Dylan Brophy
I have been interested in cryptocurrencies for a while now. It's about time I made a blockchain to learn about how things work 'under the hood'. And hopefully store massive amounts of data at the same time.
Since many crypto wallets (which are basically just blockchain clients) download THE ENTIRE BLOCKCHAIN >:(, and therefore uploading gigabytes of data to a blockchain would kinda mess things up, I decided I could change the protocol a bit. Most blockchains only accept valid blocks on the longest branch, but what if some really large blocks could be 'floating around', and were pointed to by smaller blocks?
If you don't know anything about how a blockchain works, basically what I'm saying is "why give someone a hard drive of data when you could write a short URL for them instead?". The smaller block is like a URL, the larger block is like a multi-gigabyte file you could download from a server.
Then how does a blockchain look, then, for this new design?
Like this:
And you could store anything, so you could build anything off of the blockchain, even new cryptocurrencies... Or databases, and more.
Where would these giant blocks be stored?
It is impractical for clients to function as nodes, so miners would also store this data.
Why mine and store other people's information?
I might make an ethereum contract to pay miners, and a cost in ether for storage on the blockchain.
Why not just use the ethereum network?
Ethereum is not designed for storing files like that. It would also be expensive. See here and here. For many files it may even be impossible (2nd link).
Paul Scott
Aaron Miller
Arya
Initial State