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Comment by calicocoa | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting. The site is very beautiful! I'm curious: let's say I'm 30 years old. How can I be sure that 'posterity.life' will be around if I live a full and long life. A _lot_ can change in fifty years.

This seems like an obvious concern and I don't see it covered in your FAQ. This is not hypothetical. There are many similar (not identical) services that are no more. See SafeBeyond for one such example.

What do you say to folks who wonder about whether their lives will be longer than that of this site?

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This is a good question.

The way to think about us is more like a home insurance. When you purchase a policy, your home is covered if something happens to it for one year. When it expires, you can renew it again. If the insurance goes out of business, you can choose another carrier or find another alternative.

It’s not so different with us. You purchase a subscription, and it covers you for one year if you pass away during that time, and you can renew it afterwards.

The services we offer never extend more than 6 months after one’s passing, so you don’t have to really be worried about us being in business for more than 18 months after you become a user, which is really not excessive and in the ballpark of most other services you use.

Edit — Typo.

I've been thinking about this topic after I got married, and realized that I wanted to back up my wedding photos for 100+ years so my great-great-grandkids have the originals.

I wonder if this is a good use of blockchain technology. The company sets things up in such a way where there are resources and mechanisms to keep things running after the company collapses. Theoretically, as long as the s3 bills are paid, things keep running - the money pool pays for that, getting annual refreshes from data owners. Then money also exists for maintenance - s3 will shut down some day, but with money in escrow, developers can create proposals for maintenance that the token owners vote on.

Just a lot of hand waving away problems on my part, but I think it's an interesting question: how do people store data for 100+ years?

> how do people store data for 100+ years?

Print it.

On acid-free paper.

In a decent box.

With archival quality pigment inks

https://keithdotson.com/blogs/news/how-long-will-your-photog...

Do you have any insight on whether NeverTear would be good media for long-term archival? Waterproof and damage resistant is a big plus, but I wonder if they come at the cost of pigmant durability.

I can’t say for sure. I’ve never used the product you mention, but it is made out of polyester, which is supposed to be great for archival purposes. So…probably yes?

I disagree - digital is the only route. Printouts will get lost, bent, fires, floods, and lost.

The broader idea that I find interesting however is how to preserve digital content for > 100 years. It's okay if other people don't care about that - I do, and I think it's an interesting set of problem constraints, and was just wondering if anyone else has thought about it.

It's difficult to suggest an actual use case for blockchain, and I am far from an expert, but I think this could be an interesting innovative options for actually using distributed databases to control assets and make collective decisions in a decentralized fashion.

Looking at 200 year old photos is easy.

Trying to find hardware to access a 30 year old hard drive is not.

Don't do this. I somehow ended up with all the pictures of family going back to the 1800s. I have 5 suitcases full that I now have to scan.

Find the best representative photos, and upload them to Geni.com, Ancestry.com, MyHerritage.com, 23andme, etc. They are bound to survive from one of those sources.

That's why you pick the best five from each year and print them in a small acid-free paper book.

You keep the gigantic digital repository as long as feasible (I burn to M-Discs), but for accessibility and long-term, pick your favorites in a way we have good reason to think can last for hundreds of years.

> print them in a small acid-free paper book

any good recommendations for printers?

Shutterfly's interface is (was? been a while) kind of painful, but we've gotten good results from them.

Chatbooks makes it fairly brainlessly easy to produce books regularly (and had a hilarious ad a few years back focusing on the ease of use compared to other options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF2eKaOc3wo).

I can't swear to the longevity of the books - I never dug into the details of how they're printed, because I'm not especially concerned about making sure they last a hundred years.

It's the right strategy in principle, though, if that is your goal.

Why don't you just pass on 6 suitcases instead of adding the risk of losing digital media. The current process has worked for your family for 200 years.

Color inkjet printing wasn't a thing 50 years ago

Arweave

I see a market opening: a service to track and manage the afterlife of afterlife services.

This. Unless you are a mayfly, you are highly likely to outlive any new business. Simpler approach is to have an executor have a way to access a password manager to be able to identify and close out online services.

Seeing this makes me also think... why not offer a service that will lock down all finance, identity and other related services upon the event of a perceived attack? Sure, it would be worthless if it was too sensitive. I key feature would be that it could be unlocked in 5mins or less by an account holder.

this would be vulnerable to DOSing. Imagine me, your competition, with a finger over a button that can make your money useless for the next five minutes.

I wonder if the whole site could be put in a trust with legal stipulations to maintain hosting funds. The trustees would be the management teams, then potentially a corporate trustee who could keep the lights on in the event of a permanent code freeze.

I think partnering with a forward thinking legal firm that specializes in estate planning would be a cool avenue to explore that further.

or maybe structure the organization as two parts, an independent trust that acts as a custodian with set aside assets to cover the running costs over the expected lifetime of the covered population , and a technology company that builds markets and operates the service on behalf of the trust (or trusts)?

kind of like how a regulated brokerage, pension fund or insurance company operates. The difficult part is credibly ensuring that the companies will follow the rules when there is no legal big stick hanging over them. Maybe you could have the company buy and issue performance bonds to the policy holders , so if the company disappears, the policy holder or their family gets a lump sum? And have the (independent) company issuing the bonds have the contractual right to display the current pricing of the performance bonds, so if the bond company starts to suspects mismanagement, the price goes up, and that has an immediate effect on the company’s standing (and is therefore likely to deter bad behavior)

The oldest organizations are churches and universities. Seems like they should be involved managing something like this.

Banks and trusts management firms generally have a good track record. Lately banks have been much more speculative but historically existed because they had peoples trust. Trust management firms that manage trusts have to last because it’s part of the purpose of a trust. I’d imagine a digital trust could have potential, where you add some sort of digital artifact and it’s expected to be accessible.

Churches and universities are not something I would bet heavily on in the next 100 years. Some will survive, but society may not continue to favor them like we’ve seen recently.

Churches surely have ahem a hand in the afterlife planning of many people, and a good track record for being their at time of death, but they’ve recently taken a massive beating in terms of attendance in much of American.

Universities were pretty rare a long time ago, and society has seen lots of new ones recently. I don’t know if I’d bet that any but the biggest names (endowments) eg ivy leagues, Oxford etc. can be counted on to last another hundred+ years.

Cryonics service providers do that. Here's an example from Alcor, the largest: https://www.alcor.org/library/the-alcor-patient-care-trusts/

"At Alcor, patient storage costs are paid from two separate but interrelated Trusts: the Alcor Patient Care Trust, and the Alcor Care Trust Supporting Organization. … This conservative funding arrangement is designed to cover the cost of patient storage solely from the income from the Trusts, thereby assuring that such funding will continue indefinitely into the future."

They can ghost you

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