Having an uncensored and secure blockchain to record information on is a great opportunity for everyone, but the majority of really important information is not always for the eyes of the public, so storing data on the blockchain can be beneficial as well as dangerous.
It would be nice to back up all sorts of key personal information like identification numbers and passwords, but posting that kind of stuff on steemit would not be wise.
What then are the ways that we can be using the blockchain to store information for us?
@ausbitbank had a great idea when he made this post. Basically, @ausbitbank wanted it forever documented on the blockchain that he will in no circumstances ever commit suicide. That way, if he ever turns up dead from an apparent suicide, people know not to believe the "official" ruling.
Recently, I came up with another way for me to utilize the blockchain for storing information.
I know that I used to drink and smoke a lot, like, A LOT, but regardless of if that played a role or not, a lot of my memories are based on photographs and stories. However, stories can twist and change over time, and photographs get lost. Thankfully my mom was very meticulous about taking photos and keeping them organized chronologically. Those photo albums can be destroyed though. I don't want to lose all the memories and history that we can be recording right now.
Life is brief, but fantastic. Once I am gone, I want my children and grandchildren to have full memories of my life and any time that we got to spend together.
DOCUMENTING LIFE
This is a second reason that I started the @little-peppers account. One reason was surely as a financial investment, but another reason was to document life. These precious children will not be little children for long, and as parents, we want to preserve what we can!
Often, life is quick and we are busy. Time flies by and life passes quickly. Throughout my life I've taken some pictures and recorded some events in writing, but the physical hard copies of those can get lost or destroyed.
Steemit not only provided the incentive to document more of life, but the real opportunity with the blockchain too!
I just turned 36, and soon I'll be even older. My children are growing at incredible rates, and at least one more is still on the way! Time itself seems to change once you have a child to measure it by. I don't want life just to pass my family by and have nothing to show for it.
Some of my posts focus on my family and our life together, but many cover a wide variety of other topics. Twenty years from now, the story of an adventure I shared with my son will mean far more to my boy than a bigfoot comic.
To focus less on other things and more on documenting the adventures and times of the @papa-pepper tribe, I created the @little-peppers account for me to use to store those precious memories. A fridge can only hold so much on the door, and it can only hold it for so long. In this way, blogging on steemit and recording life on the blockchain can be like a giant diary, preserved for the future.
I know that others will enjoy some of what I post there too, and they may even get some great ideas for fun family activities to try themselves with their own children. Despite being a wild, humorous, and interesting man, I am also very serious and sentimental. Now is the only time that I can be sure that I have to spend with my children, but the odds of a two or three year old remember these times that I share with them are slim.
Recording the present before it becomes the past and making sure that it's there for the future is a big part of parenting for me. If I invest my present with my focus on how it'll effect the future, hopefully later it'll prevent me from regretting my past.
When the memories are recorded on the blockchain though, they will be there for future generations to enjoy!
If you want, you can check out the intro post that I made for the @little-peppers account:
How do you plan on using the blockchain?
FOLLOW
papa, you beat me to it... I was thinking EXACTLY the same thing. In fact, I will do it soon - create an account to document so many wonderful things that happened around my boy. mostly in texts (some maybe in Chinese) as images are not recorded on blockchain. There is really so much potential for Steem to change our lives!
There sure is! - Thanks for everything @deanliu!
Hey Papa,
What @timcliff said... At least that goes for Steemit for now. However, you're on the right track I think. As @dwinblood mentioned, if you had some really important images, you could encode them and post them as text, and they would go on the chain.
BTW, if you start with a .jpg format image, you can custom-tailor the amount of compression (and loss of detail) to minimize size to an acceptable level. Then, as long as you have appropriate coder-decoder software available, you have your archive.
Or, you could begin your own blockchain, custom tailored for the purpose... ;) 😄😇😄
Hi @papa-pepper, cool idea!!
One thing to keep in mind though if you are using it for this purpose is that the images you post are not saved in the blockchain. The blockchain stores the links, but the images themselves are still hosted off-chain.
Right, I was thinking about that too, but wasn't sure of the details.
Thanks @timcliff!
You can store any data in the Blockchain but it is quite costly to do so. Check out http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html
Thanks for that @woocharlie!
Great info! I did not know this ! 👍
Get some powder and smack me now! Great tidbit of info!
:)
Any one interested in this article may also like this one: https://steemit.com/freespeech/@woocharlie/the-time-is-now-we-must-shift-to-decentralized-uncensorable-platforms :)
Great read as always @papa-pepper
And that's a great post from you too!
I hope more people check it out!
Nice post, documenting on the block chain is the whole reason steem exists :) As this gets more exposure I think people will begin to understand just how fundamentally revolutionary it is. Your thinking is exactly where everyone's here should be I say.
Thanks @justryme90.
There is so much potential and so many opportunities for us here!
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What a great idea ! I am also following your @little-peppers account ! Keep up the great work ! 👫👭👍
Yeah, for the fullest view of my life, my role as a father can't be left out, and a lot of what I experience in that role will be documented there!
What might be interesting is compressing some data and then base64 encoding it. I don't think people will appreciate such posts, but this is doable. The amount of information that could be stored this way would be limited by the maximum block size, and it certainly would not make for an interesting post, but it is a way to store other kinds of information.
Perhaps such experiments could be labeled as FORSTORAGE or something and not soliciting votes. We likely would want a tag that could be easily filtered to handle such DATA posts, as it'd suck to get flagged a bunch of times because of posting a data post.
Right, I could see the flags... Good point though on the benefit of compressing and encoding data...
Maybe in a reply to your own, older post would be a great place to try it.
Then, no one would really see it.
Interesting idea.... as a reply. That has quite a bit of potential actually. You could string multiple replies together if you needed to and fragment a larger data set across those replies. THIS IS DANGEROUS talk though. Something like this could be abused to attack the network thinking about it.
Because we are decentralized the witnesses still store the blocks. What is to stop someone from making something that intentionally keeps creating blocks in the form of replies. That's kind of scary, and hopefully something @dantheman has covered. It wouldn't even have to be rapidly posted to be an issue... it'd just chew up a lot of space and the storage requirements for witnesses would balloon. I don't know how the blockchain really works so there is hopefully a defense for this.
On the non-nefarious side of things, it could be a pretty cool little project and potentially be useful.
You could do some REALLY cool things such that your main post and the replies are linked together and a specialized website viewing program might be able to string some interesting data together.
If you just wanted to store it, and only you know its there. Then here is one way to do it.
Make a post, as you said, with base64 encoding or PGP.
Then after a blocks time has gone by, edit the post and paste something for everyone to see.
You can then go to steemd and see your post, but basically, you will have to know what you are looking for.
I am pretty sure you do not edit the original block created, so its always there. (I could be wrong)
That sounds like an amazing idea.
Upvoted and resteemed!!!
Great idea! I have often thought about what my sons will think of me someday if they read my posts, whether I am still alive or dead. I agree that life should be documented and preserved.
Yes, very true what you said because the internet never forgets.