First, responding to comments to my comments. Clearly I know nothing about bitchain and torrent, so I won't comment further on those technologies. "Herb is curmudgeonly about this" - acknowledged, I did call myself "stone-age" for a reason. "hammer looking for a nail" seems to be an acknowledged call. My comment on the Internet Archive was misread a bit. It collects the first few "layers" of Web content - not all of a site's files are preserved. Hence "wide not deep". If that changes, bless 'em and our good fortune. On the issues - which to me are about content and acquisition. The discussion is about technical methods and their merits. That's fine. A claimed motivation is "lost archives", which is or was an issue. Many online archives become replicated now, some people like doing that, they often claim "duplication is preservation". Replication solves the problem. As on-line technology is getting cheaper and faster and bigger - I'm just not worried about the technical details or costs; for others that's their interests, and that's fine. My worries, and Dave McGuire and others echos these, are motivating *people* - to preserve content in the first place, to contribute to those who ARE preserving and who need support ($$$, show-of-interest, provide more content). I also worry about archiving institutions; they have merits and issues, that's another discussion. And I worry about "curation" - how to represent a thing, give it a context, a history. As Dave McGuire said, short-attention and narrow interests are problems. Blockchain doesn't help us with block-heads, or about simple ignorance of the past, or with efforts to acquire and digitize. Or, with preserving artifacts and not just content. (shrug) but those are other discussions. Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net