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.
There's no technical barrier to truncating a blockchain. Just create a new genesis block and have it initialize every account balance to the balance it held at the end of the previous block chain. You could discard all the junk data as simply as that.
"No technical barrier" means nothing with respect to Bitcoin. You have to convince a large majority of Bitcoin users / miners / exchanges / services to switch to your new genesis block or other protocol modifications, otherwise your fork will die off, or at least not "be Bitcoin" as the rest of the world sees it (e.x. Bitcoin Cash, etc)
But really it's not even necessary, nodes can and do prune op_return, spent, and otherwise unspendable transaction outputs.
The point though is someone is likely to always hold onto a complete history of the Bitcoin blockchain, even if most users don't.
> The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear"
The former may or may not happen depending on how widely it is used, certainly not everyone will have the full blockchain on their devices due to storage requirements. The latter is a social issue not a technical one.
> Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificating
One can definitely make an argument that Bitcoin will lose its social relevance in 100 years. Or 500 years. Or 1000 years. Do you see where i'm going with this?
Most of the OSes currently in use might not be relevant in a century. Most of HDDs or SSDs in use currently won't be around in a century, unless they're a part of an abstracted and clustered storage pool, which would take constant effort to maintain. Even short of the technical concerns, there is still need for social relevance - if and when it eventually ceases to be relevant, no one will care much about maintaining copies of the full blockchain, except for maybe in some museum archive.
Using a globally distributed store like that is a good idea, but it's definitely not foolproof. One of the better ways, perhaps, but maybe there are even better ones, that you or a foundation in your name controls, with properly sourced funding and preservation of data being its sole and primary concern.
>The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear"
This is a really bold assumption - you do understand that core dev is still ongoing, yes?
You do understand that "infinite data on a disk" doesn't exist, yes? And as the chain goes on longer, more space is going to be needed, and centralization of the miners will continue to increase, yes?
Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificating
If growth continues linearly it will be less than 20tb. It is possible to fit that much data on a single physical drive even now, let alone in 500 years. 360gb is just not that much.
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.
Eh, you just need a different "crypto" that's quantum safe. Yes if someone today had a computer that could crack private keys, all current crypto would be dead immediately. If crypto has some advanced warning (enough time to implement a new quantum safe private key scheme, update node software, and allow users to move funds to quantum safe addresses), then it's not existential.
Is there any standard for this, and a website (or websites) that publishes the data on the web?
There are obvious problems with blindly republishing arbitrary data from a public blockchain, of course.
Depending on how long you're willing to wait, you might be able to publish with as little as $0.00061 per byte: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/
For reference, the text of the HN homepage (excluding HTML tags) is about 4KB so ~$2 if you're willing to wait, or up to ~$200 if you're in a hurry. I'm not sure if op_return transactions are typically priced the same as standard transactions though.
I was curious what this would cost and found a thorough stackexchange post [0] that puts the price at 0.032 ETH per KB stored on-chain. Comes out to around 12,000 USD for a small 100kb static site.
I would guess this cost is competitive with carving binary data into stone, not bad for permenant storage, reading the data is free.
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.
Would S3 exist in 500 years? Bezos would be long gone. Our tech would be long gone. I'd think about the only thing we could do the same is walk and open our mouth's.
And who knows what the unexpected looks like...Wars, political shifts, etc. Hell, until 2019, I thought toilet paper was unlimited. Once again, toilet paper is starting to look like the currency of the new-world.
:) That's a joke BTW. But is it? I don't want to go back to using squirrels as toilet paper!
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.
I fully realize the theoretical advantages of blockchains. I can still store multiple copies in multiple clouds across multiple availability zones cheaper. The original question did not imply the destruction of S3.
You need to make sure someone continues pinning the data for it to exist on the network. You need to create the right financial incentives for that to happen, which is what Filecoin is supposed to solve.
I think Bitcoin is the safer option, since the history is more likely to be retained for historic reasons and it is smaller. Ethereum just has a lot more stuff running on it and the chain is much larger.
This. It's a gross abuse of bitcoins network, but bitcoin is a time keeping database at its core and it would not be impossible. That only accounts for data storage and retrieval though. For the end user to connect to the website, you still need some sort of server stack. Maybe IPFS could be used to overcome that part.
