Comment by caetano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caetano | Hacker News Reader

Given the adoption and direction crypto is going with decentralization, we can imagine some new/future incarnation of the technology to exist, possibly on new mediums.

In short, blockchains don't die. They may become zombies, but they never die. Tokens and profit keep them alive; without, they just go dormant.

Therefore, I would suggest a blockchain called Arweave that delivers the permanence for your website:

"Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever – for the very first time.

As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. By preserving history, it prevents others from rewriting it."

https://www.arweave.org

And Akord offers the product for your children and grandchildren:

https://www.akord.com

Surprisingly, this is actually a much more practical solution than what many other people here are proposing.

Sure, if one has money enough to sponsor a trust, then that'll work. But for those with more modest means, storing it on a blockchain is a solid(!) alternative.

The biggest factor here is the choice of the blockchain. One can go with special purpose ones like you suggest, they take care of the details of storing the data, but those blockchains risk losing momentum.

But it would be quite cheap (compared to setting up a trust) to use Bitcoin for this too. Bitcoin isn't meant for this, but there are ways of encoding the website's data and have it be part of the Bitcoin blockchain, spread out over multiple transactions.

The issue there is that the algorithm to deconstruct the data, as simple as it might be, would need to be separately communicated.

A slightly more riskier choice technically superior choice would be to do this on Ethereum, since the exact program for reconstructing the website from the data in the blockchain can also be deployed as a smart contract on the blockchain. So all the great grand children would need to be aware of is the address of the contract, and that it is on the Ethereum main net.

That said, one risk is -- while the specific blockchain might remain, who knows what it'll be called 500 years down the line. So the problem would be, while the website "exists", it's URI might change.

Interesting questions.

The point about the URI changing is interesting. One could imagine the current URL stored in metadata and then "virtual" DNS lookups could be done over time/across chains well into the future.

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