[FAQ] How to read Comments from the Feathercoin Blockchain?

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How to read comments from the Feathercoin Blockchain?

It is possible to read the comment by visiting the FTC-C.com explorer and there is an enhancement request for the wallet to view comments simply on a right click of the address. There are also server side sites that could set up “comment explorers” .

Until then : How can you see the message using just the wallet and a decoder?

How are comments recorded in the Blockchain?
OP_RETURN opcode works at the byte level in a bitcoin transaction. To prevent over flooding the transaction database with text messages the core-developers made the opcode OP_RETURN a valid opcode to be used in a bitcoin / feathercoin transaction, which allows 80 arbitrary bytes to be used in an un-spendable transaction. In 2014 that was educed to 40.

Find the comment
First find the “Transaction ID” of the Address with a message, from the transaction menu right click option in the Feathercoin-qt wallet.

Transaction ID     3ddc1aa067548a398557386037f83b2e09fb5878d0c1ed886c0c20e3227f6311-000

Obtaining the raw transaction details
Open a Console Tab window from the Settings > Debug menu options in the wallet:

Delete the -000 from the end and of thhe transaction ID and replace it with 1

getrawtransaction   3ddc1aa067548a398557386037f83b2e09fb5878d0c1ed886c0c20e3227f6311 1

Extract the Hex code of the message
From the output text, copy the Hex part of OP_RETURN

"scriptPubKey" : {
"asm" : "OP_RETURN 5468697320636f6d6d656e74206973206d61646520746f6461792053617475726461792032337264",
"hex" : "6a285468697320636f6d6d656e74206973206d61646520746f6461792053617475726461792032337264",

Converting the Hex to ASCII

xxd
Vim is another tool set that can be installed or is already on some Unix systems. It includes the command xxd.
Using the Terminal in Debian based systems :

sudo apt-get install vim
echo 6a285468697320636f6d6d656e74206973206d61646520746f6461792053617475726461792032337264 | xxd -r -p
This comment is made today Saturday 23rd

uni2ascii
Using an Hex to ASCI converter such as uni2ascii, copy the Hex text and save it to a file comments.txt

sudo apt-get install uni2ascii
uni2ascii comments.txt