Using Bitcoin to save your valuable content: Bico.Media review

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Bitcoin SV (BSV), through its unlimited blockchain scaling, is set to be the data ledger of the future. With larger block sizes and an increased OP_RETURN limit, BSV isn’t just the fastest and cheapest cryptocurrency in the world, it’s also a great way to permanently save the most valuable data to an immutable ledger. Bico.Media is a great way to leverage this capability, by quickly and easily writing files to the blockchain.

If you’re unfamiliar with how to use Bico.Media, the site provides all of its documentation up front. If you’re just trying to write a simple file to the blockchain, you can do so with add.bico.media. If you want to view your file on the blockchain, just visti bico.media/[TXID], where [TXID] is the transaction ID where your file can be located, helpfully provided after you’ve made your upload. If the file isn’t one that can natively be viewed in a browser, just add the file extension at the end, like .doc for example.

We tested the site using several files and ran into very few problems. Uploading pictures (both .jpegs and .pngs) and word documents was fast and only cost pennies using Money Button. Accessing them was equally fast, with the images presenting in the browser, and the word document downloading as any file would from the internet.

For more advanced Bitcoin and developmental users, bico.media offers a wide range of support for BSV protocols, like B://, C://, D://, JSON, Mustache, and more. With the right set of skills and code, users can and have created dynamics files, working with data stored to the BSV blockchain. One ambitious developer created a working version of Microsoft’s Windows XP on chain using bico.media.

Is this for everybody? Not really. Content creators who want to save their data and creations will find value in writing to the blockchain, and developers can create truly amazing things if they understand how. But this is not a service that appears ready for wider adoption. Even at the cost of pennies per picture, the ease of use and cost of traditional cloud services will still prove much more attractive and understandable to the non-tech savvy. As easy as bico.media is to use, the average consumer won’t want to be saving hundreds or thousands of TXIDs to then later access their content.

But if you’re a business owner, or a decision maker in a large enterprise, or a developer, this could have great value for you. Instead of using third party services to host your data, where it could go down at any time, uploading your company’s content, or your project, to the immutable BSV blockchain, where the distributed ledger guarantees it will always be available, could prove to be a killer service. You just need someone on the team who knows how to do it right.