No Data Lasts Forever

> All data degrades and eventually disappears unless an effort is made to care for and maintain it.

This is the crux of it. You can have your holographic quartz or whatever new technology is supposed to last a hundred million years, but unless someone is keeping it from being thrown away after your family has a yard sale after you die, it's gone. Getting people to care about your data is the hardest thing required to make data last forever.

A blockchain funded by data contributors is an interesting idea.

If fees for adding data were continually adjusted to keep data size to an economically viable size.

I.e. there would be a continual auction of adding data, with the fees spread out among verifiably maintained repositories (say fastest generation of hash across all data from previous hash, every minute.)

And each repository could compete by price to service data requests.

The point being: long term distributed incentive to maintain and serve data.

(Scaling to vast amounts of data vs. sharding - allowing individual repositories to hold partial data - balanced to ensure distributed backups, but not more than necessary to keep each archive size manageable for many providers.)

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Best done without creating any new coin type. I.e. avoid creating any non-aligned hype incentives.

Maybe this has already been done?

Somehow "No Data Lasts Forever" sounds profound while "Nothing Lasts Forever" sound obvious. Why is that?

True, but data will be aggregated to train generative AIs. If those systems prevail, then the original data will live in spirit.

Maybe that will be the ultimate destination of all data: To train AIs.

In the future, data creators should be compensated for their contributions to build AIs.

This cannot be true. Science marches ever forward. We are learning new things constantly and no knowledge has been lost. New findings from new studies always augment our growing base of empirical facts and evidence. We are more advanced today than anyone, anywhere in the past.