Introducing STEEM Liberator - Preserving important files on the STEEM blockchain.
STEEM Liberator - http://www.steemliberator.com
This past week or so I have been playing around with storing files on the STEEM blockchain to be preserved forever. My tests have been extremely successful. Today, I would like to share with you some of that success.
The first couple files that I have uploaded to the STEEM blockchain and have provided available for download via the STEEM Liberator front-end are the STEEM WhitePaper and the United States Declaration of Independence.
It is my opinion that each of these documents represents freedom and the will of the people to come together for something greater than them.
Roadmap
Going forward, I would like to continue building out the @steemliberator front-end website and allow users to upload their own files. On top of providing a normal downloader, I will also provide a novel way of keeping track of the block numbers that the files are stored in. (The files get chunked into pieces and stored in different blocks)
Important Notes
This software is highly experimental and can potentially have unexpected consequences. Due to this, I am taking things one step at a time and seeing the response from the network before proceeding forward with more. I even wrote a blog post about me explaining that I likely triggered the bandwidth issues users have been experiencing.
Vote for @netuoso as Witness
- Go to the witness voting page on SteemIt.com
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the vote box (shown below)
- Input my name (netuoso) and hit vote.
- Give yourself a high-five for making such an awesome decision
Excellent work - thank you for this!
I understand that the files will be stored forvever. What I don't understand is it possible for any blackhat or governmental institution to put down this or Steemit itself? Yes, witnesses are the ones who run the whole thing but what happens with a blackhat attack? Frozen storage
After several blocks have been verified after the files are uploaded, they become more and more secure from being changed or removed.
None of this prevents a government from attacking STEEM and trying to shut it down altogether. But should a thing ever happen, it will be VERY VERY obvious.
With this system, you can be 100% positive your uploaded files have not been modified. Just a proof of concept at this point.
But can the creator later edit those files? or even delete them?
Nope.
Look at what happens around the blockchain world. All the time hacks. It's like something that was created for better security is actually the opposite. Will be checking on the progress of this project. @netuoso
I'm so glad I can follow your writing. The information you submit is very useful. I myself still have many who do not understand about Steemit, especially to reach a lot of upvote.
Success always. We are waiting for the latest news about Steemit.
Regards,
@dsatria
What about bloat of the block chain? Its going to happen sooner or later but if people start uploading files that they want to archive won't it hasten the inevitable? Think of somebody's 3 tera byte porn collection that they just want to ensure access to it with a nice safe back up on the blockchain. Just to be clear, I'm not against it, just want to think things through first. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Also, if you need 2 more test documents, I suggest the US constitution and the patriot act. Maybe putting these documents side by side will get people thinking. Kinda where we started and where we are now.
There are protections in the blockchain that prevent people from putting too much in, too quickly, based on the amount of SP they hold.
That said, the blockchain will still get quite large. Fortunately, storage is quite cheap.
Is that steemliberator functional yet? Great job
The backend is functional but not ready for public release. It still has a few errors and needs to handle them properly to ensure complete file integrity.
The website is functional that shows the STEEM Whitepaper and the US Declaration of Independence stored on the blockchain. The download technically comes from the server itself, but it pulled the files from the blockchain.
My vision to create a caching server that sits inbetween the frontend and the backend. When a file is requested, the caching server will download it and have it available where it will be stored until it is no longer accessed at least once a week. At that point, it will be deleted from the caching server to free up space for more active files.
STEEM Liberator will be able to be interacted with directly thru STEEM via @steemliberator. I have a ways to go keep an eye out
Be careful going too far beyond a PoC though - it turns out that you will need quite a bit of SP to store anything very substantial. I'd recommend perhaps a 50KiB sanity limit on uploads.
SP directly affects how much can be uploaded at one time, but I'm not sure why that would be of any real concern during the PoC stages.
STEEM already has a lot of bloat and what I am doing, anyone can do. It is easy to politely ask me to be careful, but if someone wanted to attack STEEM it wouldn't be so easy to ask them to quit.
I have a decent amount invested in STEEM and powered up on my account. I would personally like to see STEEM do well.
If a 5MB upload can make the entire network freak out and hit a bug that prevents lower level users from doing anything, the network wasn't QA'd under heavy load. My experience is of a QA manager. And I can document exactly what was done when I triggered any issues, reducing time to find a fix by a considerable amount.
Trust me that I'm not going to intentionally break things. But also remember that anyone anywhere can do all of this with
This post has been resteemed by @msp-lovebot courtesy of @netuoso from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ). Join us in Discord.
Good one! Just don't break anything while you're at it hahaha
Can't promise anything! :)
This is very handy!
This is brilliant! A thousand educators will thank you (and vote for you) so they can post their tutorials, worksheets, whatever and not see them lost down the stream.
I'm wondering what's up with negative bandwidth?
The negative bandwidth happened because I delegated SP to the account and used some bandwidth before removing the delegation. I believe it was also during a time where the bandwidth was rapidly changing so it showed a very low percentage.