Bitcoin Blockchain Scan Finds No Images, Contradicting NFT Claims

A recent experiment to scan the entire Bitcoin blockchain for images found no meaningful images of any kind. The study used PhotoRec, an open-source image recovery program, to search over a terabyte of blockchain data.

The researchers set up a 4-terabyte disk drive and installed the latest version of Bitcoin Core on it. They then synced the full Bitcoin node, which took around 72 hours to complete.

Once the blockchain was fully downloaded and validated, they ran PhotoRec to search for image files. However, despite the extensive search, no images were found. The software did identify some ICOs and PNG files that didn't display any images when opened.

The absence of images on the blockchain is due to a data obfuscation technique called XOR, which scrambles all the blockchain data while it's at rest on a hard drive. This means that other programs can find no meaning in the data without the key to unscramble it.