B://
Bitcoin Data Protocol
b://6c784b78cff5ee4f469f783adc0e957265f467d3a0dae2b2b1ecbc84a1bd1fb6
Store and reference data on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Intro
B is an OP_RETURN protocol to store and reference arbitrary data on Bitcoin.
The design goal:
- The simplest protocol to upload arbitrary media to the blockchain
- A protocol to reference previously uploaded media from another on-chain media.
Protocol
- The prefix for B is 19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut, generated using Bitcom
Here's an example of what POST transactions look like:
OP_RETURN
19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut
[Data]
[Media Type]
[Encoding]
[Filename]
The order is deliberately data, media type, and encoding, filename, in the order of significance (With future extensibility through adding additional push data).
- Data: data to store
- Media Type: As listed at https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml
- Encoding: As listed at https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml (The default is
binary) - Filename: a filename to store the blob as (the default has no filename and just stored as a blob, identified simply by the txid)
Example: HTML
OP_RETURN 19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut <html><body>hello world</body></html> text/html UTF-8 hello.html
Note
B:// is NOT a protocol for handling authenticated and encrypted media (That would be a much more complex problem). The main design goal of B is:
- Public: Public assets
- Simple: Simple to implement
- Versatile: Easily pluggable to any application in any context
- Extensible: Future extensibility with additional push data support
Demo
Try it here: https://b.bitdb.network
Usage
1. Uploading Large Media
Let's upload an image.
You can try it here (up to 100KB)
When you select a file, it directly writes the binary (ArrayBuffer) into Bitcoin pushdata (instead of base64 string). The resulting OP_RETURN would look something like this:
OP_RETURN 19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut [ArrayBuffer from the file] image/png binary duck.png
By default, the encoding is binary, so you could just do (if you don't care about file names):
OP_RETURN 19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut [ArrayBuffer from the file] image/png
Another example:
OP_RETURN 19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut [ArrayBuffer from the file] text/html UTF-8 index.html
2. Referencing Media
Once uploaded, this media can be referenced from ANY other transactions using a transaction hash. For example, let's say the media hash for an image uploaded this way was 46e1ca555622e73708a065f92df0af2cc0fe00ed1dd352d5fb8510365050347c.
You can reference it in another HTML file like this:
<html>
<body>
<img src="b://46e1ca555622e73708a065f92df0af2cc0fe00ed1dd352d5fb8510365050347c">
</body>
</html>
Of course, to upload this HTML file itself, you would do this:
OP_RETURN
19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut
<html><body><img src="b://46e1ca555622e73708a065f92df0af2cc0fe00ed1dd352d5fb8510365050347c"></body></html>
text/html
UTF-8
example.html
Once this HTML file is uploaded to Bitcoin, and the tx hash is e2be88f33d98074f778ddd94c13fe500cb1f5a4dfb3ed958391c95f431c20549, you can link it from another HTML, like this:
<html>
<body>
Check out <a href="b://e2be88f33d98074f778ddd94c13fe500cb1f5a4dfb3ed958391c95f431c20549">my website!</a>
</body>
</html>
You can use it in a markdown too:
[Here](b://e2be88f33d98074f778ddd94c13fe500cb1f5a4dfb3ed958391c95f431c20549) is a website, which contains the following image:
Of course, you will upload it like this:
OP_RETURN
19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut
[Here](b://e2be88f33d98074f778ddd94c13fe500cb1f5a4dfb3ed958391c95f431c20549) is a website, which contains the following image:\n
text/markdown
UTF-8
README.md