I scanned the Bitcoin blockchain for images; what I found will shock you. Much has been said online about the arbitrary data and content that can be found on the Bitcoin blockchain. Not only has this possibility spawned a niche art scene, but it has also led to a movement against ‘non-monetary transactions’ on the Bitcoin network. Were you to hear from one of its proponents or detractors, you’d figure the blockchain is basically a wall filled with graffiti.
Well, I decided to put the question to the test: are there actually images on the blockchain? And what does this actually mean for Bitcoiners simply trying to run their own full node and maximize their financial sovereignty?My methodology was simple: I was to buy a fresh hard drive to store the blockchain on, and then I was going to run classic image recovery software over the data- something used to rescue images from broken hard drives, something designed to find raw image data.
I chose PhotoRec to do the image recovery work, an open source image recovery program that’s been around for over 20 years. The software is designed to find image files in raw data. This can be used to recover images and other file formats from hard drives that have failed or been corrupted. It is actually often used to recover lost wallet.dat files from the early days of Bitcoin wallets, before the proliferation of the seed word format.
