If someone wants to dive into any topic in the archive 30 years from now they will have access to everything, not access to what some of us deem 'worthy' of curating.
I agree that it makes it harder to find things but I also see the value of IA as a time capsule.
I enjoy using Open Library to re-read obscure middle grades books from the 1950s-1990, and there are some obscure DOS games I want to revisit. It's hard to find what I want sometimes, but only having access to curated lists would change it from "hard" to "impossible" in many cases.
Hard to compare Bitcoin directly, but its market cap was around $1 billion in 2013 and cleared $1 trillion for the first time a little over a year ago.
I get that this article is about people using their personal computers to help archive things, but I don't think the Internet archive is ever going to be using resources even remotely as aggressively as cryptocurrencies unless they somehow turn all their archiving into cryptocurrency.
Usually it’s hard to say if it’s valuable now , only time can tell.
Crawled data is de-duplicated on the request level and response payloads can be individually gzipped as well as having per-archive-file compression. [1]
I doubt it take tremendous energy or resources. What percentage of the overall internet energy/resources is used by IA? An insignificant minuscule amount.
The problem with IA is that they are constantly attacked by institutions, corporations, etc to remove content.
Libraries aren't just "a bunch of books piled up in shelves", they're a historical invention built and perfected for centuries where books are extensively coded and catalogued via a complex hierarchical system. As we are dealing with far more data than the past (not just books but posts and comments from all over the world, as well as new kinds of media such as images and videos), and also have new kinds of conceptual and technological inventions that previous librarians didn't have access to (hyperlinks, databases, graph theory, machine learning, etc.), the current status of data management begs for a major overhaul. (For example, the best we are currently doing for querying and searching from massive data is Google, and it is incredibly primitive! And even then we lament that the quality of it has decreased in favor of SEO-maximizing content.) So much raw data is created every day, and we just seem to fail to understand and interpret almost all of it, I see it as one of the major historical crises we face today. Instead of just storing data, we must find radical new methodologies and tools to search, filter, and explore data, and this poses as both a philosophical problem (of semiotics, linguistics, and hermeneutics) as well as a technological problem.
Same reason why notes taken by random people 250 years ago are really valuable to historians today, even if it's just a todo list
Or Zero...depends who want to exchange it to real-stuff
The same goes for any other money/not-money's out there... If anyone has gold/silver/diamonds that he wants to get rid of for a price lower than the market value, then again, please get in touch with me....