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Wednesday, April 14, 2021

CONTINUITY: Blockchain as Global, Un-censorable, and Indestructible Library

The book(-let: it's just 104 pages) is Blockchain (Library Futures Series, Book 3).

In 1998, I proposed the “Data Immortality Foundation” to provide for perpetual storage and access to documents and data despite the vicissitudes of time, technology, and coercive governments. Perhaps blockchain technology (not Bitcoin, which would be hideously inefficient for the purpose and prohibitively expensive, but a purpose-built system based upon its fundamental technologies) could provide for a distributed, peer-to-peer, permanent, unalterable, and impossible-to-censor repository for documents and data of all kinds (images, video, sound recordings, raw data from scientific experiments, etc.). Once you have immutable addresses and documents, you can then build a layer on top of it with versioning, citation, and compensation for authors and publishers, and finally realise the dream of Project Xanadu without any central organisation or choke-point where censorship could be applied.

Such a system would, incidentally, make abusive copyrights impotent and obsolete.

Posted at April 14, 2021 13:28