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- 4EVERLY means keeping your valuable photos, memoriesforever
Does the thought of auto-uploading all your mobile camera photos to Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) or Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) make you slightly queasy? Though millions of people do this, they do it without knowing how private or secure their data is. Thanks to tokenization and a fast, scalable blockchain, theres a better option. 4EVERLY has built a simple interface to do this, one that stores images on-chain, permanently. Better still, there are no monthly or annual subscription fees.
In addition to the privacy angle, there are also concerns about who actually owns data stored on centralized servers in corporate data centers. Ostensibly, the data belongs to the users. However, this is never 100% guaranteed, and its difficult to enforce. On-chain tokenization of data means only the person who put it there can own, access, or control it.
4EVERLY is very simple to use. You take a photo, and it creates a 1Sat Ordinal token of the image, which is permanent. No data center can accidentally delete it, you wont lose valuable content over a banned account, and its private by design. End-to-end encryption makes photos accessible only to the users who uploaded them. Users retain full ownership of all content, which is also a built-in blockchain benefit.
As privacy concerns continue to grow, more users are seeking alternatives to traditional cloud storage. Blockchain technology offers a promising solution that puts control back in the hands of photo owners, 4EVERLYs website reads.
While free storage might save money today, the long-term cost to your privacy could be substantial. Consider investing in secure, blockchain-based alternatives that prioritize your ownership and privacy rights.
How 4EVERLY works
There are costs involved with all this, though over time its still cheaper than paying for cloud storage subscriptions, and there arent any limits to the number of images you could upload. 4EVERLY grants you 10 free tokens for signing up. From there, its $10 for 1,000 more image uploads, $25 for 3,125 images, $50 for 7,500, and $100 for 20,000.
4EVERLY, at present, doesnt have any features apart from these basics. Theres no social or sharing aspect. Youre also only able to upload photos you take with the mobile (web) apps camerai.e., no uploading past photos from folders or galleries. Developer Dan Wagner told CoinGeek the upload feature is definitely something that should be added, and hopefully it is at some point.
One other thing to consider is that when we say on-chain tokenization is permanent and immutable, thats exactly what it means. 4EVERLY will allow you to remove images that appear in the app itself, but once theyre a token, they exist on the blockchain forever. That said, only the original uploader would have the data to access that image. And 4EVERLY itself wont harvest your data since it cant see it.
The problem with storing images on centralized servers
There are many cloud backup services available these days for photos. The main ones that spring to mind are Google Photos and Apples iCloud, as mentioned above, but other cloud storage services like Dropbox, pCloud, and OneDrive are also keen to store your camera roll. In fact, the average mobile device user receives multiple prompts to do this, and they can be persistent, even if youve said no, thank you in the past.
Why do they try so hard to provide this service? For one, photos and videos take up a lot of storage space, meaning youll hit your free account limits pretty quickly and need to sign up for extended disk space for a subscription fee. Another, more sinister-sounding, reason is that these services could potentially be harvesting your data behind the scenes. Facial recognition and metadata can be analyzed, cross-referenced, and saved for later, even if no actual human ever accesses the data.These large corporate cloud storage services all have privacy policies, but trusting these policies to protect you is a leap of faith. Theyre also updated occasionally, presenting users with a wall of text and an agree button, which is the only option to continue using the service. We wouldnt want to outright accuse cloud storage services of outright abusing their positions of power by analyzing and harvesting data, but these days, there are many reasons not to assume your online data is as private as youd like.
Blockchain, to use a cliche, provides a solution to this. More specifically, its the BSV blockchain with unbounded scaling, fast processing time, and minuscule fees. 4EVERLY and 1Sat Ordinals store images on-chain via ordfs.network, encrypted with AES-256 and keys derived from SHA256 (mnemonic phrase and derivation path). Each uploaded photo has its own unique key.
Using the mnemonic (the usual 12-word phrase familiar to digital wallet owners), users can restore access to images even if 4EVERLY itself ever shuts downtheres a recovery tool available on ordfs.network, and 4EVERLY gives you the URL for this, should you need it in the future.
Centralized cloud data storage may seem cheap and easy to use, but at the end of the day, youre trusting precious memories to services that have done little to earn that trust, and dont provide any lasting guarantees. A far better option exists, and its more affordable. If services like 4EVERLY can match cloud services with more sophisticated feature sets, it and other blockchain-based services could (and should) become the data storage option of choice.
Watch: Blockchain is much more than digital assets
