Storing thumbnail images in Ethereum c

Question

I understand that its expensive impractical to store images directly in smart contracts, but I'm wondering if possible to store something like a thumbnail, say 50x50 with 8 bit color depth. Is that every expensive or impractical, if I put the data in some kind of array, for example?

I have read about IPFS, but I have understood that things can disappear from IPFS after a while unless a pinning service is used, and if I want this thumbnail is going to be in 20 or 30 years, I wonder if IPFS is a viable choice.

PS. A little research seems to suggest that the cost of storing 1Kb in a contract at a gas price of 10 Gwei is on the order of $11.00. I guess that array composed of 2500 UInt8 is roughly 2.5KB, so something like $27.00 (June 2021) in gas to write this contract at today's prices?

Answer 1

Looks like your math is in the ballpark:

• 32 bytes in a single storage slot
• 32 slots to hold 1Kb
• 25,000 gas to write a single slot
• 800,000 gas to write one KB.
• $17 per KB at this moment's prices

You might want to consider using a carefully compressed JPG rather than writing raw pixels. The savings could be considerable.