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by Galanwe 222 days ago
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.
2 comments
egberts1 222 days ago
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/

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dpark 222 days ago
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.

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Galanwe 222 days ago
> 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.

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dpark 222 days ago
> That's nonsensical, the price of using a service on a blockchain is essentially a floating value.

This is kind of a ridiculous response. The price of oil is also a floating value and yet it is not nonsensical to discuss the price of a barrel of oil.

Yes, the cost to store something on the bitcoin blockchain floats. Several sources indicate that roughly a dollar is a reasonable approximation currently. If you disagree I’d be interested in seeing your data.

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

I don’t know a ton about filecoin but it seems like retrieving data is pretty cumbersome. It’s not clear that this would actually be useable for a Wikipedia reference archive.

> 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.

Blockchain for its own sake. Sure, you could create a custom blockchain. You could also just pay AWS for georeplicated blob storage and it would be way less complex.

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