[egypturnash]

Historical interest.

You wouldn't think today's newspaper is interesting, but to someone doing research, the newspaper of a hundred years ago is interesting.

You wouldn't think someone's Geocities site was interesting, but when that shut down, the Internet Archive spent a lot of energy saving what they could, and that's already interesting for someone researching what the Internet was like a mere twenty years ago.

Blockchains get sold as these wonderful systems for storing data and also coincidentally making money off of ICOs. If they're going to actually be used to store real, useful data, then even if there stops being am immediate use for it, future historians may find one.

[cortesoft]

If you just want an archive, you can simply download a copy of the blockchain and store it. You only need a network for updating a chain.

[la_fayette]

I totally agree, there is some historical importance to this whole blockchain hype. I remember the "ICO hype", where seemingly 1000s of ICO projects emerged out of the blue. All projects had websites, "whitepapers" and the like. There was a lot of attention, money and scams involved (at least from a personal perspective).

Nowadays many of these ICO projects are vanished: websites are down, "whitepapers" are gone, team members are in jail... Somebody in the future might want to reason about this phenomenon. As this was mostly an internet thing all data and information lived on the internet only. I think even today it might already be difficult to research about this, as lot of information is already gone.

[tromp]

Cryptocurrencies of interest leave long trails of discussion on bitcointalk.org and reddit, and project websites tend to leave traces on the internet archive.

[zitterbewegung]

A majority of coins either launch on networks like Ethereum or are a copy of Bitcoin. I do still realize that archiving old blockchains may still be important. I think archive.org would be a good place for that to happen.