loved his GF once. \s I think no needing to store the whole chain while also not relying on verified shards or trusted peers will be a major breakthrough for BC-Tech in the future. Mina looks promising in that regard.
  - spinny 5y ago
    can16358p paid for tx fees when the tx was mined. from that perspective that data should be there and even contributes to the network security. you too can write crap to the blockchain. Still remember that years ago, before the bitcoin core client started to obfuscate on disk data, people mined transactions with EICAR as data and that got picked up by AVs
  - jtsiskin 5y ago
dnpp123 5y ago
If anyone wants to explore this by themselves, I wrote a few years back a library to help: https://sr.ht/~pierrenn/barkaelogy/ https://sr.ht/~pierrenn/barkaelogy/
danguson 5y ago
This looks interesting; any clear tutorial or explanation on how they did this?
- pininja 5y ago
  I didn’t see one, but they posted code extracted from the blockchain that can extract existing and write new data.
Yetino 5y ago
A few years ago I wrote some toy code to scan for raw texts stored on Ethereum. Some were interesting to read. See below (the way to read: expand "click to see more" -> "Input Data" -> "view input as" - select UTF8) * A (a bit creepy) love letter https://etherscan.io/tx/0xee30531afa6147ce450d9404bcc3fb97588da07cac516b712a85744a4d9b82d1 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xee30531afa6147ce450d9404bcc3fb9758... * A Chinese student activist's open letter (some media reported about it at the time) https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2d6a7b0f6adeff38423d4c62cd8b6ccb708ddad85da5d3d06756ad4d8a04a6a2 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2d6a7b0f6adeff38423d4c62cd8b6ccb70...
- folli 5y ago
  Damn, for anyone trying to replicate this: the transaction cost of the love letter would be around $2500 today.
  - kyruzic 5y ago
    It would be $700 the link literally tells you that. And you could do it for much cheaper by just lower the gas cost. They used 900 gwei, you can get a transaction through most days for 90 gwei. Right now you could do it for 165 gwei.
    - boring_twenties 5y ago
      This is a bit above my paygrade but I think this type of transaction doesn't depend on any state, so you can expect it to succeed even if it gets mined a few days after you submit it? If so you could just set the gas price to 50 gwei and wait.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  You exposed another comment's love letter to HN!
- irthomasthomas 5y ago
  Hello Qiu Shifu, hello world.Do you know? We appeared to be cool and smart when we first met. The truth is, we are both childish and stupid (in a good way). We do not know each other for very long, but we get use to each other faster than light. We think alike. We have similar minds. We know what the other wants without much asking. We make fun of each other. We make fun of the blockchain. We make fun of the world. Yes, you and me are fun-making-massive-attacks terrorists. Who are you? I remember you elegantly spilled strawberry milk out of your mouth on a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing like my young sister. You asked me to conduct pyramid schemes with your twinkling big beautiful eyes. You encouraged me to travel to India and North Korea like a Hajid encouraging his fellows. You and me climbed up the tallest chimney in 798 factory trembling like a spring chicken. You woke me up and asked me to run with you and enjoyed Jian Bing Guo Zi for breakfast. You are so abnormal, and I enjoy doing all these with you. What are you? You are a very smart thinker and you are smart enough to do anything be it investing to marketing. You dreamt about being an artist and I think I will be your broker. You are always full of beautiful passion and dreams about the world and I wish they will all come true. No, they are coming true. You are so cute, and I think nothing else can be even as close to your cuteness.Your eyes are more beautiful than the most beautiful lakes. I do not only want to stand on the tip of your nose and dive into the water, I want to be the pisces that swim in the water forever, one fish in each of your eyes. Out of the water, I die. Here and now, on this Ethereum Block, I am ledgering on the network just to tell the entire world how lucky I am to have found the most astonishingly adorable woman since I am a very normal grown man with barely basic programming skills. You fascinate and inspire me. You influence me for the better. You re the on my top list, you are the objective of my objective, like an angel that rescued my stupid lonely soul in David Tao s songs; and at the same time like a cult religious leader running pyramid scheme that takes my ass for sacrafice and I can never say no, and instead I recklessly offer you my properties, passion and love. For every minute that I have been with you, it is full of happiness and joy. Can I have so more of this in the rest of my time? More minutes, more hours, more days, and even years? There is only one solution to that problem. You, be mine. O shifu
novalis78 5y ago
https://eternitywall.it/about/ https://eternitywall.it/about/
known 5y ago

106 points by picture 5y ago

My immediate thought is that this can be abused: to store revenge porn, inflammatory comments, defamation, and so on, in a way that is more "permanent" than the way this stuff is usually stored online. Is that a valid concern, or no?

gjs278 5y ago
human 5y ago
If you could store Pi (3.14159..) with all its digits on your computer, it would contain all past and future revenge porn. I wouldn’t really make anything of it but I wonder what a judge might want to do.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  That's not a good faith response. Show me the digits of pi that contain the image of Nelson Mandela that is as easy to find as the one described in this article. Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and find it's corresponding representation in pi that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
  - vivegi 5y ago
    I am not making any claims about digits of pi, however, one can take an arbitrary bit string (eg: an image of Nelson Mandela's representation), treat it as a number and extend its digits to generate a prime number or a perfect power. See: https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/015/10/0941-0947 https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/015/10/0941-0947 So, one could in theory create a list of primes (or perfect powers) populated them with hidden content using the aforesaid method and claim they are only a list of primes (or perfect powers).
    - deanCommie 5y ago
      Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and do the calculation you discuss, and share the output, that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/pifs https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/pifs
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  People throw this claim around, but note that: 1. It's only theorized that pi has this property. 2. Storing the starting index of the digit would likely be larger than any computer right now can hold, and possibly bigger than the estimated number atoms in the universe. 3. What a judge cares about is that you used the number with the intention of accessing the file, not the particular sleight of hand method by which you accessed it. If you cheekily share your favorite number that just so happens to be the starting digit index for "Limp Bizkit - Nookie.mp3", that's what the judge cares about. No need to outlaw pi, no need to outlaw numbers, it's all about intent. That's why they're called judges. They judge people and their intentions.
  - tromp 5y ago
    A number that provably contains all finite bit patterns is X = . 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 0000 0001 ... (the binary version of Champernowne's constant [1]) but the index at which any pattern occurs takes more bits to write than that pattern itself, and the same would hold (on average) for patterns in pi, assuming it actually is normal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant
- onpensionsterm 5y ago
  If true then the index of the data would be the file. That's called encryption.
seibelj 5y ago
I would say it’s physically impossible to restrict what an individual can do, regarding basically anything, without severe restrictions in freedom. However you can make fierce penalties for entities and organizations that promote, advertise, profit, etc. from actions which has a tendency to reduce it happening. For example it is trivially easy to film the TV at a bar, then tweet out the video of a sports game - millions do it every day. But if a company did that without the rights and earned money from it - an easy lawsuit.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Yeah, and there's the difference - putting it on a blockchain is incredibly permanent, and might not be easily attributable to a person.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    In these cases the miners and the orgs who run the blockchains are the vulnerable parties hosting the content. I suspect it flies below the radar for enforcement mostly because offending material is basically there as a stunt rather than a place used for active proliferation. In the same way Roblox is full of IP infringement.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  The issue is that the damage here is almost irreversible - short of taking the whole blockchain down (which might be used as an excuse to do it ?). I guess that the penalties could be correspondingly high - like the difference between rendering someone temporarily unconscious versus killing them ?
pontifier 5y ago
It's an attack I've contemplated. If you started sending a whole bunch of plain text Tiananmen Square remembrance stuff you'd very quickly have China cracking down on whatever it was.
- david_allison 5y ago
  An image of tank man is already embedded in the blockchain.[0] CSAM links are there too.[1] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_image_on_bitcoin_blockchain/hnt2yje https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_ima... [1] > Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman. In an online forum this image is claimed to show child pornography, albeit this claim cannot be verified (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation). Notably, two of the explicit images were only detected by our suspicious transaction detector, i.e., they were not inserted via known services. https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf [SFW]
  - kragen 5y ago
    Maybe this explains PRC's new hard-line anti-Bitcoin stance (over the last year).
    - TremendousJudge 5y ago
      Yeah, that's definitely it. I can't think of any other reason.
      - kragen 5y ago
        I can think of a couple.
- 5y ago
missblit 5y ago
I don't see why bitcoin nodes would be immune to DMCA takedown notices or other legal remedies. Sure it'd be a pain and (so far) not usually worth the hassle, but it'll have to come up eventually right? What's that? It's impossible to take down a block without messing up the entire blockchain? Well maybe Mr. Bitcoin should have thought of that when making the data so disturbingly entangled!
- jeppesen-io 5y ago
  A massive, multi-national takedown across the planet for 12k nodes? Thats well beyond the DMCA I can only imagine the cost to do that
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Would you have to do that or would putting the squeeze on nodes in jurisdictions you could reach be enough? Not complying comes with a cost so presumably they would ultimately be forced out or to convince their peers to fork.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      extra-territorial enforcement? would you personally enjoy taking orders from China, or whoever the next global hegemon happens to be? Isn't it great to have some very remote and entirely unaccountable overlord telling you what to do, and then prosecute you criminally on a whim? Sounds like utopia.
      - herbst 5y ago
        Or just like America.
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        two wrongs dont make a right. america should stop doing that.
throwaway22032 5y ago
In the engineering sense this has already happened. I'm not sure "abused" is the correct term, though. It's an immutable data store, like IPFS with a server in a jurisdiction you don't control. It stores data. Is it "abusing" ext4 if you use it to store a movie rip?
- Traster 5y ago
  I would say it's pretty clear cut that this is abuse in a different way than ext4 because the blockchain has a format for how it stores various fields and you store data by putting different data in those fields. For example the fake addresses to which they send bitcoin to generate transactions. It's also worth thinking about how this is used in the context of leaking data. Imagine if instead of posting Jennifer Lawrence's nudes on reddit, hackers had put them on the blockchain and just told people it was there. You now have an immutable copy of those photos stuck in a billion dollar speculative asset.
  - throwaway22032 5y ago
    I agree that Bitcoin wasn't explicitly designed to store data. It was, however, designed to be uncensorable. Your second sentence there is - well, indeed. It _is_.
    - iszomer 5y ago
      Or worse, all the nuanced forms of a dead man's switch. [0] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_happened_with_the_julian_assange_dead_mans/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_h... [2] https://sarcophagus.io/ https://sarcophagus.io/
      - throwaway22032 5y ago
        "Worse" in what way? To me that sounds beneficial. I'd do it myself if I had some blackmail on someone!
tirpen 5y ago
Yes it's a very valid concern. And you don't even have to go into porn territory, if the blockchain containans personally identifiable information, and it does, then it's probably in violation of the GDPR in the EU. Immutable data is almost never a good idea in practice.
- iszomer 5y ago
  This reminded me of Keybase where they signed and published [0] their root Merkle tree to the Bitcoin blockchain, as part of their server security mechanism. It was an ingenious idea at first until when it came to signature revocations. Even though they have the mechanism for that too, the data itself is still stored onto the blockchain forever with no "garbage collection" on deprecated data, outside of Keybase's control. [0] https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-blockchain https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-b... [1] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stellar_blockchain https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stell...
usrusr 5y ago
If the article wasn't as old as it is (almost eight years), I'd take it as a given that the author deliberately omitted a whole lot of things that might put BTC in a bad light. Considering that even in 2014 the days of whole-number BTC amounting to play money had long been over, I wouldn't be surprised if there was self-censoring due to being personally invested even back then (but I wouldn't have suspected it back then)
- kens 5y ago
  I'm somewhat offended by your comment. For the record, I did not deliberately omit things that would put BTC in a bad light. I was not personally invested in Bitcoin (beyond a dollar or so for experiments). I wrote plenty of things negative about Bitcoin, enough to be disliked by part of the community.

pininja 5y ago

Fascinating way to make a puzzle for people, post a digital message for someone to stumble upon, or make a tribute. This was from 2014, I wonder if someone has posted a follow up.

dools 5y ago

[flagged]

can16358p 5y ago

Well, we must be careful about what goes into blockchain. I've once publicly announced my love for my geeky GF in the transaction data of my Ethereum transaction, which was cool at the time... Then we broke up.

saurik 5y ago
Did you at least update your relationship status, or were you dating long enough for the transaction fees to have gone up enough to make that unreasonably expensive? ;P
arvinsim 5y ago
Could be worse, you might have gotten a big tattoo
- rgrmrts 5y ago
  Tattoos can be removed these days :p edit: this is not a value statement about blockchains
dna_polymerase 5y ago
And isn't that just great? In order to verify my $1 payment to McDonalds all we have to do is acknowledge that can16358p loved his GF once. \s I think no needing to store the whole chain while also not relying on verified shards or trusted peers will be a major breakthrough for BC-Tech in the future. Mina looks promising in that regard.
- spinny 5y ago
  can16358p paid for tx fees when the tx was mined. from that perspective that data should be there and even contributes to the network security. you too can write crap to the blockchain. Still remember that years ago, before the bitcoin core client started to obfuscate on disk data, people mined transactions with EICAR as data and that got picked up by AVs
- jtsiskin 5y ago

dnpp123 5y ago

If anyone wants to explore this by themselves, I wrote a few years back a library to help: https://sr.ht/~pierrenn/barkaelogy/ https://sr.ht/~pierrenn/barkaelogy/

danguson 5y ago

This looks interesting; any clear tutorial or explanation on how they did this?

pininja 5y ago
I didn’t see one, but they posted code extracted from the blockchain that can extract existing and write new data.

Yetino 5y ago

A few years ago I wrote some toy code to scan for raw texts stored on Ethereum. Some were interesting to read. See below (the way to read: expand "click to see more" -> "Input Data" -> "view input as" - select UTF8) * A (a bit creepy) love letter https://etherscan.io/tx/0xee30531afa6147ce450d9404bcc3fb97588da07cac516b712a85744a4d9b82d1 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xee30531afa6147ce450d9404bcc3fb9758... * A Chinese student activist's open letter (some media reported about it at the time) https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2d6a7b0f6adeff38423d4c62cd8b6ccb708ddad85da5d3d06756ad4d8a04a6a2 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2d6a7b0f6adeff38423d4c62cd8b6ccb70...

folli 5y ago
Damn, for anyone trying to replicate this: the transaction cost of the love letter would be around $2500 today.
- kyruzic 5y ago
  It would be $700 the link literally tells you that. And you could do it for much cheaper by just lower the gas cost. They used 900 gwei, you can get a transaction through most days for 90 gwei. Right now you could do it for 165 gwei.
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    This is a bit above my paygrade but I think this type of transaction doesn't depend on any state, so you can expect it to succeed even if it gets mined a few days after you submit it? If so you could just set the gas price to 50 gwei and wait.
lostmsu 5y ago
You exposed another comment's love letter to HN!
irthomasthomas 5y ago
Hello Qiu Shifu, hello world.Do you know? We appeared to be cool and smart when we first met. The truth is, we are both childish and stupid (in a good way). We do not know each other for very long, but we get use to each other faster than light. We think alike. We have similar minds. We know what the other wants without much asking. We make fun of each other. We make fun of the blockchain. We make fun of the world. Yes, you and me are fun-making-massive-attacks terrorists. Who are you? I remember you elegantly spilled strawberry milk out of your mouth on a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing like my young sister. You asked me to conduct pyramid schemes with your twinkling big beautiful eyes. You encouraged me to travel to India and North Korea like a Hajid encouraging his fellows. You and me climbed up the tallest chimney in 798 factory trembling like a spring chicken. You woke me up and asked me to run with you and enjoyed Jian Bing Guo Zi for breakfast. You are so abnormal, and I enjoy doing all these with you. What are you? You are a very smart thinker and you are smart enough to do anything be it investing to marketing. You dreamt about being an artist and I think I will be your broker. You are always full of beautiful passion and dreams about the world and I wish they will all come true. No, they are coming true. You are so cute, and I think nothing else can be even as close to your cuteness.Your eyes are more beautiful than the most beautiful lakes. I do not only want to stand on the tip of your nose and dive into the water, I want to be the pisces that swim in the water forever, one fish in each of your eyes. Out of the water, I die. Here and now, on this Ethereum Block, I am ledgering on the network just to tell the entire world how lucky I am to have found the most astonishingly adorable woman since I am a very normal grown man with barely basic programming skills. You fascinate and inspire me. You influence me for the better. You re the on my top list, you are the objective of my objective, like an angel that rescued my stupid lonely soul in David Tao s songs; and at the same time like a cult religious leader running pyramid scheme that takes my ass for sacrafice and I can never say no, and instead I recklessly offer you my properties, passion and love. For every minute that I have been with you, it is full of happiness and joy. Can I have so more of this in the rest of my time? More minutes, more hours, more days, and even years? There is only one solution to that problem. You, be mine. O shifu

novalis78 5y ago

https://eternitywall.it/about/ https://eternitywall.it/about/

known 5y ago