[zer01]

Sure, I generally think of these projects as experiments to try to make this “store something permanently” vision happen in reality. Just because the vision has hurdles to overcome doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Arguably GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault aimed to do the same thing in a different way https://archiveprogram.github.com/. I agree that the tail end support of bandwidth and storage costs for X years are obstacles for this vision but blockchains in their current form already incentivize keeping this data around and hosting the data as part of normal network operations. These projects are just trying to separate out the storage layer from the computation layer (which may be a folly, or may prove viable). The point is that there’s groups of people trying to apply these new tools in novel ways to try to give humanity better tools in some capacity, and I think that’s a fine use of resources and effort.

Have you heard of the uncensorable library project? https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en it aims to make some data permanent and available even in the face of Chinese censorship. Is it a panacea that’s going to scale for all data forever? Of course not, but it’s a novel approach and an interesting experiment (and look ma, no blockchain!).