You do need some kind of reliable, distributed storage though. The sequential nature of a blockchain also ensures that such stored content is held no matter what by any full node.
The hash to verify content is only half of the problem. You also need to store the _actual_ content of the page. What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?
A blockchain is, at its core, a distributed database, it is exactly made for this use case.
A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar. How many millions (billions?) would Wikipedia need to spend to stash everything they reference in the blockchain?
> What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?
It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as an archive.
> A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar
That's nonsensical, the price of using a service on a blockchain is essentially a floating value. That is the whole point of having a token in the first place: people willing to store and people storing are participating in the price of the service.
Last I checked, filecoin was a few cents per GB per month.
You can create a blockchain of kind hearted people to store Wikipedia as well, it's really up to you. But comparing apples and oranges makes no sense.
> That's nonsensical, the price of using a service on a blockchain is essentially a floating value.
This is kind of a ridiculous response. The price of oil is also a floating value and yet it is not nonsensical to discuss the price of a barrel of oil.
Yes, the cost to store something on the bitcoin blockchain floats. Several sources indicate that roughly a dollar is a reasonable approximation currently. If you disagree I’d be interested in seeing your data.
> Last I checked, filecoin was a few cents per GB per month.
I don’t know a ton about filecoin but it seems like retrieving data is pretty cumbersome. It’s not clear that this would actually be useable for a Wikipedia reference archive.
> You can create a blockchain of kind hearted people to store Wikipedia as well, it's really up to you. But comparing apples and oranges makes no sense.
Blockchain for its own sake. Sure, you could create a custom blockchain. You could also just pay AWS for georeplicated blob storage and it would be way less complex.
You both need to generate the hash at the point of archival correctly and store it in a way that cannot be modified later on.
Doing that with a blockchain like tech is one of the few use cases where the tech itself actually adds value.
Heck you might be able to store the entire pages on a blockchain or a blockchain linked storage.
The problem with these sites is that we implicitly trust them and unlike a book or other handprint media where editing or destroying all unedited existing copies is effectively impossible if a shady actor can easily start editing archived news articles and other sites that are no longer publicly available.
This is getting to blockchain for the sake of blockchain.
If Wikipedia recorded the hash of every referenced page you could verify that the archive.is page is unchanged.
You could certainly argue that archive.is isn’t the right place to store archives (I have no idea) but attempting to move all this to the blockchain would be very expensive.
You only need the hash of the original content. No blockchain is necessary. The problem is that there is no source for that hash except for the scraper that archives it since people don't put the hash in a hyperlink.
If you download an ISO for a Linux OS for example, they give you the hash of the file so you can check it. They don't build an entire blockchain whatever to validate the hash.
