Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Nothing. The way arbitrary data is stored in the blockchain is encoding it in the financial transactional data.

For example, you could use a similar method to "store" data using Paypal: use the amount of cents in each transaction to encode a byte of data (e.g. $1.17 means 0x75 etc.) and make transfers to random people until enough bytes have been transferred. That's it, your copyrighted data or CP is now forever "stored" on Paypal servers.

I don't think this accusation will hold up in any reasonable court. Taking into account the cost of storing data (20 bytes in a single output of minimum 5400 satoshi + fees) your hypothetical instructions and code to retrieve the images would be of comparable size to any images you can reasonably store.



There is no minimum output size. Outputs can be zero-valued.


The standard client and by extension most miners will reject outputs smaller than a certain value ("dust")

You are correct that the protocol itself doesn't have a minimum output size, so if you mine a block yourself you can include dust reliably.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: