Hello Steemit Community,
We are cryptocurrency researchers at Augustana College, and we have just completed a paper on data publication methods using Bitcoin's blockchain. We have posted the preprint manuscript to our college's digital repository, this link is here: http://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/cscfaculty/1/
This paper is a survey of data insertion methods that have been used to store arbitrary data within Bitcoin's blockchain, along with some examples of the kinds of files that have been stored with these methods. This paper is technical, and focuses on the scripting language Bitcoin uses at the transaction level. You may only be familiar with the basic script type (Pay-to-public-key-hash), but Pay-to-script-hash offers more flexibility in storing large amounts of data, with less overhead and at a far cheaper cost.
The P2SH methods do not "burn" bitcoin to store data, and do not create additional UTXOs for miners to keep track of. Detailed explanations and graphs are included in the paper. This paper is currently under the peer-review process, but we would like to share our findings with the broader community.
This work was not done for profit, and any donations received will fund Augustana's cryptocurrency research in the future.