Blockchain: A Solution for Permanent Digital Archives

The recent article by the Brownstone Institute, "They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now," highlights a trend of information being removed from the internet, making digital information sources less reliable. Additionally, search algorithms are downranking inconvenient content, which could be seen as censorship of the web.

• The Internet Archive hasn’t archived anything since Oct 8 due to a DDoS attack.
• Google Cache has stopped caching.
• The Alexa web traffic ranking service is gone.

All of this leads to a loss of independent control over internet history.

It seems the only way to create a truly permanent, tamper-proof digital archive is with blockchain. Here, miners or validators have a financial incentive to add new records for rewards and to store previous data because every new entry relies on older ones for verification.

As traditional permaweb approaches falter, blockchain projects designed to store arbitrary data - like Filecoin, Storj, and Sia - are likely to gain interest. In these networks, not only miners are incentivized to preserve data indefinitely, but any network participant can also be rewarded for sharing storage space.

You can exchange any cryptocurrency for FIL, STORJ, SC, and similar tokens at the best rates on rabbit.io.