It’s never a good idea to store big chunks of data on a blockchain. For starters this is simply impossible, as the amount of data that may be included in a transaction is limited.
But even if you could store big chunks of data on a blockchain, it would be prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and resources, as every peer in the network would have to store those pieces of data that you chose to store on-chain. Moreover, if your plan is to do all of this over a public blockchain network, everything that you store on-chain would become visible for every peer in the network. That makes storing sensitive information a terrible idea, unless you have a fetish for disclosing all your secrets to the world.
You may be wondering, “How can someone implement a decentralized application that requires the storage of large chunks of data, if those data can’t be stored directly on-chain?” Fortunately, decentralized storage solutions like IPFS already exist within the Web3 ecosystem to help us with this goal.
IPFS, blockchain’s best friend for dealing with data
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. It is a public…
