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Comment by tbodt | Hacker News Reader

You can do exactly the same thing without blockchain.

And store the encrypted passwords where?

As they are encrypted you can save them anywhere you want, and even distribute them to a bunch of different services where they won't be inaccessible if one service goes down.

That's exactly what the blockchain is doing, distributing the data across multiple devices.

Exactly, so why do you need it then?

Anywhere. Put them on an HN comment, log in and enable showdead. Stick them in a git repo, revert the commit, and make a pull request to a popular project. Steganographically encode them into the next popular internet meme. Make an account on hashbang.sh and save it to disk.

If you have access to the blockchain, you already have access to a million more reliable data storage options, some reasonable, some not. Blockchain is a distributed consensus tool, not an anti-censorship tool. If you can't reach other random storage services, why do you think you can reach the blockchain?

YCombinator can go out of business and bring HN down, not all internet memes survive long, your disk can be lost in a fire, etc.

I'm not saying blockchain is better, just that it's at least reasonable. Already distributed and can be expected to survive longer than individual companies.

What are the odds that Dropbox and HN and a dozen popular internet memes of your choice and your local computer and your phone and your blog and…

…go all down before you can react? Seriously, if you need a secure backup, a couple instances, geographically separated, are more than enough.

My machines?

Now you have to think about backup, transporting across borders, etc.

Here's how you transport over borders. Works with plain text as well as encrypted data.

Step 1: upload your data on a server somewhere. Your mail server, Dropbox, GitHub, your blog, your virtual server with SSH access…

Step 2: cross the border.

Step 3: download the data.

Ever heard of this silly thing called distributed hash tables? And BitTorrent protocol that is currently the most popular implementation, which sets up a whole DHT/P2P network for every share? There, as one example.

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