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.
-- ixnaum, Feb 05 2016

Don't people already do this?
-- notexactly, Feb 06 2016


Yes, they do - or if they don't there is a wave of technology being whipped up into being by excited programmers up and down the planet, funded by slightly bemused capitalists who have an inkling that blockchain will be the very next big thing - which it will.

After the initial round of basic payments services, we'll be seeing blockchain intellectual property services, blockchain insurance, blockchain lending, blockchain derivatives, blockchain betting, blockchain contracts and legal, maybe blockchain legislation, blockchain distributed programming, blockchain organisational management - indeed blockchain anything you like that might benefit from some degree of decentralisation - which, organisationally, is a lot of stuff.
-- zen_tom, Feb 08 2016



random, halfbakery