This weekend the Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) developers have announced another new feature to the Bitcoin Cash network called the Bitcoin Files Protocol (BFP). The first implementation of the file storage system has been added to the SLP version of the Electron Cash light client.
The Bitcoin Files Protocol
Anonymous and censorship-resistant file storage is hard to come by these days as governments and corporate entities have made it difficult for peer-to-peer file sharing. Now a new application dedicated to the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network has launched called the Bitcoin Files Protocol (BFP). The open source BFP program was developed by the Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) programmers James Cramer, Ryan X. Charles, Mark B. Lundeberg, Calin Culianu, Jonald Fyookball, and the BCH developer Unwriter. In a post written on the social media platform Yours.org, BCH developer James Cramer explains why he believes uploading files to BCH blockchain provides a great use case.
“The SLP developers have created a very simple protocol for uploading and downloading small files (<5kb) to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, it is called Bitcoin Files Protocol (BFP) — Once a file is uploaded it can be simply downloaded using a single transaction ID,” Cramer explains on Sunday, September 23.
Cramer adds:
SLP Token V1 has two fields in its Genesis transaction called `token_document_url` and `token_document_hash`. These fields to allow any additional token related data to be attached to a token — The thought was that a user could “simply” upload a file to somewhere in the cloud and provide its URL and hash.
The Need for a Long-Lasting, Reliable, and Anonymous File Storage
Moreover, Cramer details that on-chain file storage systems are needed because most online cloud services are not censorship resistant and are very centralized. Cramer further notes the depreciated anonymous gist creation on Github because the firm complained some individuals quickly putting a code snippet online created lots of spam.
“It turns out very few cloud storage services permit anonymous file uploads with URL for sharing with others,” Cramer emphasizes.
I found a couple and none of them appeared to be reliable to me — Even if a relatively good anonymous cloud storage service was found, what about its long-term reliability?
The developer also details the BFP roadmap, by explaining the team will be implementing a download tool in Electron Cash SLP Edition that allows the user to save the file directly to a desktop by pasting in the file’s transaction id. Additionally, the team has plans to create a website called ‘Bitcoinfiles.com’ and the web portal will enable small file uploads and downloads via a web browser. Lastly, the Bitcoin Files Protocol programmers are working on a Javascript software development kit (SDK or devkit) for BFP uploads and download functions.
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What do you think about the BFP storage system? Let us know what you think about this project in the comment section below.
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Images via Shutterstock, BFP, Github, and Yours.org
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