[dogma1138]

Regardless of this situation I actually think that websites like Archive and TWBM should be fully transparent.

A very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them. Most of the pages that cite archived copies do so because the live version is no longer available I would like to have some assurances that archive.is and the likes are not altering their content in any way over time.

Unironically content sensitive hashing of archival pages might be one of the few use cases where something like a blockchain might actually be useful for.

[dpark]

Why would the blockchain be useful here? You don’t need a blockchain to store a hash.

[Galanwe]

You do need some kind of reliable, distributed storage though. The sequential nature of a blockchain also ensures that such stored content is held no matter what by any full node.

[egberts1]

No, just no.

A simple four-hash like BSD or Gentoo Linux do with their repository is more than sufficient.

No need to record who is requesting the recording, much leas fetchibg.

[Galanwe]

The hash to verify content is only half of the problem. You also need to store the _actual_ content of the page. What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?

A blockchain is, at its core, a distributed database, it is exactly made for this use case.

[egberts1]

You should experiment with embedded hash within HTML pages and discover their limitations.

These same limitations amplifies when going to outer scopes like URL itself, blockchain isn't immune to this.

Blockchain also has the same problem when attempting to track/verify each single vote.

W3C Subresource Integrity Recommendation

Source: https://www.w3.org/TR/sri-2/

[dpark]

A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar. How many millions (billions?) would Wikipedia need to spend to stash everything they reference in the blockchain?

> What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?

It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as an archive.

[Galanwe]

> A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar

That's nonsensical, the price of using a service on a blockchain is essentially a floating value. That is the whole point of having a token in the first place: people willing to store and people storing are participating in the price of the service.

Last I checked, filecoin was a few cents per GB per month.

You can create a blockchain of kind hearted people to store Wikipedia as well, it's really up to you. But comparing apples and oranges makes no sense.

[AlienRobot]

It's a hash.

[dogma1138]

You both need to generate the hash at the point of archival correctly and store it in a way that cannot be modified later on.

Doing that with a blockchain like tech is one of the few use cases where the tech itself actually adds value.

Heck you might be able to store the entire pages on a blockchain or a blockchain linked storage.

The problem with these sites is that we implicitly trust them and unlike a book or other handprint media where editing or destroying all unedited existing copies is effectively impossible if a shady actor can easily start editing archived news articles and other sites that are no longer publicly available.

[dpark]

This is getting to blockchain for the sake of blockchain.

If Wikipedia recorded the hash of every referenced page you could verify that the archive.is page is unchanged.

You could certainly argue that archive.is isn’t the right place to store archives (I have no idea) but attempting to move all this to the blockchain would be very expensive.

[AlienRobot]

You only need the hash of the original content. No blockchain is necessary. The problem is that there is no source for that hash except for the scraper that archives it since people don't put the hash in a hyperlink.

If you download an ISO for a Linux OS for example, they give you the hash of the file so you can check it. They don't build an entire blockchain whatever to validate the hash.

[JumpCrisscross]

> very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them

Is the Internet Archive related to archive.is?

[cosmojg]

No, the Internet Archive is an organization that runs a web archive at archive.org while archive.is is an alternative domain for archive.today, a competing web archive run by an individual.