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

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

#451

Post by mcculley »

foopod wrote: post #387
mcculley wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Putting 1 gigabyte in S3 for 500 years at today's most expensive price ($0.023 per gigabyte month) would be $138. Prices are certain to decrease over time. This says something about the cost of using the Ethereum blockchain for storage.

S3 and blockchain have very different use cases right? Blockchain being for small quantities of data made immutable, used in a p2p manner with as many copies as there are peers. S3 generally being purpose built for short term (relative to blockchain) storage and price.

Yes, they have different uses cases. But one can easily see an arbitrage opportunity here for building an immortal database atop S3 (and other cloud services) for a lot less money. For $12,000 USD, I could store the same data in S3 for (at the very least) 445,217 years. (Using the example above.)

That makes the value proposition of the Ethereum blockchain as a data store a lot less attractive.

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

#453

Post by SynasterBeiter »

brutusborn wrote: post #434
cstross wrote: post #336

The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…

I would also add the social element - if you want your kids and grandkids to be able to read it, pass custody of the website well before you die (perhaps in a will?) and tell as many friends and family as you can. I know I would happily administer a deceased friend's website until i could no longer myself.

But who will administer the site after you pass? It's much harder to justify the administering effort, when you never even knew the original guy.

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

#454

Post by mattl »

cstross wrote: post #336

The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…

Where are you getting 28 years old from?

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

#455

Post by Someone »

Your options are “durable copies” and “lots of copies”. Some out-of-the-box ideas for these:

For durable copies, use clay tablets, or (better, I think) write it in large print (kilometers per letter, preferably) on the surface of the moon.

For lots of copies, put it in every block-chain you can find or write it (say in Morse or in ascii bits) on or in small durable objects that have little inherent value (you don’t want your writing to be recycled for its resource value) such a as glass beads, produce billions of them, and distribute them over the surface of the world.

Launching a pioneer-class probe with the text on it every year or so also may help, in the (not highly likely, IMO) case there’s almost total collapse of society where we have to leave earth and then invent much faster space travel than we have now (so that we can catch up with old, slow probes)

I think your biggest challenge will be to make your progeny interested in reading what you wrote, though. Why do you think they would want to read your page, and not watch videos of adorable robotic kittens?

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

#456

Post by tragictrash »

SynasterBeiter wrote: post #453
brutusborn wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also add the social element - if you want your kids and grandkids to be able to read it, pass custody of the website well before you die (perhaps in a will?) and tell as many friends and family as you can. I know I would happily administer a deceased friend's website until i could no longer myself.

But who will administer the site after you pass? It's much harder to justify the administering effort, when you never even knew the original guy.

Start a cult of data protectors, maybe your kids?

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

#457

Post by endymi0n »

SynasterBeiter wrote: post #453
brutusborn wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also add the social element - if you want your kids and grandkids to be able to read it, pass custody of the website well before you die (perhaps in a will?) and tell as many friends and family as you can. I know I would happily administer a deceased friend's website until i could no longer myself.

But who will administer the site after you pass? It's much harder to justify the administering effort, when you never even knew the original guy.

Adding money might help. We have a small scale investment in our cap table from a German family who have kept their money together for 650 years…

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

#458

Post by matthias509 »

mattl wrote: post #454
cstross wrote: post #336

The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…

Where are you getting 28 years old from?

Mosaic release date maybe? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

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

#459

Post by zarmin »

cstross wrote: post #336

The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…

Maybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in the time of Shakespeare?

   Forsooth!

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

#460

Post by teawrecks »

mcculley wrote: post #451
foopod wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S3 and blockchain have very different use cases right? Blockchain being for small quantities of data made immutable, used in a p2p manner with as many copies as there are peers. S3 generally being purpose built for short term (relative to blockchain) storage and price.

Yes, they have different uses cases. But one can easily see an arbitrage opportunity here for building an immortal database atop S3 (and other cloud services) for a lot less money. For $12,000 USD, I could store the same data in S3 for (at the very least) 445,217 years. (Using the example above.) That makes the value proposition of the Ethereum blockchain as a data store a lot less attractive.

This is so theoretical, I don't think it has any value. Meanwhile, consider the effort involved in destroying all data stored in S3 vs destroying the entire ETH blockchain. One is expensive, possibly only achievable by a national superpower, the other is virtually impossible without destroying the planet.
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