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.