Problem: How do you store the phrase "Ixnaum wills his
happy platypus to the half bakery upon his death." on
any
medium forever at a reasonable cost? How do you do it
in
a way that it can never be altered?
Ideas:
Paper: nope, can be ripped up and burned. Can be
altered.
Stone:
nope, too bulky, can crack due to temperature
variations, I don't have a chisel on me. Also, this can be
altered and tampered with.
CD: nope, they get scratched and have a limited
lifetime.
Can be tampered with
USB drive: nope, the chip might stop working. Can be
tampered with.
Cloud: nope, the cloud operator may go out of business,
or
get horribly hacked. Can definitely be tampered with.
Own archival solution with multiple levels of backups and
media upgrade strategy: nope, way too expensive. Can
still be tampered with.
Floppy disk: what's that? .. and yes, even if you make it
read only, all you need it a bit of tape to make it RW
again
to tamper with it.
... Instead of fumbling with all that, why not store the
data inside the bitcoin block chain. Encode the text
inside
transaction from one wallet that you own to another.
That
will create a near ever lasting, un-alterable record. I
figure the cost will be a about $0.02 USD for the phrase
above (less with compression and less if you are willing
to
wait for confirmation very long time). That is $230 per
MB
of data, so you might want to be careful what you record
is
really important.
PS: No, I don't have a happy platypus ... so stop wishing
I die already.