Data storage and retrieval is at the heart of blockchain, where assets, accounts, permissions, and transactions are treated as data. But what about documents such as evidence files, X-rays, image scans, videos, and legal contract documents in PDF form? Where should a blockchain application store these documents? What is the architecturally correct approach to storing documents? This chapter will discuss document storage approaches and how blockchain properties, such as immutability, can be preserved even for off-chain storage.
There are arguments for storing images, PDF files, and other objects on-chain as part of the payload of a blockchain transaction. The reasons for doing so are to ensure ...
