The author synced a full Bitcoin node on a 4-terabyte hard drive and used open source software PhotoRec to search for images embedded in the blockchain. After over 11 hours of scanning, the tool found no meaningful images, only a handful of false positives (8 ICO files and 4 identical PNG files). This absence is explained by Bitcoin’s use of XOR obfuscation, a technique that encrypts all data at rest. XOR was implemented on the UTXO set by late 2015 and on the full blockchain data in 2024, making it impossible to extract arbitrary data without deliberately bypassing this mechanism.
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