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Comment by OrgNet | Hacker News Reader

Apparently, we need a storage capacity breakthrough so that everyone can store everything so that we do not have to relay on what someone else say is acceptable.

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What we need is good p2p tech that will enable distributed storage that is impossible to censor while also automatically providing gazillion terabytes of storage distributed over all peers. Problem solved.

I would like that too but the government will make laws and all the peers from the p2p network will get scared

There is an argument to be made that archival and distribution are two different things.

There are justifiable cases where you might want to remove something from the public internet. Some problems of p2p distributed proposals is that the only way to take down a single bit is to dismantle the entire network.

In this sense a federated system is objectively better.

> There is an argument to be made that archival and distribution are two different things.

of course download and upload are 2 different things...

which is why Torrent users often get emails about their download activities...

This meaning that a closed archive is still a valuable archive.

(For torrents I believe that there is (in many jurisdictions) a presumption that if you are downloading torrents then you are automatically guilty of distributions; similarly how in many places being drunk in a turned off car can be sufficient for a DUI)

Making laws is one thing, enforcing them is a completely different story. The government has no chance to survive and should make their time.

That will never work. Data will always expand to use up all available storage. It's like trying to build more roads when your city has a traffic problem. You build roads to reduce traffic and improve commute times, and then more people start commuting from further away.

you are probably right... but what if it was like IPV6 where there are so many IPs that they should never run out... the unlimited storage dream.

Unlike IP addresses where you get exponentially more of them per unit cost (i.e size), storage space costs 1 bit per bit.

I don't think that you understand what I said... I don't mean that IP addresses have anything to do with physical space. I only mean it in the sense that IPv6 supposedly solved a problem and we need the same thing to happen to storage space.

He understands perfectly, it's theoretically impossible to get infinite storage in finite amounts of matter.

What I was thinking is that maybe we can use the 4th or maybe 5th dimension to hide all that matter. /s

How about archiving all text written by everyone? Napkin calc: if every person in the world (10 billion people) types for 8 hours every day, at 200 characters per minute, 4 bytes per character, we need 10000000000 * 365 * 8 * 60 * 200 * 4 = on the order of 1 exabyte per year. That's a huge overestimate, but the world's storage capacity is growing much faster than even that.

Or think of it this way: the lifetime output of George R.R. Martin is <10MB. The output of 100000 writers like him could fit in a 1TB drive ($50). If everyone in the US was as prolific as GRRM, you could archive their lifetime output for $150000. Everyone in the world, $5 million. That's 1/20th of the investment that Juicero got.

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