The Vital Core Of Cryptology In Blockchain

By Dmitriy

BTC Wires: Man has forever had an obsession with steganography, which is the practice of hiding secret messages in ordinary messages. To that effect, they haven’t left any stone unturned to come up with ways to send these secret messages. So it comes as no shock that the blockchain technology has always been riddled with messages hidden in it.

So apparently there are six ways to encode messages in the bitcoin blockchain. One can use fields such as the coinbase parameter and OP_RETURN. For the purpose of encoding cryptic messages, all these fields have been made use of in diverse ways.

Since blockchain is an open database, one doesn’t have to worry about losing their messages, because even if bitcoin dies, the copies on the blockchain would remain. It distributes around 100,000 backups around the world, so someone will inevitably have a copy. One can find detailed guides which will instruct one on how to encode their own messages in the blockchain.

Eternity Wall makes it easier for those who don’t enjoy setting up a Bitcoin Core client, to deliver “messages lasting forever”. It promises “Even if this site goes down or disappears, your message is guaranteed to persist [in the bitcoin blockchain] for generations to come.”

It is eerie that on the blockchain, every message, no matter how prosaic, political, or crude, remains forever, free from any sort of censorship, just as bitcoin was made to be.

There is a very interesting interactive art installation for decoding blockchain messages and bringing them to life, that was created by a Florida design agency. It is called Messages from the Mines and it reveals the “cryptic poems, ASCII art, signatures, eulogies and more” that form “a creative misuse of the Bitcoin transaction protocol, a form of digital graffiti…cultural artifacts forever embedded in one of the most contemporary digital technologies.”