What’s lovely about Ethereum or the idea of crypto is that it will be around for a really long time.
I just watched a video of a women cleaning off a strangers tombstone. She went over the persons story and his life. He was born during the 1850s and died in the 1920s. It was a really nice video.
I think we all want to be able to be remembered by our future generations and for what we all did during our lives. It serves as a noble reminder for those of us know looking at the humble lives our ancestors lived. Yes obituaries are preserved online but they are preserved on servers and by companies that could be long gone in just a few decades. They might cease to exists.
What do you think about preserving your legacy and your place in history by publicly putting it on the black chain?
I don’t think this will be the use case that brings people to crypto but I think it’s something that will be used once they are here after they see the value of it.
I like it.
As you say, it is not the use case that brings the next million users, but it shows how this technology can be used in real processes in real world, with real needs.
IMO, the idea is simple but brilliant.It poses an interesting question: What happens if everyone starts using Ethereum as a data archive service?
One interesting aspect of this, and this applies to most blockchains, is that you pay for the data a single time upfront but you expect it to remain there forever.
Does this make any sense to you at scale? Does this at all sound sustainable? Because it isn’t. It’s a tragedy of the commons problem. It can even get worse if a naive pricing mechanism is added for rent, where you rely on hardcoded parameters to gauge the price of storage in a fluctuating market.
You only solve this issue with a market mechanism, something fundamental. Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting coupled with a finite ledger is a good solution: basically, all transactions have a set lifespan and at the end they must be rebroadcast, paying the average fee/byte new txs paid over their lifespan.
If you fund it well enough (or if it’s on Saito and your staking rewards offset your rent) you can have data that lasts forever on a chain with a sustainable economic model.
It might seem like a downgrade because you don’t get to pay once and live forever - but consider that paying once and living forever is a straight road to economic ruin and is simply pushing costs onto future users, thus continually removing users from the chain until it dies.
If you actually can pay for storage at a market rate, the chance that your data survives hundreds of years is far greater.
That’s a very fair take. I’ve always thought one of the best qualities of crypto is its potential use as like a digital proof of history.
But I never really considered the continuous cost of keeping data around forever.
Would either one of the next upgrades for the network help solve this issue by allowing some data to not be kept forever? I forget if it’s blob space or danksharing but one of these allows for data to be removed after some time right?
Then what are the chances that our need for data storage does not grow as fast as our data storage capabilities? That seems to be the trend over the years with most technology. So if our capacity is increasing and ethereum is becoming more efficient with the data it stores is there a case it is sustainable to keep this data on the network for a very very long time? That sounds realistic to me.
Many protocols take the easy route and just say storage will get cheaper as more data is placed on-chain.
The problem is that this isn’t a market pricing mechanism - it’s developers forecasting prices and hard-coding variables based on those estimations. Not only does this put huge economic power and continuous reliance on developers, but it will never be as accurate as the free market.
When you start guessing prices instead of letting the market decide, you get problems on either side of the error. Over-price and users are paying nodes extra for no extra utility, under-price and nodes will not provide utility at all (unless centrally subsidized, like Infura is now).
The only way to get consistently low fees is the let the market price storage. Now when storage prices go down the cost for using the blockchain will immediately follow. Actually, it’s much better than that…
Because nodes are rewarded for storing data more efficiently, they actually earn profits they can use to research and develop even more efficient forms of storage - so they will be enhancing that trend instead of merely relying on it.
You don’t get any of this when you don’t pay nodes the market rate for storage and just hope that adoption will happen more slowly than storage technology happens to become cheaper.