Ask HN: How would you store 5TB of data for 50 years, untouched? - <AUTHOR> Let's say you were thinking of putting digital data in a time capsule where it couldn't be touched for 50 years. How would you store it? How would you ensure it was readable at the end of the 50 years? <comment><USER2> Here's what I would suggest:

Take a bunch of fibrous, cellulosic material, pound it into a pulp and then squeeze it into very thin, flexible sheets of material. Let them dry.

Then, take some form of pigment or dye, and with a very fine stylus impregnated with the dye, visually encode the data on the cellulosic sheets using a set of graphemes. Each grapheme would roughly represent a phoneme in a spoken language.

It would take quite a while to encode all that data. I'd suggest building some type of mechanical to automate the task of transferring dye on to the cellulosic sheets. I'd also want to bundle these individual cellulosic sheets into stacks of 200-500 for organization's sake. I'd probably cover them with a more durable material such as animal hide or perhaps a thicker layer of cellulosic material.

I'd then take all these bundles of data laded cellulosic material, and I'd build a structure to protect these bundles from the elements. Developing a cataloging or indexing system for these bundles shouldn't be too hard. I'm sure it's been done before.

Regardless, you could either preserve the materials or let the public have free access to the information. You'd run the risk of damaging the data, but if you had a mechanical replication system, you could simply make multiple copies of each data set, and ensure the safety of the data that way.

Sheets of fibrous, cellulosic material should last several thousand years if kept in the right environment.

You know. Now that I think about it. It's probably much too complex a system to handle something like that. I really don't think it would work.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, how large would the time capsule need to be to contain 5TB of data encoded that way?

<comment><USER4> The storage density of A-format mass market paperbacks containing dense UTF-8 text is roughly 4Mb/Kg. (A 400 page novel weighs around 250 grams and contains roughly 1Mb. Source: I went and weighed one of my novels, of known word count.) We can up the density somewhat by bzip2-compressing and then uuencoding (or similar); maybe 10Mb/kg is achievable.

Normal A-format paperbacks use acidic wood pulp for paper, but acid-free paper doesn't add a whole lot to the cost. So we get roughly 10Gb/ton, and the whole kaboodle comes in at roughly 500 tons. As the density of wood pulp is close to that of water, this approximates to a 10 x 10 x 5 metre lump. Quite a large time capsule, but not unmanagable :)

However. If we posit the availability of decent optical scanners in 50 years' time, there's no reason not to go denser.

We can print the data as a bitmap at 300dpi and be reasonably sure of retrieving it using a 2400dpi scanner. Let's approximate 300dpi to 254dpi, and call it 10 bits/mm. Printed on reasonable quality acid-free paper, we can get 100mbits/square metre, and that square metre will weigh around 80 grams (it's 80gsm paper -- same as your laser printer runs on). Call it 1.1 mb/gram. At this density, we can print the whole 5Tb (or 40tbits) on just 40 tons of paper, without compression; with compression, call it 20 tons. That's a 2.71 metre cube; just under 9' on an edge.

This assumes a monochrome bitmap. If we go to colour and use archival-quality inks we can probably -- conservatively -- retrieve one bit each of red/blue/green per dot, and it's probably not unreasonable to expect to get a whole byte out in place of each bit in our mono bitmap. So we can probably shrink our archive to roughly 2.5 tons of paper -- a pallet-load.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if anyone has actually attempted this and seen how dense you can pack it and reliably recover. I imagine you would need measures to counter small misalignments when rescanning and imperfections in the physical media.

<comment><USER6> 200kb per A4 page using a 600dpi b/w laser printer: <http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Use ion beam deposition (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_beam_deposition>). You can inscribe 20,000 pages on a 5" nickel disk. The data can be read by any civilization that can build an optical microscope. It will last for millennia.

</comment><comment><USER8> Since some of the solutions people are proposing assume you have a lot of space for storage, I'll assume that too.

1\. Get a 9600 bps modem. Use it to encode your data, and record the output as an audio file.

2\. Take this audio file, and split it up into 60 minute segments.

3\. Record these 60 minute segments onto two-sided vinyl LPs, 30 minutes per side. This will take about a million LPs.

4\. Print on acid-free paper, using ink that will survive 50 years too, instructions on how a 9600 bps modem works. Describe the encoding in detail, sufficient so that someone using the equivalent of MATLAB or Mathematica or something 50 years from now on the computers they will have then could easily write a program to decode a modem signal.

5\. Also print and include instructions for making a record player. As with the modem, the important part is describing how the signal is encoded on the LP. They'll have no trouble building a record player 50 years from now. (Assuming they don't just photograph the LPs with the 3D terapixel camera on their iPhone 54, and then write an app to extract the signal from the photo...)

5\. Store all of this somewhere. LPs will last 50 years easily in a typical office environment, so you probably don't have to resort to something like a hermetically sealed vault buried in an old salt mine or anything extreme like that.

<comment><USER9> Nice idea. Probably no need for an actual modem in the encoding, I think that should be feasible with software nowadays?

<comment><USER10> It's nice to work with standard things when you're talking archive. A physical modem is a lot more standard than a custom one-of program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If a constraint was that it's going in a literal time capsule that would be buried underground (i.e. physical damage to the area is not controllable) I would get a couple of SSDs and a couple of backup tapes, and save redundant copies on different types of media. Given enough space I'd also stick a couple of machines capable of reading the data just in case.

Removing that constraint and completely ignoring cost I'd also setup a low- risk savings account with $1M in it and put the data on S3 and Rackspace Cloud. I'd store access credentials in the capsule. Odds are pretty good one of those 2 will be around in 50 years (and you'll have a chunk of money left over in interest).

Try to keep everything ASCII, with really good text descriptions of data formats.

Realistically 50 years is not a long time: I would bet we'll still have legacy access to USB, SATA, and probably ext3 & NTFS (though probably not IDE). Tons of computer folk who used these technologies will still be alive to work them. English will still be the primary language in the US.

An interesting problem is what to do when the timescale allows these things to change. What if nobody remembers USB, or what spinning platters are. Or the English language?

<comment><USER12> Neither tape nor SSDs will last 50 years. Within about 10 years, tapes will loose magnetization through thermal movement and capacitors in SSD storage cells will flip due to cosmic radiation. Over some decades the plastic the media and/or casings are made of will just decay (a serious problem for museums of modern art and design: [http://www.getty.edu/conservation/science/plastics/index.htm...](http://www.getty.edu/conservation/science/plastics/index.html)). The only media with a prooven track record of preservation over decades are acid free paper, parchment and non-organic materials like steel, stone and clay. But getting 5TB on an stone tablet has its very own challenges. [Edit: And using acid free paper won't buy you anything if you print using plastic based toner common in modern laser printers, at least use an inkjet with inorganic pigment (and not dye based) ink. If you look out for pitfalls like this, you might be able to implement your requirements with <http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/> and only 125 metric tons of acid free paper, which you should be able to buy for less than $200000.]

Some people claim than MO media and DVD-RAM can guarantee 30 years, but this still is an estimate, they have not been around long enough to actually know.

The only "reliable" way to store digital data for more than five years known today is to copy them to new media well in advance of the old media loosing them, and even that is difficult if the amount of data is growing faster than the the storage technologies get faster. (I don't know if I should trust Eric Schmidt, but a few days ago he claimed that currently humanity generates as much data every two days as it did up until 2003, <http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data> )

<comment><USER13> SSDs with batteries and/or solar power for 50 years?

<comment><USER10> If it's solar radiation that flips the bits, why not just stick it in a lead case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Convert the data to a string of letters.

Have a child.

Name your child that string of letters.

Now preserving your data is the government's problem- they have to produce a birth certificate and keep track of him/her in their databases.

<comment><USER14> They'll just rename your child.

The thing about government is, all the laws apply to you. But they can do anything they want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of people are talking about 50 years like it was a super long time, and propose solutions that are really intended for hundreds to thousands of years. I think it's overkill. [Also I think a lot of you are under 30 :-) ]

For only 50 years, I'd probably risk making many thousands of DVDs and CDs, using different manufacturers and drives. Store with tons of redundancy and ECC, don't use inner / outer tracks for anything important, etc.

Also, are all of the data equally important? You can afford to store the more critical pieces in more expensive and less compact, but more robust formats.

I think the real enemy is obsolescence, and that keeping the data simple (and providing decompression programs and indices in easily understandable formats) is likely more important than worrying about bit-dropout, which seems largely manageable over your specified time.

For 500 years, I'd print it, or micro-inscribe it. (One problem with printed matter is that it has other inherent value, e.g., fuel for heating the yurts of cold barbarians).

For 5K years, micro-inscription and (if you are worried about technological crashes) an archive in the sky. You could populate a host of satellites in various orbits, timed to re-enter at intervals of (say) a decade over a few thousand years (hard to be exact with atmospheric drag and climate change, but you get my drift). Getting something from orbit down to the ground is not hard, getting /noticed/ and picked up as an interesting artifact is probably harder.

For 5M years, add a metric buttload of ECC and stick it in the DNA of some critter that doesn't get out much. A bottom-feeder in a radiation-shielded environment would be cool. Say, a lobster.

<comment><USER16> I love the lobster idea. It would be even better if the lobsters survival was based on the integrity of the data. This would provide evolutionary ECC.

You would also need some mechanism to signal people in the far future that the lobsters were data carrying devices. Otherwise they wouldn't have any reason to randomly decode sea creatures. Perhaps you could program the lobsters to develop spots on their shells every century which denote the first 10 prime numbers.

<comment><USER17> A religion that worships the lobster-god?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is everybody worried about the future people knowing how to read the data? Barring some unprecedented catastrophe, we should still have detailed technical specs of today's formats in 50 years.

Just bury 250TB worth of SSD storage, along with a device that activates every year and copies from one 5TB block to the next. Any single SSD will only be in use for a year. If the drives can survive 49 years before their first use, it will work.

Storing the data in some ridiculous format is just going to discourage anyone from ever reading it. I'm sure the people of tomorrow have better things to do than OCR millions of sheets of paper just to see grandpa's porn collection.

<comment><USER2> How many digital devices that were created in 1960 are still running today? Most digital devices back then were created using vacuum tubes. How many vacuum tube makers still exist? The military was buying vacuum tubes from Checkoslovakia in the 80's to keep the SAGE early warning system running. ref: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Automatic_Ground_Environme...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Automatic_Ground_Environment) That's because there were no American manufacturers of vacuum tubes after the late 70's.

Sure, we still have the technical specifications for how to build it, but manufacturing the individual components would be a giant pain in the ass.

<comment><USER18> I suppose it depends on how much effort we assume will be expended reading this data. If humanity bands together and exploits every available technology, it should be a piece of cake. If it's just our grandkids doing it for kicks, that may present a real challenge.

Regardless, I think it's likely that we will be better at reading 2010 media in 2060 than we are at reading 1960 media in 2010.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Encrypt the data with a key long enough that, by Moore's law, you'd expect computers to be able to break it in 50 years. Submit the data to Wikileaks. Destroy the key.

<comment><USER20> Modern encryption systems do not fall out of use because computers get faster, it's because new mathematical attacks to the underlying encryption are found, and this makes brute forcing it easier than people thought at the time.

In other words, the reason we don't use (say) the MD5 hash system is not because computers are able to break the 32-bit hash system, but because people have discovered flaws in the MD5 algorithm that means it doesn't give '32 bits of strength'. In this case it's not the hardware (CPU clock speed) that gets better, but the software (programmes that break MD5) that gets better.

Hence, you could use Moore's Law to predict what computers in 50 years time will be like, but you can't know what mathematical techniques will be like in 10 yet alone 50 years. Your encryption system you use might get broken in 10 years time.

<comment><USER21> DES is arguably an exception to that. Twenty years after the standard was published, the EFF published designs for a machine that could brute-force a DES key in a matter of days.

But even when it was published, people were saying a 56-bit key was too small, which they aren't saying of modern cryptosystems (to my knowledge).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard>

<comment><USER20> Yes OK, a small key size makes brute force more likely. Bruce Schneier wrote about how it's not possible to brute for 256-bit keys. Short section here <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9902.html#snakeoil> , there's a longer explaination saying you can't even flip all the bits in 256-bit key before the universe expires, but I can't find that at the moment. So once you hit a upper limit (256-bits), you can't brute force anything ever, so faster computers are useless. Algorithms like that get broken by new maths, which could happen at any time, you can't predict it, so you can't rely on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Contract with the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project to put the data on their 'Rosetta Disks', readable by any civilization with high-powered optical telescopes:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project>

Supposedly one holds 13,000 pages of text in human languages. If we assume your data is similar text, and one page is 58 lines of 66 characters (as are plain text IETF RFCs), you'll need:

(5TB / (3828 bytes)) / 13000 = 110473 disks

</comment><comment><USER23> My answer is that you don't put digital data in a time capsule. Digital data is easy to copy, and that's what you want to leverage. Put a two pairs of servers in two data centers and keep them running, migrating to new tech when needed. I'd assume 5-10 generations of hardware would be necessary.

<comment><USER24> This is the best answer.

I also think things like NASA datasets, other govt agency datasets, etc, should be placed on torrents for anyone who wants to make a copy. Let the self-replicating nature of the internet serve as the backup backup plan.

If you put those Apollo datasets online, it's a guaranteed certainty that some hacker somewhere will have them in 50 years.

<comment><USER25> Bleh. It'll just sit on TPB with 0 seeds, 0 peers for years. I'd recommend bundling it with pr0n.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 1\. Convert all the data to decimal (digits 0-9).

2\. Put a decimal point in front of this long string. The result will be a rational number between 0 and 1. Call it x.

3\. Get a titanium rod exactly 12 inches long.

4\. Using a fine laser, etch a line in the rod precisely 12x inches from the end.

5\. Done. Precise, durable, elegant, compact, and green.

EDIT: </sarcasm>

<comment><USER27> Ah, you added the `</sarcasm>` tag while I was responding …. Anyway, it was an excuse to break out Frink (<http://futureboy.us/fsp/frink.fsp>), which reports that the resolution required, which (I think) is (1 foot)/(50 terabytes/byte), is 6 * 10^(-15) m, i.e., on the order of the diametre of a proton. Honestly, I thought it would be much smaller.

Another problem is that any rod etched in this way will have two decodings. :-)

<comment><USER28> Gah, anti-procrastination settings prevented me from correcting this, but it's too stupid to let stand. At least this post demonstrates once again the important principle that a smart (computer) calculator is no match for a dumb (human) calculator.

Of course, n bytes can store a number up to 2^(8n), not up to n. Thus, the number we'd be recording has _order of magnitude_ (50 terabytes/bit)×log[2]/log[10] ≈ 1.20e+14, so we'd need to distinguish that many _digits_ after the decimal point.

Conversely, as bayes pointed out (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585498>), if we have a resolution of 10 digits after the decimal point, then we can handle about 10*log[10]/log[2] ≈ 33 bits.

(EDIT: To be clear, it's the same person posting; I just can't stand to wait 154 minutes to correct the error.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just out of curiosity: whats the background of this question? Are you planning to actually do this? What kind of data?

If so, you could maybe give use some more information on the constraints involved(although i must admit thinking about it without any constraints is fun, too)

<comment><AUTHOR> There isn't really much in the way of background, I was thinking about people who decide to use cryopreservation, or the potential of sending out spacecraft for long periods of time where it may be out of communication range but the craft is meant to return, or even something as simple as a school's time capsule.

The constraints were chosen in order to remove the easiest answers (file sizes, period of time, etc).

Ultimately I think it's an unsolved problem that will become more important over time. My family can has photo albums from over 50 years ago but that doesn't have the kind of bandwidth we need for larger datasets (audio, video, etc).

So I guess it's just a thought experiment I thought was interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If this digital data didn't have to be put away somewhere, I would make the most of intelligence. Put someone in charge, with the skills to transfer the data the newer mediums as they become popular and to ensure that the copies are not corrupted in the process. This person would be paid in whatever kind of way leads to the most loyalty, I would also leverage their sense of pride. Maybe have a few different people each tasked with protecting overlapping segments of the data to help ensure nothing is ever lost.

Ideally some kind of artificial intelligence would come about sometime in the future to assume the role of data keeper - hiring people to do any work it couldn't do from within the computer and running off some kind of fund that had been set up. Maybe one day there will be a market for creating intelligent services like this, I hope I have something to do with them.

</comment><comment><USER30> Transmit the data with a laser to a mirror 25 light years away.

<comment><USER31> The beauty is in the simplicity.

<comment><USER32> Unfortunately, this is far from simple. Laser light is a lossy medium, in that all laser beams diverge.

For example, even just sending a laser to the moon and back is quite sophisticated.

"Laser beams are used because they remain tightly focused for large distances. Nevertheless, there is enough dispersion of the beam that it is about 7 kilometers in diameter when it reaches the Moon and 20 kilometers in diameter when it returns to Earth. Because of this very weak signal, observations are made for several hours at a time. By averaging the signal for this period, the distance to the Moon can be measured to an accuracy of about 3 centimeters (the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 385,000 kilometers)." [source: [http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/expe...](http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/experiments/lrr/)]

Thus, even if you could get a mirror 25 light years away, the light wouldn't hit it or bounce back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> With the rates of our both culture and technology changes, communicating with people 50 year into the future is like communicating with Aliens. So you may apply the same principles:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_Extraterrest...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_Extraterrestrial_Intelligence)

Another proven way to communicating your knowledge through thousands of years is to start your own ethno-religious group/nation, like for example Jews.

If you want to combine both approaches - try Scientology ;)

<comment><USER16> My dad doesn't think we are aliens, and he used to listen to music encoded on disks as a kid...

Humanity is changing much slower than you may think. The big leap was electricity, and that is well behind us. I doubt the next big leap (nanotech) will become widespread for a hundred or more years.

<comment><USER33> 1\. The technological gap between your father and your grandfather was much smaller, than between you and your father. The gap between you and your son in 50 years will be much bigger. Iphone4, Android will be antiquated technology for your son in 50 years. I remember some article about a kid, who found old walkman in his father's closet. It's took him some time to learn how to use it. And he wrote article comparing walkman with iPod ;)

2\. Nanotech is much closer, than you think! Toshiba is already working on 16nm semiconductor process. The transistors will be of the size of atoms. Intel Nehalem is already 32nm process, so 16nm is two tic-toc cycles aways.

32 nm — 2010

22 nm — approx. 2011

16 nm — approx. 2013

11 nm — approx. 2015

You will need nanorobots to build chips of the NEAR future. My startup in the nanotech area, so I know what I talking about.

<comment><USER16> Yeah I know nanotech has current limited applications. That's why I said "widespread". As in electricity once had limited applications, now it's widespread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Paper ? It's possible to print binary data on paper now. I'm not sure at what 5TB would look like though. It's probably better to keep the data at hand and migrate it as the world and the technology evolve.

<comment><USER35> 5 TB on paper needs to much room to store.

<comment><USER36> It depends on who's doing the storing.

A4 page, which has 210x297mm, say a border of 10mm all around non-printable area, gives 190x277.

Say we print at a resolution of 0.5mm, and in 16 shades, so we get 4x4 = 16 bits per mm, or 2 bytes. That gives 105,260 bytes per page. Probably we can squeeze more bytes in than this, but let's allocate those to redundancy and error correcting codes.

So for 5TB (in hard drive size, 5e12) would take about 23.75 million sheets of paper printed on both sides. At 5g per sheet, that's about 119 metric tons.

1 ream (500 pages) of the 75g/m^2 A4 paper I have beside my printer here is about 50mm thick. Say 215x305x55mm including some slack for packaging, is a little over 3.6 litres in volume; total volume for 23.75 million sheets is 171,285 litres, or 171.285 cubic metres.

A room with a ceiling height of 3 metres would need to be only 8 meters on each side to store this. Of course, the room shouldn't have any windows and should be at the appropriate humidity, etc.

The cost of the paper, assuming $5 per 500 pages, is less than a quarter of a million. Much more forbidding is the labour and temporary acquisition of printers required to transcribe the data to paper. A good printer @50ppm would take nearly 2 years, assuming zero downtime and very quick paper and toner changes. To do it in more reasonable time and with more reliability, you'd want a bunch more printers; and of course, you'd need to hire the people to do the work of shuffling paper and carting it around, but I'd bet you could probably do it for less than the cost of the paper, particularly if you did it in a cheap labour country.

<comment><USER37> This guy claims 200 kB per A4 page <http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/>

<comment><USER12> Which gives you 125 tons for 5TB on 80g/m² paper single sided, which gives you about the same cost as the 119 tons double sided in the GP, but without paper jams in the duplexer unit.

<comment><USER36> The estimated error rate is however about 1 in 100,000 pages, which isn't quite good enough. Probably a slightly better code can be used with a small amount of inflation; even something like RAID-5 except over pages (i.e. parity pages) would do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Use archival CD-R Media - Good for 300 Years

Start by looking at these guys: <http://www.falconrak.com/pro_archival_cd- r_gold_ep.html>

<comment><USER39> Any idea where they get the number 300 years? In the archival world, we're leery of such blatant marketing claims, especially since CD technology is only a few decades old.

<comment><USER38> Not as much a marketing claim as it is a MTBF analysis procedure. They run their media through advanced heat/cold/light cycles to approximate how long the media will last. There a number of vendors/technology providers out there that are working on this technology - see <http://www.millenniata.com/>. Electronics vendors do the same thing when creating 20 Year+ Lifetime components - Just heat it up to 85 degrees, then drop it down to -45. Repeat over and over to advance the aging process.

I've heard that the LDS church / Vatican have both been interested in the archival media, and they have a pretty good long perspective, so might be worth checking with technologists in that realm.

<comment><USER40> According to Wikipedia, the LDS Granite Mountain Vault (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Mountain_(Utah)>) adds 40,000 rolls of microfiche per year. Not sure how current that info is, though; the LDS church is pretty secretive with a lot of its methodology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 50 years isn't all that long - there are plenty of tapes and records that are still perfectly usable from then. As long as you included a decent amount of redundancy you'd be alright with a few hard drives surely? There's always the issue of software being able to read the data, but we have no problems opening images and documents from 27 years ago now. In 50 years time there'll probably be a niche industry producing software that converts old formats - just as there is now converting VHS/Cinefilm.

</comment><comment><USER42> The major film studios, faced with a related problem a long time ago, opted for a method called YCM separation, where they separate the image into yellow, cyan and magenta and record it onto very stable black and white polyester film stock. Properly stored, this supposedly has a lifetime of 500 years or more.

A modern laser film recorder is capable of a resolution of 4096x3112 and 10 bits per pixel, so that's about 16MB of data per 35mm frame with black and white film.

</comment><comment><USER43> Print them out on an acid free paper (I have books that are over 300 years old), so this will definitely work.

After 50 years you can OCR the data etc (or ask your personal robot to do it for you) and print it using a variant of TeX/LaTex. This has already survived for 34 years, so another fifty years is almost guaranteed;) Knuth predicted some years back that TeX will last for about 100 years.

</comment><comment><USER44> use the 1000 year dvd: <http://www.millenniata.com/>

or: <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langzeitarchivierung>

</comment><comment><USER45> Assume we encode the data on acid free paper with color-retaining ink using colored squares of size 1/64" x 1/64", using one of 64 colors in each square. There are then 4,096 of the squares in 1 square inch, so (assuming we print on 8"x10" regions) we can fit 327680 squares on a side of a sheet of paper, so that there are 655360 squares on a sheet of paper (if we use both sides). Each square encodes 6 bits of information, so we have 3932160 bits per piece of paper, or 491520 bytes, which is 480 KB.

At this rate, encoding a gigabyte requires 2,185 pages. As an aside, this is only 5 pages fewer than are contained in the "Art of Computer Programming" box set.

We can comfortably fit a gigabyte, then, on printed paper, in a 10"x12"x5" box. A terabyte will then fit comfortably in a 10'x10'x5' space. Throw a few of these together to get 5 terabytes. Let's add, say, 1 TB more of error correcting codes. In the unused margins of each page add in some information about alignment, a printing of all the colors used (to try to protect against inks changing color over time) and the page number. All together, this is certainly _big_ , but could probably fit in, say, a tractor-trailer. Throw in some books describing the data format and the meaning of the data, and you're done.

</comment><comment><USER46> Store the drive along with a computer to read it? :)

</comment><comment><USER47> It seems like optical discs (CD/DVD/BluRay) are the right idea, they're just not made from stable enough materials. As far as I know, you could apply the same technology used to make optical discs to a more stable material like gold. Assuming that you could get the same storage density as a DVD (which seems reasonable, given that we have the technology/know-how to make 25GB single-layer BluRay discs), you'd need something like 500-600 disks (if you etched both sides). I'm a bit suspicious of my math here, but if my back of the envelope calculation is right a single disc made of gold would be something like 0.8 kg.

The nice thing about this solution is that there's a lot of existing knowledge about how to build and design optical media, how to build in parity checking, detect jitter when reading, etc. This could be relatively cheap to do in bulk also, if you found the right material (I just mentioned gold because I know it to be chemically stable, but there are probably better materials).

</comment><comment><USER48> Is putting it into orbit with solar power to keep it alive an option?

<comment><USER49> If it's electronic media, I would guess that solar wind/flares will kill it pretty fast without earth's magnetic field for protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Probably would have to build a desktop with a 5x1TB HDD and make sure the case is super strong and water proof. Stick the machine in a fire-proof and water proof safe and of course, be sure to have formatted the partitions differently and have RAID.

Alternatively burn a 100 or so Blu-rays and get two Blu-ray readers (one on a mobile device) other an external reader that you will attach to the aforementioned desktop.

Or who knows, maybe holographic storage (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage>) will come around finally and store the 5TB in a toothpick sized gizmo (which might probably run 512 cores of Googple's Chip (in my alternate reality, Google and Apple merge and buy Intel)...

<comment><USER36> For the HDD route, I'd probably prefer lower density storage, heaps of redundancy, and a good spread of HDD manufacturers.

A quick Google of HDD MTBF suggests that 1 million hours (over a century) is wildly optimistic, and typical failure rate is 2-4% per year, possibly as high as 13%. If e is the failure rate (as a fraction of 1), and assuming a constant and independent failure rate over time, then the survival chances for any one drive are:

        (1 - e)^50

So the chance that any one will fail is:

        1 - (1 - e)^50

With n mirrors (assuming a reliable checksum to verify data in the event of only a single copy of a mirror surviving), the chances of all failing, f, are:

        f = (1 - (1 - e)^50)^n

        log(f) = n log(1 - (1 - e)^50)

        n = log(f) / log(1 - (1 - e)^50)

So, for a reliability of 99.999%, and hoping you can keep the individual yearly failure rate at 3%, so f=0.00001 and e=0.03, n would need to be at least 47.

<comment><USER51> I think you're making the improper assumption that the drives would need to be left on during this entire time. I don't believe they would.

I don't know if the bits eventually lose their magnetism over time, so if they do, you may need to spin up the drives every so often and copy to and from drives to make sure the data is still "fresh", but I seriously doubt they'd need to be left on and spinning for the entire 50 year span.

<comment><USER36> I'm not assuming that the disks are spinning all the time; I don't know what the failure rates of drives left unpowered are, so I took the spinning rate instead. Google search suggests that failure rates for unpowered hard drives is high - sticking heads etc. - and as drives are not designed for this, probably higher than powered drives.

<comment><USER52> this is also what I've read. Also, anecdotally, I've had a disproportionate number of drives fail on power-up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> There are a lot of amazing solutions on this page. Things that I haven't even thought about, but why do we have to assume that a data reader cannot be kept in the capsule itself? Why should we create something of arbitrary complexity that will cause people to just tear their hair out in frustration?

Since the basics of logic will not change and since theoretically any computer can simulate another. Why shouldn't we just keep a hackable computer with detailed visual instructions and specifications? Further, to enable someone to read the specifications we could have a "learning board" with the symbol and the component next to it. Also, we could even have a haptic output with which people can interact with the computer.

Let's assume that we have a nuclear battery made out of Technetium. Now this feeds into a bank of capacitors and high performance rechargeable cells. Slowly over time the batteries are kept topped off and they are "exercised" by the computer. Further, for redundancy 4 or more computing units in parallel could be placed that would wake up sequentially and call the others to check how the entire unit is working. If we keep something like this in a hermetically sealed environment and we use the radiation source to manage the temperature and use passive cooling technologies for letting out heat. It should be able to sit still until someone finds it.

Now the data itself would be stored on a series of solid state devices [edit: a specially designed optical storage medium would be far better, but this is 50 years not 1050.] attached to a display. Why shouldn't this suffice?

Presuming that civilization has not collapsed anyone should be able to read it.

By the way, the Phoenix lander has a DVD that tries to do just this (see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(spacecraft)#Phoenix_DV...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_\(spacecraft\)#Phoenix_DVD)). It even has this awesome intro by Carl Sagan. (hear: [http://www.planetary.org/special/vomgreetings/greet2/SAGAN.h...](http://www.planetary.org/special/vomgreetings/greet2/SAGAN.html))

[edit: Dyslexic errors.]

</comment><comment><USER54> Endow an educational institution with funding to teach the data to students, and a trust fund to pay a stipend to any student who can prove they have taught all of the data to all of their children, and do the same for the children's children. The institution will determine invariant replication through rigorous testing of a recitation of the data set.

The human brain has superior data storage capacity and resilience to any of the mentioned media, and a longer functional lifespan. It can also adapt on the fly to changes in technology and language.

This also makes the data proof against illiteracy and technological collapse, assuming a cultural impetus to memorize the data and teach it to others can be maintained.

</comment><comment><USER55> Take a person. Make the person maintain 1MB of data -- copy it, memorize it, something like that. Possibly understand it. Repeat for 5 million people.

If 1MB is too much, try 1KB, and repeat for 5 billion people. There should still be some people left for systems maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER56> 0\. Write the data on an hard disk (named 0) and calculate multiple hashes for the various fragments of data. The hard disk must contain also a minimal os which is only able to dd partitions and must be connected to a computer

1\. Create some type of mechanical which is able to periodically do these tasks:

       - create an hard disk (named n)

       - plug it to the computer above

       - transfer the data from hard disk n-1 to hard disk n

       - check the hashes

       - unplug hard disk n-1

       - reboot the system using the new hard disk

To minimize the failure rate of this environment you should create more computer which check if something is not working

</comment><comment><USER57> My idea.. include with the data storage devices (5tb data on them), the complete but unassembled parts of the data reader (maybe a full computer ready to go) plus instructions on how to assemble a compatable power supply for the time it's being recovered in..

vacuum seal everything, with a packet of silica.. no air at all, moisture removed.. part by part.

1) then vacuum seal the container or 2) pack it with closed cell insulation

no light, no air, no corrosion or UV damage. advantage to #2 is that it would be ruggedized for hits & transport.

</comment><comment><USER58> Use a high energy laser to etch thick platinum CDs. The pits produced by the laser should be deep. Coat the etched surface with a thick layer of diamond using vapor deposition. Enclose the CD in a vacuum case made with extremely durable material (granite maybe). Entomb the CD case in a 10 ton cement block. Stack the Cement blocks (if more than 1 CD) in a shape of a pyramid on a dry desert plateau. Irradiate the area around the pyramid. That should last more than 50 years.

</comment><comment><USER59> Write a book about how you collected the data. Then just collect it again when you need it in 50 years. In a long time scale, processing power is cheaper then storage.

</comment><comment><USER60> Very interesting topic.

For preservation, encode the data in the DNA of a bacterium, replicate it massively and put them in some kind of suspended animation (hand waving wildly).

Getting the meaning of the data is another matter. I wonder whether it will be possible to create species of bacteria that can decode the above DNA and present it directly accessible to human senses - ex: bacteria that change color, form shapes, etc.

<comment><USER61> I don't think genomes are anything like as big as the requirement, e.g. this link gives 0.35GB as the size of the human genome:

[http://www.utheguru.com/fun-science-how-many-megabytes-in- th...](http://www.utheguru.com/fun-science-how-many-megabytes-in-the-human- body)

<comment><USER62> Nothing stopping you from making a much larger one! Or a lot of different ones, if it's automated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Read the data and convert it to binary numbers. Use teddy bears for encoding the data. Each teddy bear has another color which represents a sequence of numbers, e.g. yellow is 1010101011101, blue 10101011010101010101010 and so on. We have 16777216 color possibilites with the normal rgb or cmyk color mode. I believe that is more than enough to encode the data (altough I didn't check it).

Easy isn't it? ;)

</comment><comment><USER37> Two sets of hard drives, five sets of CDs, and five sets of DVDs. I'd store it in a fireproof locked box with silica gel. Would probably work.

<comment><USER64> No, it won't. Some CDs from the early 90ies are not playable anymore because the foil that stores the data is damaged through aging processes. DVDs and hard drives have similar problems and won't last longer than 5-15 years if you are not lucky.

<comment><USER65> Would it help to seal the CDs/DVDs/CDROMs in a vacuum bag? And/or in cryogenic storage?

<comment><USER66> A nitrogen-filled container would be more practical than a vacuum. Lowering the temperature would definitely help, although too cold could be bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, you know they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures are quite good at lasting for eons, when put upon proper substrate

</comment><comment><USER67> I have received Commodore 64 floppies from a lot of different people, some of which have dates written in the early 80s or late 70s (for the disk not the data of course). And in every box I've gotten there have only been a couple that haven't worked. Maybe they all just happen to have been stored in optimum ways.. but I fail to see what the big deal is.

</comment><comment><USER39> Here's an associated question that archives everywhere are beginning to struggle with (though they should have begun struggling long ago). Many municipal records are being born digital these days, and records retention schedules telling us to keep a wide variety of materials permanently.

How would you store an ever-increasing amount of digital data _indefinitely_?

<comment><USER62> Given any method, memory diamond[1]. It's incredibly dense (25 grams of the stuff stores a bit over half a Yottabyte), and quite durable. If restricted to existing methods ... a metric fuckton of hard drives in raid arrays, outsourcing backups to cloud storage providers where possible, and investing as much money as possible in getting a way to use memory diamond worked out.

[1] Charles Stross describes it: "Memory diamond is quite simple: at any given position in the rigid carbon lattice, a carbon-12 followed by a carbon-13 means zero, and a carbon-13 followed by a carbon-12 means one. To rewrite a zero to a one, you swap the positions of the two atoms, and vice versa." See [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2007/05/shaping_...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It is not only the physical storage, but also the software that can read the data which matters. So choose your formats wisely.

</comment><comment><USER68> Amazon S3 would surely be the most economical, right? No upfront costs, and running costs steadily decreasing?

<comment><USER52> I wouldn't count on the 'steadily decreasing' part, s3 hasn't come anywhere near to following the downward price trend in hard drive cost per gigabyte/power per gigabyte, but even at todays costs, that's only $3900, which sounds pretty reasonable compared to what others are suggesting, if I did my math right, to keep 50 gigs around for 50 years. Of course, while I'd rather depend on s3 being around in 50 years than a raid in my closet, I still don't know that I'd give it great odds.

I don't think 'use rackspace /and/ use amazon' is a good strategy either, just 'cause if market conditions change enough that one goes under it's likely the other will to... and it's also likely that they could be bought by the same entity. you'd want to put one copy on s3, and then use some completely different storage method, like microfiche or or archival CD roms or something in a safety deposit box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> 1) Buy 5-10 different brands of hard drive and make a copy of the data on each. 2) Invest $100K dollars in very long-term inflation-protected investments 3) In 50 years, use the proceeds (around $1m) to offer a prize to anyone who can decode the disks to a current format

</comment><comment><USER70> What if there is some kind of solar event that renders the population unable to generate electricity. Does this leave paper/microfiche/stone as the only options? Surely this kind of possibility must be accounted for when determining the viability of digital options.

</comment><comment><USER71> Sandisk has already solved this: [http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/06/23/sandisk.outs.s...](http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/06/23/sandisk.outs.sd.worm.cards.for.forensics/)

In a few years we'll have those with 64gb/128gb capacity.

</comment><comment><USER72> Holographic storage. Seriously. The current technology has a 50 year archive life.

<http://www.inphase-tech.com/products/default.asp?tnn=3>

</comment><comment><USER73> Here's a good question, given the probability of a bit on an ssd being flipped by cosmic radiation, how much redundancy would allow recreating the data using parity bits or something along those lines?

</comment><comment><USER74> how long does an integrated circuit last in storage?

design a few of them with the data just burned in. no capacitors to fail, you could get your redundancy by just making a couple dozen of each. design them to wait a few seconds after power on, and then start spitting out the data and a clock. label the power, ground, serial out and data pins.

given those pins, there isn't anything else you could do with it besides hook it up and see what it has to say. and all you need to read it is a stable power supply, and sufficiently fast analog to digital converters.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think you have to state some assumptions about technology levels at the time the time capsule is opened and whether you want the data to survive much beyond the 50 years if it is not opened.

</comment><comment><USER75> I would go with b/w microfilm but anyhow see here <http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/timecapsule/home.html>

</comment><comment><USER76> doesnt every solution involving magnetic media include the need to have power sources (since HDD, USB drives need a recommended electrical power rating source).

Optical media is the only way to guarantee whichever future "creatures" encounter the data, can actually figure out how to access it.

If you are a blind alien (so that you do not understand the _concept of light_) you can potentially still have measuring equipment that can sense the pits in the media and make sense out of the binary data.

<comment><USER77> We're talking 50 years not 50 centuries

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Just write an own logarithms and encode this in that way. Rent some dedicated servers with enough HDD and RAID, store them there, grant various persons access. :)

</comment><comment><USER79> 1\. Encode the data into a stream of bits 2\. Send the data using a laser and bounce it off a planet 25 light years away. 3\. Recieve the data in 50 years

</comment><comment><USER80> Like this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes>

</comment><comment><USER81> Print them as high-density barcode on acid-free paper.

</comment><comment><USER82> You people have way too much free time. I'm going to get Congress to pass a law stating all free time must be given to the gubbermint.

Cheers :)

</comment><comment><USER83> Make a bunch of asian kids memorize it. You'll need some redundancy, but not much. Most of them will live to be 60.

(note: self.race == asian)

</comment><comment><USER84> While these are some rather colorful and interesting ideas, might I suggest ROM chips?

 _goes back to playing 30+ year old Atari games_

</comment><comment><USER44> use microfilm, write as text.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform>

</comment><comment><USER85> If it's media, store it on 80+ iPads. Bundles the reader with the data. Only requires AC power in 50 hrs.

<comment><USER73> Wouldn't that make the "kindle/nook/something else" a better platform for that kind of solution?

<comment><USER56> this is the only way to make an ipad useful :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> <http://rosettaproject.org/about/>

<comment><USER87> Or just go to the supplier:

<http://hstrial-norsamtechnol.homestead.com/Rosetta.html>

The New York Times used them to make a nickel disk of their archives for a very long-lived time capsule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Put it encoded and distributed over Internet, so Google and other search engines can store it.

</comment><comment><USER88> metal punch cards, stored in low acid clay vessels in a very dry place. Seems to have worked so far... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Scroll>

</comment><comment><USER89> Put a webserver on the Moon accessible via satellite and/or short wave radio.

</comment><comment><USER90> And store data on ceramics or porcelaine ? It's easier than writing on rocks

</comment><comment><USER91> Stone, or perhaps clay. Some of the oldest written records we still have are from Sumer using cuneiform on clay tablets. Use modern micro-abrasion techniques to encode data to stone, then put that stone away into an area little accessed by humans on a daily or yearly basis.

Assuming there is no cost limit here, I would go one step further and say use some form of metal. Say stainless steel, aluminum, gold, or titanium. Some metal that is very stable over time and does not interact with the atmosphere readily. Again, use micro-abrasion / carving technology to write data to the materials.

The next question is what format for the data? It depends on whats being stored. The biggest issue is that of "formats".

Lets look at things that last a long time. The English(or any language) is unlikely to change that much in 50, 100, or even 200 years. Words and their meanings will change, but for the most part a native English speaker 200 years from now could read what we write now. Whether or not they understand the usage of the language is a different question. So if its a textual document you're saving, write it in plain English. No abbreviations, etc.

What about media? That gets complicated. If its a static image, perhaps keeping it simple is best. In plain English, write that the following section of data is an image. Each group of three numbers starts at 0 through 255. In procession from left-to-right, the values represent Red, Green, and Blue. Each group of 3 numbers is what we called a "pixel". The image is 300 pixels wide, and 800 pixels heigh(arbitrary numbers for this argument).

For moving images, further expand on the single image description and say every 24 images should be spaced equally and viewed over the course of 1 second to achieve animation.

Sound is something I don't know _anything_ about from a data format perspective, but I would again find the simplest mechanical way to produce a sound and store it in that format with ample verbage describing how to handle it.

 _Edit After reading other responses that came in while I was writing this, I want to add some more thoughts.

Remember that our technology is ephemeral. We don't really use much tech from 50 years ago, hardly any from 100 years ago, and it just gets worse from there.

Things like microfiche, ssd's, cd-roms, blue-ray, etc are all the more bad ideas for long-term backup. Paper books are a better option than any of these for near-term storage for time periods up to 50 years.

If we want to actually store data in a meaningful way for long periods of time, say over 100 years, we have to keep it simple. Your devices will probably not last 100 years, even if kept in storage under the most secure environment. But in 100 years people will still have eyes, ears, and hands.

We have to look back over history and look at the material types that survive long periods. Stone, and metal to an extent, are very good long-term materials. Cloth and paper are _not*. DNA is potentially a usable data store, but is corruptible. Plus you can't read DNA patterns with the eye.

<comment><USER92> > _We don't really use much tech from 50 years ago, hardly any from 100 years > ago, and it just gets worse from there._

Printing presses, microfiche, film, radio, telephones, television, computers, light bulbs, electrical sockets, toasters, cars, bicycles, electric stoves, speakers, microphones, projectors, etc.

Technology is not nearly as fickle as you'd think. Remember, 50 years ago is only 1960. VHS tape technology is almost 40 years old. Sure, things are moving faster now, but things that work tend to stick around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> I'd store it on BetaMax tapes :) They do say history repeats itself

</comment><comment><USER94> Paper, it will outlast anything other than maybe stone.

</comment><comment><USER95> punchcards.

</comment><comment><USER96> I had a good talk with my ex-wife's uncle about this a few years ago. He's a record's archival specialist in Australia, and they seem to be doing a lot of work with Microfiche. Apparently it lasts quite a long time and is highly dense. They encode data in some sort of an xml format, and the first slide on each sheet has a reasonably explanatory description as to how to decode the data.

<comment><USER97> B&W film is the best archival format I've come across, it'll last a century stored in a shoebox in the attic, and you can look at it just by holding it up to the light. That's important; anyone who picks it up regardless of their prior experience will know, this is a thing with information on. Would you even recognize a HD if you'd never seen one before?

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Lots of good (and bad :-) ideas; here's another:

Mylar "paper" tape, or use some other plastic that's known to have serious archival qualities.

Bulky, but if stable (enough) in the presence of water it'll survive various failure modes that would kill acid free paper. Of course you could etch Mylar or some other stable plastic to gain greater data densities like with the suggestions for paper. Just pick a plastic we _know_ is seriously stable from actual experience, like we know with acid-free paper.

We also have such experience with emulsion based storage methods (microfilm, fiche, etc.), but those are rather delicate for my taste.</comment>


Centralized Wins. Decentralized Loses - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/8/22/what-do-you-believe-now-that-you-didnt-five-years-ago-centra.html <comment><USER3> The author claims winners and losers but doesn't talk about the criteria for winning and losing. Decentralized networks aren't after the same things as centralized ones. They're not after engagement metrics, ARPU, or stock valuation.

If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the decentralized networks are far behind. But these things can change quickly after changing slowly.

If decentralized networks cause big centralized ones to change their behavior in meaningful ways, for fear of losing users to the decentralized ones, then I would argue that's a win for decentralized networks. Small win, but still a win.

<comment><USER4> > If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the > decentralized networks are far behind.

7B humans are organized in decentralized social networks (linked by small world phenomenon). 99% active daily.

<comment><USER5> Actually, they're on Facebook.

<comment><USER6> At best, 2B of them are.

<comment><USER7> There's only 3 billion internet users.

<comment><USER8> >There's only 3 billion internet users.

I am actually assuming you meant "Social Media Users" and not Internet users. There are now more than 4B internet users.

<comment><USER9> I was wondering when this was going to happen. A repeat of when people thought www = Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Watching the Internet develop since the 1980s, this leaves a lot of stuff out.

Yes, decentralized protocols like NNTP are not around like they used to be. The reason for this is because Usenet was effectively crushed by the US government. Many net luminaries, scientists, mathematicians, journalists, artists etc. were users of Usenet. In the 1990s and on, the Baby Bell monopolies used their monopoly powers to crush ISP competition. Then in 2008 Andrew Cuomo strongarmed the remaining monopoly telcos in New York to shut down Usenet saying "This literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than keeping our children safe".

Obviously you can't say you want to crush decentralization in order to take power away from the individual and place it in the hands of corporate monopolies and the government, so you have to hear from the RIAA/MPAA about how artists are being ripped off (although many artists say the RIAA and MPAA are the ripoffs), or about terrorism, or the "think of the children" stuff from this case.

> "it's controlable, it's governable, ..., it's walled gardenable,..., it's > brandable, it's ownable, ..., it's auditable, it's copyright checkable, ..., > it's safe for China searchable,..., it's monitorable"

Well this is correct. Now we can be more controlled, more governed, more owned, more copyright checked, more monitored - these are all the benefits for them as they remove our decentralized communications.

As the tendency toward recentralization seems to be in the US, a broader metric is the ratio of US GDP to world GDP, i.e. centralization of the world economy. This ratio has been falling since World War II - each year the US economy becomes less and less significant. So while network control is being centralized in the US, economic control in the world is becoming decentralized.

<comment><USER11> The point about Cuomo is definitely worth remembering, but USENET suffered its own decline. The vast majority of folks who got online from the mid-nineties on never learned how to use it or engaged with it in any fashion. Once the center of gravity shifted to web-based forums, and then social media, the older users mostly abandoned it.

The lack of comprehensive solutions for spam in the mid-90s should also not be discounted. Spam is an easier problem for centralized systems to fix.

<comment><USER12> I'd argue that its now even easier to combat spam using decentralization technologies. If you gateway all actions prone to spam with a signed transaction to a smart contract platform, where that execution costs the spammer real value for each action the spammer no longer has a unequal advantage. This means as an app developer I can mostly ignore combatting spam, that's now an infrastructure problem that the transaction miners need to deal with and handle. It's an empowering separation of concerns! Web 3.0 really shaping up to be a revolutionary development in humanities technology progress and modeling of the world around us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It will take a lot more time, but I think that decentralization will win in the end.

Society could not operate without social contracts and those social contracts are founded on certain universally agreed upon principles of fairness. As the fairness of our economic system comes into question, more people feel justified in exploiting loopholes within social contracts; this causes social contracts to lose their integrity in the minds of people; which further exacerbates the problem/behavior. Eventually, there comes a point when most people are cheating the system; at that point, the system can no longer function and it collapses.

Centralization creates an unfair economic environment because it limits the spread of economic opportunities. Most people already see centralization as a problem; as a source of injustice and inequality.

Just as the process of acquiring private property (as a result of wealth accumulation) becomes increasingly unfair, social contracts founded on principles of ownership of private property are themselves becoming weaker.

<comment><USER14> there are situations where decentralization must win. You cannot, for example, have a centralized network between the Earth and Mars.

<comment><USER12> I'd argue economics is a system that requires decentralization as well. Now with cryotocurrencies the burden required to get a seat at the table went from basically an impossible game of politics and expression of violence/dominance to a purely technical one. If I want to become a member of bitcoin I just need to start computing and now I'm a member with voting power.

At an individual level this doesn't mean much, but at the geopolitical level this is a huge improvement. The future I see before us is our governments dropping the administrative burden of managing, minting, and distributing there own currencies and becoming a contributing member to the crypto computing platforms. If I was an up coming developing nation I'd be pouring money in into computer engineering to become a member of these global currency movments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article is extremely light on substance. This issue can be more readily addressed with a simple list:

Centralization pros:

      * security
      * ease of management
      * lower overhead in task delegation
      * maintenance simplicity
      * versioning
      * no distribution

Centralization cons:

      * fixed resources
      * fixed configuration
      * fixed environment

Looking at these lists centralization at first appears immediately superior. These lists is an illusion in that it accounts for concerns in the present, but it does not account for growth or future concerns. Decentralized systems can scale in ways centralized systems cannot.

The fixed nature of a centralized system is also a huge limitation. Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer. While the computation power of super computers grows rapidly over time so too does the computation power of your average home computer.

There is also an economic qualifier for distribution too. Computational resources cost money in both hardware and electricity. When computational tasks are distributed so too are the expenses of computation.

There is also a security/availability benefit to distributed systems. Centralized systems are a single point of failure. Distributed systems, at least in the public space, are diverse in their hardware and software which allows the system immunization from many forms of attacks. A centralized system can be isolated from the world by a DDOS attack, but it is substantially hard to attack a distributed system in this way.

<comment><USER16> Bigger problem with centralized services is stifling monoculture. There will never be 10 different frontends to Facebook the way there can be 10 different email clients. Or 10 different newsfeed sorting algorithms.

It's the same problem that Amazon has - one size does not fit all in UX, and one decision maker, even if very smart and well-meaning, will sooner or later get himself into a corner and be stuck there.

<comment><USER17> But one could say the same for a monoculture of protocols in decentralized systems, the email protocol has been stable for a long time and has some serious issues due to its decentralized nature.

For emails it is surely worth, but for many other application it might be different.

<comment><USER12> If you attach a signed monetary transaction cost using a decentralized smart contract transaction system to sending email to a federated host I hypothesize that spam would start dwindling. Email, IMO, largely grew into a centralized system due to the difficulties in combating spam. From the receiving end where filtering and blacklisting is a major system administration task. Self hosting also requires high quality SRE skills to combat servers from being compromised and used to flood the federated network with spam.

Make the act of sending a message cost the send or money and I think spam goes away and self hosting becomes much simpler.

<comment><USER18> _> Make the act of sending a message cost the send or money and I think spam goes away and self hosting becomes much simpler._

...and the service itself becomes _less useful to everybody who doesn 't want to self-host_.

If you choose to off-road, you can't really complain about it being bumpy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish it weren't true but for right now I agree with the author, including what it might take to tip the balance: "1. Complete deterioration of trust such that avoiding the centralization of power becomes a necessity. 4. The decentralization community manages to create clearly superior applications as convenient and reliable as centralized providers."

I was eager to use GNU Social, and after some use for a year, my host shut down. I just opened another Mastadon account but haven't started using it yet. Also, the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting people I follow. Social media is best when used as an advertising and directory service for content we put on our own blogs and web sites, but even that seems to be less common.

I really enjoyed the Decentralized Web Conference June 2016, but it also made me slightly sad that fighting back against centralized web, political, corporate, etc. centralization is an uphill fight.

Sometime network power laws suck.

<comment><USER20> > the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting > people I follow

Same as that shitty club with overpriced beers... We go where the interesting people are and the bad ones kept under control.

<comment><USER21> So anywhere but Twitter then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977), TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999)."

Yeah, no one uses TCP/IP, DNS or SMTP nowadays. Good thing that we have gotted rid of those antiquated protocols and instead can use facebook and whatsapp! </sarcasm>

<comment><USER23> Why the sarcasm? It's true that (almost) no one uses them. Or, rather, no one much cares about them, and when they do use them, it's proxied and controlled by big corporate players.

SMTP is email -- and people (outside of business email) all the more commonly use social networks for their communication. And even when they use email, a huge percentage of it is through Gmail. Heck, intra-gmail user emails don't even need (and maybe already don't) use SMTP/POP/IMAP at all, and that's a heck of a big percentage of today's email use.

DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user experience).

Ditto for TCP/IP.

The fact that these protocols lark behind what we do at the higher level is irrelevant, when the abstractions we've built totally hide them, in ways that they didn't in the 80s and 90s.

Here's some food for thought:

[https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no- id...](https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre- using-the-internet/)

<comment><USER24> >"DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user experience)."

Except that those proprietary protocols would still need to go over the internet where every router uses IP. So no they could not drop TCP/IP tomorrow. And most(all?) of those 5-10 services you mention make extensive use of IP Anycasting of DNS servers which has allowed them to scale to what they are so DNS is very much relevant to the success of those services.

<comment><USER23> > _Except that those proprietary protocols would still need to go over the > internet where every router uses IP._

Special pipes and contracts could take care of that too.

But in any case, it alone is small comfort when it comes to decentralization, since TPC/IP still allows total consolidation of control of anything that really matters to 5-10 companies (plus the telcos).

<comment><USER24> Please explain what these "special pipes" are connected to? Oh right they would have to to connect to "special routers" that didn't run IP at all. Special routers that these companies would have design and produce themselves. And convince carriers to put in their networks.

Do you think these telcos, who have an almost adversarial towards these "over the top" services are going to build out a parallel network and commit cap ex to accommodate these companies new proprietary non-IP protocol networking devices?

"Special contracts"? What does that even mean?

The dustbin of history is filled with proprietary network protocols - DECnet, IBM's SNA, Xeros XNS, Banyan Vines, Novell Netware Apple Talk. There's a good reason the world converged on TCP/IP.

Seriously your assertion is completely absurd.

<comment><USER25> There are examples for this, eg carrier IPTV.

3GPP IMS had the grand vision of telco-controlled Internet Multimedia System (IMS), an Internet modeled after the phone network. It runs over separate lines or at least separate layer 2 sessions. An application would use a signaling protocol (SIP etc) to request access to "multimedia" services like gaming, the telco would reserve bandwidth and guarantee that the service could be accessed with assured quality (and billed, of course).

While IMS uses internet tech, it has a completely different philosophy.

I'm not aware of any IMS network that went beyond doing telephony, though.

<comment><USER24> Are you listing these as failures then? IPTV would be little more than a niche presence globally no?

<comment><USER25> Those systems are not complete failures, but the underlying philosophy has certainly failed. People don't prefer the ISP's QoS-guaranteed IPTV product over Netflix or Youtube, which was the IPTV systems vendors' promise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Stop saying people don't care. (you can imagine me putting clap emojis between those like a cringy twitter poster). A majority of people supported net neutrality but the powers that be voted against it. The reality is of course people care if they know or have time to learn about systems, they just have no agency or power to effect change.

<comment><USER27> People cared about "Net Neutrality" because the name has a "free speech" ring to it, even though that isn't really anything to do with that. How could anyone against the internet being neutral?

I think "decentralised" isn't going to drum up any interest unless you can couch it in the terms of a movement that people already understand and can be certain that it's something the "good guys" would definitely want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Centralized vs. decentralized is a pendulum that has been swinging since time immemorial. Heck one could argue that cooperateive single-celled vs. multicellular organisms boils down to a similar principle. Given that this pendulum has been swinging back and forth since long before humans, and certainly throughout human history, I believe it is safe to say that neither is going to "win in the end". They each must obviously contain the seeds of their own downfall. Which is interesting and worthy of study, but I don't see this article particularly advancing the understanding of that.

</comment><comment><USER29> Honestly, I think that decentralized networks are able to leverage advantages of centralization, like trust, while remaining decentralized enough to still have the advantages from that front too.

GitHub and git are actually a good example of this, since you can use GitHub and know the platform is reliable, trustworthy, etc. but you can also use other hosts too. This degree of decentralization is at least better than fully centralized services like Twitter where you have zero interoperability at all. You can also see this in Mastodon too; the vast majority of users are on a handful of instances like mastodon.social anyway.

</comment><comment><USER30> What's often overlooked is that this same back-and-forth history predates computing. The greatest strengths of centralization typically turn out to be its weaknesses.

The strength of well-designed decentralized systems is resiliency. But it's like multithreaded code; it's hard to write. Centralized systems trade off brittleness and kludges for a certain amount of predictability and the ability to actually hire programmers. As a result yes, you can run on multiple AWS sites, but you have to know too much to make that convenient.

And other "benefits" (as the author points out those are two-edged) ("controlable, walled gardenable,defensible, brandable auditable, copyright checkable, GDPRable...") are also by design chokepoints. Its those chokepoints that make it brittle and that is where the weaknesses lie.

Pre-computing: in the 1950s and 1960s there was a public debate as to whether the US government should be descentralized as a way of withstanding nuclear attack. Though we got the highway system, instead the US became more centralized, not less. And as a result it has contributed to more alienation of the populace from their representatives. I long thought California should spread its government around more for more public buy in and support (and for that matter knowledgable opposition). But of course everybody who cares about government wants to be "close to the seat of power", which we see particularly in the federal government.

<comment><USER31> It's a very old phenomenon indeed. Plato's Republic can be read as a meditation on the centralisation of power, the pros and cons of centralisation vs decentralisation, and how and why the balance shifts over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think there are 2 issues at play here.

The first one, the article touched on obliquely:

> Back in those days of high adventure hosts were far more than mere pets, > they were golden temples where crusaders came to worship speaking prayers of > code. > > Today, servers aren't even cattle, servers are insects connected > over fast networks. Centralization is not only possible now, it's > economical, it's practical, ...

"Back in those days" users were administrators of one sort or another because that was the barrier to entry. But administrating systems sucks, even if it's just a PC. The rise of server-less is just another testament to this: being able to outsource the boring, tricky bits to experts is great as long as the principle-agent problem doesn't rear its head too often.

The second issue is that distributed (I suppose some people might call them federated) identity systems don't work very well. Look at the vast gulf between the spam problem on Facebook and the spam problem with email.

If you've signed up with a centralized identity system, it's pretty convenient to use a bunch of services synced up with that identity: all of the social media stuff is probably the tip of the iceberg.

<comment><USER33> This is a huge barrier to today's decentralized systems.

I wanted to check out Mastodon and looked into setting up a node. It's a nightmare of rube goldberg machine dependency hell. It's not that I can't, but that I don't have time to mess with it.

If decentralized system designers want these things to take off they must get better at writing clean code with a good UX. Start with a good UX for admins: single install, dependent on not much more than maybe a database or language runtime, easy upgrades, and good docs about how to get started. Then as the product matures work up to UX for end users. You will never get to the latter if you don't plan ahead a little and avoid design and runtime choices that drag in heaps of complexity or limit portability.

Decentralized protocols are maturing, but UX is still awful. I think UX is half the problem.

The other half the problem is defending against attacks. In today's world where computer networks and even simple services on them like discussion platforms can be targets for professional criminals and even national intelligence agencies, anything that gets popular will get seriously attacked. Centralized systems are far more straightforward to defend: block IPs, kick off users, update software in one place, etc.

People like to hold up cryptocurrency as one system that has withstood constant attack, but that is only true if you limit scope to the protocol. As a holistic system cryptocurrency has been and continues to be successfully attacked with social engineering. Scammers are siphoning billions out of the cryptocurrency economy. On centralized economic systems like banks and exchanges you can ban, freeze funds, delist, and regulate.

<comment><USER3> > I wanted to check out Mastodon and looked into setting up a node. It's a > nightmare of rube goldberg machine dependency hell. It's not that I can't, > but that I don't have time to mess with it.

I've come to the conclusion lately that the thing holding decentralization back the most is that sunning any kind of server-side code is challenging to set up and a regular pain in the neck to maintain.

This prevents even tech-savvy people from setting up their own nodes of whatever cool tech happens to come out (not just social networks, but RSS readers, bookmarking apps, you name it: there is an OSS thing out there that fits your needs but is a PIA to install and run.)

And in turn this limits the number of nodes that will ever run on a decentralized service, and nodes will constantly go offline as admins get fed up with running them. We need the ability to install and run server software as easily (almost) as we can install something on our phones.

Maybe a layer on top of Ubuntu Server, with a baked in web UI so that any Joe can get a DO droplet and start serving.

<comment><USER34> You'd appreciate sandstorm.io

<comment><USER3> I was a backer when it came out but it has not become what I had hoped it would be.

It seems the need to alter the applications to work as a sandstorm app means most apps were a few versions behind and often contained bugs. I tried doing some of the simplest things and got major fails, so I let it go.

Plus it didn't handle the web-centric use case well (only static content [0]), which makes its usefulness very limited as a server-side platform.

[https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/web- publishin...](https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/web-publishing/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The author includes an incorrect diagram swapping around the definitions of distributed vs decentralised, then ignores that one of the design criteria of the internet was to survive against nuclear attack.

Google's 40 centralised global datacenters wouldn't stand up very well to that sort of thing. Centralisation only works when nobody stronger is around to compete with.

<comment><USER36> You don't think Google could survive losing a single data center? Cloud users might lose some data, sure, and it'd likely cause issues, but I bet search wouldn't go down.

<comment><USER35> You think the world only has 1 nuke?

Also it looks like 40 was an overestimate by me, the real number is 15: [https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What I think will happen is that we will see a different type of decentralization become popular. Common platforms are needed or convenient. Right now these platforms are generally controlled by large companies with something approaching monopolies in various markets. For example, Amazon provides services and a destination that help people sell things. The problem is Amazon is a company that also sells things and is trying to maximize profits. So vendors are competing with the company running their vending platform.

Uber provides a platform for people to make money with their cars and to get around. It has the large network that drivers and riders need. But they are also so dominant that there is very little competition and so they can price things unfairly.

My belief is that A) we do need common platforms but B) the monopoly platforms are unfair and C) decentralized technologies can provide common platforms that aren't controlled by monopolies.

So what I think would make sense would be for drivers or even self-driving car companies to use decentralized protocols to make one large network and platform. That platform is open source and decentralized and used by many competing companies that want to provide transportation services. This allows companies access to a large pool of drivers and riders and a core technology implementation, but does not relinquish control to one company, so we can preserve competition and fairness.

<comment><USER38> We will eventually get to a point where everybody is publishing content over arcane but decentralized protocols that may or may not be supported by their ISPs, or with content easily easily discoverable otherwise. It will take the emergence of aggregators and archivers to find and package access to this content in a convenient form while also filtering out the spam.

When that happens, it will be 1996 again, and we'll be sharing stuff over NNTP and reading it through entities like dejanews.

It was a solid plan. A lot of old Usenet content is still around, which is more than can be said about content shared on privately-owned forums or Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would argue that abuse protection has been one of the main drivers toward centralized systems.

Many goals of fully decentralized morality-neutral platforms are in conflict with the expectations of people to be protected from harm while using the internet. Centralized platforms get closed to providing such a protection (even if flawed).

There is tons of research in decentralized methods for protecting against abuse (huge research topic in the 2000), yet not much has really worked (Bitcoin solves SOME, but it still suffers of many other abuse problems).

Small-scale federated solutions (where all participants know each other) are potentially better on that front, but I don't think they will be profoundly different from solutions where control is centralized. There will need to be coordination in response to problems, hard to see how different parts of the system might implement profoundly different policies about content, anonymity without splitting the group.

So, my conclusion is that solutions with centralized control are dominating the market not because a few evil corporations are conspiring to steal the control away from the free people, but because they DO provide a much safer environment for regular people to do regular things, despite all downside.

<comment><USER16> Email is a working example of federated network, and it's _profoundly_ different from Facebook. And not any more abusive than Twitter.

<comment><USER40> Twitter is pretty abusive. And email used to be even worse.

It didn't get decent until it people started flocking toward centralized solutions like GMail, which (coincidentally or not) did a pretty decent job of reining in spam and viruses.

<comment><USER41> The industry got good at that, Google is not a magical spam filter in fact in some ways it is not even really that great at all.

There are many many ways to achieve the same or better results for spam protection they by using google

<comment><USER42> Such as? I switched to gmail mostly for the spam filtering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It is worth pointing out that the "winning" centralized systems are largely built using decentralized systems.

A lesson to start ups is to be very careful building your product by assembling pieces of commercial centralized systems. Make sure if one part goes up in smoke (Facebook deprecates an API, the App store bans you, Google Cloud API pricing quadruples, etc.) you can easily swap in out for something else.

Another thing to consider is that centralized systems die. When support ends, but users are still there, software systems may decentralize. Take a look at "dead" MMOs that are still live because someone wrote a server emulator. Or, out of date DOS games which can be run in high resolution on a modern GPU because someone bothered to release the source code.

</comment><comment><USER44> Peer-to-peer sharing in the 90s was the best example of decentralization that really worked, grew really quickly and had a massive user base.

Napster was probably the most successful consumer decentralization software ever with something like 25M users in 2001.

Sci-Hub, Torrent video sites etc... are very popular and those are all decentralized with torrents.

So it's not that decentralization can't work, it's that legal structures won't allow it to work, because decentralization doesn't play nice with locking down IP.

<comment><USER45> The examples you listed gained many users because they were (and are) sharing content that they do not own. Imagine peer to peer sharing of personal photos and videos by the users that own the copyright.

The difference in outcome may be due to less economic incentive. It's easy to share photos on instagram and it's much more difficult to, say, download 20 academic papers without emptying one's bank account. There is a cost to the user to sharing photos with instagram. The cost hasn't been realized by the average user.

[https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/](https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/)

<comment><USER44> I disagree, I think it's because they let users access content easier and cheaper than the standard way.

Music sharing is basically dead because of Spotify, Youtube Red etc... so they solved the simplicity problem, and the cost wasn't worth putting up with the problems of music torrents, which made decentralization benefits moot.

There isn't any reason you couldn't make photo sharing decentralized as easy as instagram, but Instagram isn't photo sharing it's social networking, and decentralized social networking hasn't shown that it's easier/better than centralized.

<comment><USER45> Hasn't centralized social networking proven to be a complete disaster? The user has become the product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think the main reason decentralization lost is not due to technology, but trust and network effect. Like we will deposit hard earned money in a bigger bank which has less chances of failure, even if internally it might not be safe and they will need our help to bail them out. More and more people deposit the money the bigger the bank.

Like in real world we are responsible to support monopoly and large centralized companies, it's the same we did with internet and internet companies.

<comment><USER47> >reason decentralization lost

Nothing has lost, the story is still evolving. Most people have only ever been on one social network: FB. People are now getting comfortable with Twitter, and Mastodon (or something like it) will eventually make more sense to the mainstream, non-technical audience.

<comment><USER46> You are right that some apps will become popular and they will become part of centralized backbone. People using Mastodon or any other decentralized apps based on Kadmelia DHT and other technology will still be using Android, ios, Mac or Windows as primary base platform. Only very small subset of people will use Linux. So in the end, it will still be dependent on centralized infrastructure. It's not just about one or two apps but the overall internet architecture and its control and dependence on bigger company. Now as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon lay their cables across oceans, acquire ISP's and telecom, will control from packet switching network to application delivery used by normal person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I may be feeling a touch pedantic, perhaps I just live in a different world being on the ISP side, but the Internet is not centralised at all. Large quantities of traffic ends up going to certain central locations, but the network itself is decidedly decentralised. Just look at LINX for example and the other major IXs, nobody there is telling everyone else where to send their packets, they just go where needed. In fact LINX as an organisation is a members organisation run by its members with each one, big or small, having one vote.

IXs, BGP, RIRs like RIPE, and the proliferation around the globe of access ISPs, all prove how decentralised the Internet is.

But if the point the article is trying to make is "all this content is being hosted in fewer and fewer locations and that's bad" then I completely agree. It damages choice and hugely increases the blast radius of service outages.

Now if Amazon and Facebook started offering end user connectivity, that's the time to really worry. _cough_ Google.

</comment><comment><USER49> I don'think it would be too hard to sell decentralized, even in general terms. You can buy a tomato in a supermarket, most people do so. Yet a large amount of people buy it from farmers on markets, also a lot grow it themselves. Everybody prefers local, homegrown tomato over supermarket one, always, even if that is cheaper, controlled and easier to get, everyone understands the differences, even while knowing nothing about how to grow a tomato.

Such differences would also be increasingly trivial for apps and data we use daily. Customization, inherent in every individual, would also be a powerful driving force. Why letting FB/Google etc at our data requires also less and less explanation.

</comment><comment><USER50> Decentralized is good for experimenting, testing all the possibilities in parallel. Once we have a working model - and one with network effects - <USER2> play is about squeezing the last bites of efficiency and that is better done centralized.

</comment><comment><USER51> there's a relevant gap in his 'history of the internet' analysis where centralized web was basically all that existed for users (i.e. AOL walled gardens).

as many things in society, these internet trends seem to follow cycles of discovery/innovation and improvement/cost-efficiency.

and the same way the previous centralized web crumbled with the appearance of novel services, so will the current centralized networks. trust in innovation.

</comment><comment><USER52> I suggest looking at the Holochain project.

[https://developer.holochain.org](https://developer.holochain.org)

It's operational today (prototype stage), and solves many of the problems that have prevented the roll-out of distributed systems in the past. Useful right now, and moving fast toward alpha stage, with high scalability.

This is going to have shocking effects in many fields where decentralized solutions have previously been difficult to scale.

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe this blog can survive on a single server answering direct calls from modems, but last time I checked, decentralization of content delivery was the rule, not the exception.

Centralized content with decentralized systems won. And they're doing so well it all appears centralized.

</comment><comment><USER54> An inconvenient truth in the golden age of crypto mania. Even crypto itself cannot put up a good fight against centralization, as companies like Bitmain and Coinbase dominate the landscape.

Decentralized protocols and centralized services on top of those protocols is the future.

</comment><comment><USER55> Email is decentralized, works great.

<comment><USER52> Unfortunately we've lost most of the great parts, due to the fact they were easy to attack and hard to defend...

It's not really practical to run your own mail server anymore. This is from someone who's been running a triply redundant MTA for over a decade. Works great — but I couldn't describe to someone how to do it, without telling them in the next breath not to bother.

Also, sending email was trivial and totally decentralized (any script could do it manually in a few lines of code), but that no longer works; now an authenticated connection back to a centralized industrial-scale sender is required. Easy, just not distributed anymore.

The next gen, however, _is_ going to be totally decentralized, and end-to-end authenticated and encrypted. Very exciting times:

[https://developer.holochain.org](https://developer.holochain.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Its just the beginning of decentralized. These articles are so easy to write.

</comment><comment><USER57> It's the wrong year to pick winners and losers. There's a huge amount of stress in the system right now. The coming quakes will drastically reshape the landscape.

Let's check in around 2030 and see if centralized is still winning.

</comment><comment><USER58> in the energy world (power grids), there are very practical advantages to decentralized generation. It actually makes for a good example of similar pros/cons to the kind of (de)centralization this post is talking about.

</comment><comment><USER59> This article presents absolutely nothing as regards an actual argument about how to write computer programs. That's enough to say about it.

</comment><comment><USER60> Why don't we create network systems that model real social networks?

Can't we combine centralization and decentralization?

Must it be all one or the other?

</comment><comment><USER61> isn't the author aware that Kardashian is into Bitcoin and publicly announced it?

</comment><comment><USER62> 7\. Killer app</comment>