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Btw: You need about 12 TB for a 1 year video stream at 3 Mbit/s, so it's certainly doable, but it's not cheap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what if you accidentally wrote your private key, photos of your nude boyfriend, or evidence of a crime to your mass storage
Then you would delete it > everything would be append-only by default doesn't mean everything is permanently etched into stone or written on the blockchain, it just means that "by default" everything you write is written to a new block[1], instead of having to free up old blocks to reuse and keep track of which blocks of storage are available [1]"block" is just meant as a generic unit of storage, I'm not trying to sa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all! Medieval documents were routinely washed and reused.
A reused manuscript page is called a palimpsest and often the scraped off text can be recovered. Some of Archimedes writings actually survived this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest
If mass storage were free, then everything would be append-only by default. There would be no excuse to not do this. A major benefit of append-only is that your writes are always ideal for whatever storage medium. Especially magnetic or tape. Combine append-only with batching of transactions (i.e. across 1-10 milliseconds at a time), and you can write multiple txns per disk I/O operation (assuming txn size < storage…
what if you accidentally wrote your private key, photos of your nude boyfriend, or evidence of a crime to your mass storage
Do you know why ASCII 0x7f is DEL? Paper tape is write-once. To indicate a deleted character, it was conventional to punch holes in all bit positions -- 0x7f on a 7-bit punch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all! Medieval documents were routinely washed and reused.
I don't think that was their point. If you went to a bank in the 1940s and made a withdrawal, they wouldn't pull your account slip, erase the balance, and write in the new one. They would add a new line to the ledger noting a new balance. This is by design.
> Optical discs promise to come one to two orders of magnitude closer to the limiting case of free mass storage than ever before. Other features of optical discs include improved reliability and a single technology for both on-line and archival storage with a long shelf life. Because of these features and because of (not in spite of) their non-deletion limitation, it is argued that optical discs fit the requirements…
1988: Schlumberger Cambridge Research takes possession of a new 1MB drive to be added to its VAXcluster. The drive is the size of ... a small refridgerator. It was quite a day!
> Optical discs promise to come one to two orders of magnitude closer to the limiting case of free mass storage than ever before. Other features of optical discs include improved reliability and a single technology for both on-line and archival storage with a long shelf life. Because of these features and because of (not in spite of) their non-deletion limitation, it is argued that optical discs fit the requirements…
1988: Schlumberger Cambridge Research takes possession of a new 1MB drive to be added to its VAXcluster. The drive is the size of ... a small refridgerator. It was quite a day!
Bonus: I got an RLL controller and turned it into a 30MB hard disk! Couldn't believe it. But getting the interleaving right was time consuming..
Interestingly, Google and Facebook seem to have basically done it right with their exascale filesystems. The same with object stores.
> Optical discs promise to come one to two orders of magnitude closer to the limiting case of free mass storage than ever before. Other features of optical discs include improved reliability and a single technology for both on-line and archival storage with a long shelf life. Because of these features and because of (not in spite of) their non-deletion limitation, it is argued that optical discs fit the requirements…
I just found this quite old paper and it came as a surprise to me to discover that the idea of append-only storage is not 20 years old but more than 40! The older work I was aware of is on "The design and implementation of a log-structured file system" (1) So this is with pleasure that I learned that these ideas was around in the 80: - Deletion considered harmful - A non-deletion strategy using timestamps - The impor…
The 1980 paper you linked is touched on briefly at the beginning of this Strange Loop talk on "Light and Adaptive Indexing for Immutable Databases (2022)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px-7TlceM5A