Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#321

Post by dhosek » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

gzer0 wrote: post #248

londons_explore wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many NYSE stocks that existed at the start still exist today?

There weren't any "stocks" originally signed under the Buttonwood Agreement [1]; it was a consortium of 24 individual brokers [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood_Agreement

According to this page https://finance.zacks.com/first-company-offered-new-york-sto... the first five stocks listed included the Bank of New York which still exists as BNY Mellon. It doesn't indicate what the other four stocks were, but presumably they no longer exist (The NYSE page on Wikipedia lists other traded securities as shares in The First Bank of the United States (defunct in 1821) and the Bank of North America (which became a private institution (it was previously the de facto central bank of the nascent U.S.) in 1785 before merging with Commercial Trust Company in 1923. Its successor institutions were eventually acquired by Wells Fargo so presumably if you'd bought shares in 1785 and held on to them for the next 236 years you'd now be holding shares in Wells Fargo). As far as I can tell all other trading was in government bonds.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#322

Post by 542458 » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

trenchgun wrote: post #317

kingcharles wrote: post #305

As someone who just basically teleported to 2021 from 2013, I can tell you that 99% of my bookmarks are now dead. So, even in 8 years most web sites haven't managed to survive.

Care to elaborate on the teleportation mechanism?

Per other comments, county jail waiting for a trial.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#323

Post by genewitch » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

thruway516 wrote: post #166

trinovantes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact that human language will also change over the course of 500 years 500 year old English is nothing like English today

Assuming anyone is still speaking English, and not say Mandarin or even some obscure African language no one has even heard about yet.

put me in for $1 on both Lojban and Esperanto.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#324

Post by kingcharles » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

Klimentio wrote: post #189

taylorfinley wrote: post #39

Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.

It should be a balance between readability, findability and integrity. I would not bet on the btc blockchain for it. Its relativly complex to use, its very niche, it is already 360gb big and there might be a time were it either disappears or gets optimized and your information will be gone.

At some point improvements in computing will mean that the "crypto" in current cryptocurrencies will no longer be secure, and therefore all current currencies of this type will have to be abandonded for something else - quantum-something.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#325

Post by MontyCarloHall » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

orangepurple wrote: post #85

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably

The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever. The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet will live on.

“The thing is there can't be more than one phone system, ever. The moment someone invents a new phone system, someone will create a gateway to the old phone system, and the phone system will live on.”

Thus far, this is true. The global phone system has persisted for almost 100 years, evolving via numerous “gateways” to older iterations of system (e.g. land lines -> cell phones, copper wires -> microwave links -> fiber optic lines, in-band signaling -> out-of-band signaling, individual lines -> multiplexing, etc.)

Yet despite the same phone system evolving and persisting for almost a century, dial-in BBSes, Minitel [0], and other outdated technologies that use phone lines are completely dead. Just because a communications medium may persist for a long time doesn't mean protocols utilizing the medium will.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#326

Post by novaRom » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #209

Go to a big legal firm that's been around for at least a few hundred years. With them, set up a trust with a sufficient endowment to be run indefinitely (barring total societal or economic collapse), with the mission of maintaining this specific website in accessible format (including updates and format shifts as necessary). It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations wit…

I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#327

Post by snickerer » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

Have the website engraved on stainless steel plates. There are many affordable online services out there that would do that for you.

If your descendants store the plates in a dry attic, they could last 500 years just fine.

But… did anybody ever find something on their attic that was there for 500 years. That is very rare. I would assume that your great-grandchildren will throw them away because they need the space.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#328

Post by grey-area » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

zbuf wrote: post #227

Isn't there an 'arrogance' in the premise when we ask these sorts of questions? Not a personal criticism; just an aside from the technical question for a moment. It's the assumption that we've decided something we created should have permanence. Similar to billionaires deciding they would like to live forever and trying to make it happen. There's a beauty to the world, which is we get a short time to contribute, and…

Even trivial ephemeral records from a long time ago are incredibly useful to historians for what they give away about the time - tools, politics, morality; all are encoded inadvertently in the simplest text on any subject.

The Rosetta Stone for example is an incredibly boring text about taxes on religious organisations, but it proved to be rather useful.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#329

Post by hutzlibu » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

srcreigh wrote: post #221

nkrisc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still intelligible, though. One thousand years is about the accepted timeframe for a language to be no longer mutually intelligible for speakers at either end of that period. Of course, it’s entirely possible the rate of change within a language is not static over millennia.

Isn't it a bit silly to ask about whether 1000 year old people can understand modern language? If it's not, I would love to know more about this.

Not sure if you intentionally missunderstood, but the point was, that you probably would be able to make some sense of 1000 year old english, but that is about the border.

It depends on the culture of course. There are old cultures with the same references like a bible, that might cover longer timeframes of understanding.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#330

Post by mlinsey » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

Other comments have given ways to physically archive the webpage. Continually hosting it is a much trickier endeavor. Beyond just keeping the servers up, technologies will shift such that eventually html webpages, servers that talk using tcp/ip, datacenters that connect via fiber cables, etc will all be deprecated.

That said, if we have a very liberal definition of the word "website" to include any successor technologies where a device can be used to request a document, given an identifier, that looks recognizably like your webpage, this is doable. What you really need is an institution that you can trust to keep existing and to keep the necessary upkeep of your website as part of its mission.

The main institutions I can think of that have lasted for 500 years unbroken are churches and elite universities. If you were able to convince the Pope to decree that the church should keep hosting your webpage in perpetuity, that would likely work, but persuading him of that sounds very challenging. That said, universities are used to accepting gifts with sometimes eccentric strings attached. The gift will probably need to be large; but I imagine a $1B donation to Harvard under a condition that they continue to host and update the page as needed would likely work. Getting that sort of money is quite hard, but tbh probably easier than coming with a way of guaranteeing that your direct descendents keep the webpage up.