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:

![image](b://46e1ca555622e73708a065f92df0af2cc0fe00ed1dd352d5fb8510365050347c)

Of course, you will upload it like this:

OP_RETURN
19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAut
[Here](b://e2be88f33d98074f778ddd94c13fe500cb1f5a4dfb3ed958391c95f431c20549) is a website, which contains the following image:\n![image](b://46e1ca555622e73708a065f92df0af2cc0fe00ed1dd352d5fb8510365050347c)
text/markdown
UTF-8 
README.md

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unwriter / B