# The Blockchain is not Permanent Free Storage - Rhea Myers Source: https://rhea.art/2025/03/19/the-blockchain-is-not-permanent-free-storage Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-Blockchain-is-not-Permanent-Free-Storage-Rhea-Myers?index=0x67dc31e33e94fdac2a7b3f8a7d1d8bd6f97be9881f823aaa30e6a312c277e6ae5ed6166b Submitted by misha on 2025-03-20 UTC, 6 upvotes, 10 comments ## Summary Rhea Myers argues that the blockchain is not permanent free storage and should be used mainly as an anchor for data stored offchain. Myers notes that Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin Whitepaper describes a timestamp server, and that spam transactions storing non-payment data were historically regarded as bloat that imposes costs on other users. Myers says that storage on a chain is only economically rational while the assets held on it are worth more than the cost of downloading the chain, and that low storage fees build up a debt someone must eventually pay. Myers recommends storing only identifiers, account references, and hashes onchain. ## Article 19 March 2025 In the Bitcoin Whitepaper, Satoshi Nakamoto describes a timestamp server, not a storage network. That timestamp server exists only to establish the order of transactions within Bitcoin's system of electronic money. Nakamoto goes as far as to suggest that: Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. --- Reclaiming Disk Space, The Bitcoin Whitepaper, Satoshi Nakamoto. Transactions designed to store data that are not transfers of Bitcoin were historically regarded as spam. Anyone using Bitcoin for its intended purpose is doing so to use a form of electronic money, and any given unit of that electronic money might eventually be sent to any individual who uses the network. Spam defects from this, bloating the blockchain (and in Bitcoin's case, the live transaction set) with data that may never be useful to anyone other than the person who created it. This imposes a cost on other users without a proportionate benefit to them. Each spam transaction may be only a few bytes, but they add up over time and some are much larger. "Blockchain" and "Distributed Ledger Technology" extract the surplus value of the affordances of Nakamoto's design. They vary the design parameters, emphasising one part of that design over others. NameCoin and other blockchains that were designed explicitly as data stores, including Ethereum, do so with wonderful creativity. Bitcoin is an economic solution (proof-of-work mining) to a computer science problem (establishing temporal order in the absence of a central authority) of a political programme (cypherpunk crypto-anarchy). Cryptocurrency is not something bolted on to the blockchain - it is what secures it. Nakamoto does not mention "blockchain" in the Whitepaper, although he does cite the technology's originators. What he spends some time on is establishing that an economically rational actor is better incentivised to build the Bitcoin blockchain honestly than to attack it: We consider the scenario of an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain faster than the honest chain. Even if this is accomplished, it does not throw the system open to arbitrary changes, such as creating value out of thin air or taking money that never belonged to the attacker. --- Calculations, ibid. Cryptoeconomic incentives secure open blockchains. If they are unbalanced for any given class of actor in the system, this will dicincentivise them and reduce the security of that blockchain. And for a blockchain, security is existence. The informal formula I use is that if it costs more for you to download a blockchain than the assets you hold on it are worth, it is not economically rational to do so. The more assets that aren't yours, and the heavier they are in terms of storage, the quicker this equation turns negative. You might pay a(n untrusted) third party to provide storage and access, and this is a possibility that Nakamoto mentioned in his emails. But even this may not be worthwhile if the service fees over time outweigh the total value of your assets onchain. This shows another failure mode for blockchain-as-storage. Services, platforms, and chains, can all fall out of favour, prove to be uneconomical or otherwise unviable, or be legislated against. Chain death, chain splits, chain attacks, and the whims of popularity can all reduce the security, the being, of a chain. Reduce it low enough and it will cease to exist. Low transaction fees and low storage fees are understandably popular and much promoted features of new chains. They encourage adoption and use in the short term but if they are unrealistically low rather than reflecting improved efficiency they build up a debt that someone will have to pay once the party is over. What should you store onchain? Enough to identify the existence, ownership, and value of something. This is an ID, an account reference, and at most a hash (for an individual token's metadata) or a Merkle tree root (for an entire asset's data). Every word of information you store after the first two should be accounted for as if the price of storage is shortly going to skyrocket. Ethereum and other chains are working with rather than against this logic with "stateless" contracts that store only the Merkle tree root of a contract's state onchain. Everything else must be stored offchain by its users. This addresses the issue of spam by removing the very affordance that made it possible and desirable (for spammers) in the first place. If you can't store as much as you like onchain cheaply, there's no incentive to do so. But entire industries have been based on doing so, not least NFTs. There is no scenario in which the Blockchain is permanent free storage. When designing blockchain systems, keep as much information offchain but anchored onchain as possible and regard doing so as a key design objective. When using blockchain systems, back up your keys, the block hashes you need to establish the validity of your transactions (this will include transactions sent by others before them that affect their environment), and any transactions you need in order to reconstitute your assets onchain. If it is not cost effective to do this, you will need to change some things. Facing this reality, which has been the case since the start, increases the reach of blockchain proof. It ends offchain/onchain as an ontological split, and destroys onchainness as a fetish. Treating the blockchain as the root of assertion and commitment, neccessarily incomplete in itself but still unfalsifiable and stretching out rhizomatically in all directions, anchors reality against the political order that would destroy it. ## Comments **misha**: > Facing this reality, which has been the case since the start, increases the reach of blockchain proof. It ends offchain/onchain as an ontological split, and destroys onchainness as a fetish. Treating the blockchain as the root of assertion and commitment, neccessarily incomplete in itself but still unfalsifiable and stretching out rhizomatically in all directions, anchors reality against the political order that would destroy it. **tim**: > Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. Well, you can take some text, encode it as Bitcoin addresses and send Bitcoin to these addresses. Since the node software cannot tell whether these address can be spent or not they cannot be discarded. > The Blockchain is not Permanent Free Storage Nobody said that the storage should be permanent and free. You have to pay for the transactions to be included. > Transactions designed to store data that are not transfers of Bitcoin were historically regarded as spam. Dubious claim. We even argued before the block size wars that these transactions aren't spam. "historical." History according to whom? Not according to my history. > Spam defects from this, bloating the blockchain (and in Bitcoin’s case, the live transaction set) with data that may never be useful to anyone other than the person who created it. Aha, interesting line of arguing. So storing art on the blockchain for anyone to own is "Spam" but storing the transactions between you and your friend buying pizza suddenly isn't. > This imposes a cost on other users without a proportionate benefit to them. No it doesn't. If it does then the Bitcoin fee algorithm is broken, then you need to fix it and stop complaining. > Each spam transaction may be only a few bytes, but they add up over time and some are much larger. Thankfully Moore's law for storage exists. A 4 TB hard drive is 280 USD. Cry me a river. I'm not going to go further in reading this. The basic premise is already completely off IMO **misha**: Ha ha, luckily I didn’t write this, so I’m not going to die that on that hill defending it. Also my knowledge on the subject is probably not sufficient. I guess your criticisms highlight the ongoing debate on blockchain purpose and best practice. However, I think they might not fundamentally refute the article's central thesis that blockchain storage comes with economic and technical trade-offs that must be considered when designing systems and applications. For example while storage is relatively inexpensive today, the blockchain's unlimited growth presents long-term scaling challenges. Moore's Law doesn't guarantee storage will always outpace blockchain growth, especially as adoption increases. More importantly, the cost isn't just about storage space but also about validation time, bandwidth, and synchronization - all factors that affect decentralization. **tim**: I think Bitcoin maximalists like the author of this post always make it sound like Bitcoin has one determined use case and that this would be transacting scalar. They also have a wrong moral model of burdening node operators with storing data permanently. To even argue that decentralization comes before permanent storage is just your personal preference, as much as it is my personal preference that the data is preserved. Memecoin trading is adding scalar value storage, which can be pruned according to Satoshi Nakamoto. Is memecoin trading data worth preserving longer than art on the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain? There can be a storage function where fees are determined such that storage size grows slower than Moore's law. **misha**: Personally would not describe artist Rhea Meyers as a Bitcoin maxi. She already made work on Ethereum as early as 2014, and most of her work is on Ethereum. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-crypto-and-anarchism-in-conversation-with-rhea-myers/ I interpret the article in the context of artists pushing for onchainness as a fetish, the idea of “onchain art” as the leading paradigm for creating art on a blockchain in the sense that their art then will be stored forever and cannot be lost (also in terms of value for the collector) - thought this is not explicit in the article. I think she is trying to argue against this, and that using blockchains for storing art is beyond their purpose. **tim**: Yeah, this is a Bitcoin maxi opinion **tim**: Misha why do you print artworks and hang them on walls? Walls were not meant to hang artworks and the holes from the nails are ugly and make the wall less stable. Paper and color was never mean to produce art. We manufactured it to write texts, it‘s fetishized to think you can forever embody yourself in paper and on walls. I think you should stop doing it, it makes no sense. How is this not the same nonsense? **tim**: > Personally would not describe artist Rhea Meyers as a Bitcoin maxi. She already made work on Ethereum as early as 2014, and most of her work is on Ethereum. Ethereum’s mainnet was launched on July 30, 2015. where is the proof that she did this? **tim**: Anyways, I‘m also working on using blockchains for storage since 2014 and I disagree with her. And I was also working on storing art. And besides, just because she has a bigger profile and Google decides to show her face when you Google her, it literally means nothing in relation to her vision and argument being bad! **misha**: Talking about onchain and offchain storage, recently discovered a project called Beast DAO and they are building an alternative to ENS names called 0xNAME which is fully onchain contrary to, they claim, ENS names that partly rely on offchain data. Anyway identity probably a good use for onchain storage! https://xcancel.com/BEAST_DAO/status/1900877469235708003