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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

This is the one thing blockchains are truly good for.

But there has to be economic incentives to maintain the data, and only Bitcoin can even to begin to make that claim, and even it is only 16 years old.

Still, Open Timestamps does exactly this, and had been running for over 8 years now.

Yeah it definitely could be, though you may similarly find yourself in a spot of trusting a limited number of nodes that guarantee the chain was never tampered with.

For something like this there’s ways to minimize how much you need to trust nodes such as regularly publishing hashes to 3rd parties like HN.

Not so useful if something was edited a few minutes after posting, but it makes it more difficult for a new administration to suddenly edit a bunch of old data.

> there’s ways to minimize how much you need to trust nodes such as regularly publishing hashes to 3rd parties like HN.

But you could do the same thing with any hashes, right? There is no need for a blockchain in the middle.

What happens as websites disappear? With a blockchain in 2090 you can point to a website post in 2060 as support that your hashes on data posted in 2030 are still valid. That’s useful when preventing people from rewriting history is the goal.

There’s also a size advantage. You can keep a diff on the archive for each hash being posted instead of the full index for every time you post a hash.

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