Decentralised Essays
How to make sure our words live forever 🙌
In this week’s newsletter: Decentralised Essays, Prado’s Private Club, Randi Zuckerberg, & many more
Hi 👋 Prado here
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Every Friday, I publish one essay & 10 interesting things that will help you become healthy, wealthy and wise 👇
Back in 2019, When I was building my website I had one constant question in my mind. Who will handle my website after I'm no more?
My website, tweets, blogs, newsletters, videos, everything. My website is my life's encyclopedia.
I was never able to answer the question. I bought the domain name and hosted it on some server for a couple of dollars a month.
Then in 2021, I came across this tweet 👇
I clicked on the link right away. Hoping it will fulfil my curiosity.
The subheading of the discussion was
"Say you wanted to host a personal page that can outlive you and be seen by the children of your grandchildren. Other than asking your progeny to keep paying the hosting bills, is there another way?"
The discussion was actually pretty interesting.
Here are a few solutions that were shared:
Using pen and paper (There are over 7000 pages from Leonardo Da Vinci that are still readable)
Find out institutions that preserved information for over 500+ years like churches and elite universities. Ask them to preserve your content as well. But then convincing them is a hard job.
Go to a legal firm and pay them a big fee to run things for you. Legal firms will never go out of business.
Print it on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container.
All these are hard, expensive and not so easy to access methods.
Then I read something interesting.
Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.
Taylor Finley
I was very early in the blockchain world and was still trying to understand it. What I understood was... make small transactions and add them to the bitcoin blockchain. The network is vast and it'll be impossible to kill it.
Unless some meteorite hits us and kills everyone and everything (I hope that never happens)
Doing it through bitcoin's blockchain is also costly and not easily accessible.
So the discussion didn't really answer the question but it did show me a direction. Blockchain.
Mirror.xyz runs on the Ethereum blockchain.
Wordcel.club is a publishing stack on Solana and stored on a decentralised Arweave network.
I won't get into the which is the better conversation now because I haven't used them much... but so far they look promising.
This is the closest I've ever got to answering the question.
How to make sure my words live forever?
Put them on a blockchain.
This essay was also uploaded on wordcel.club. It cost me ₹7 or $0.1 to upload it on the blockchain and now it’ll leave forever.
10 Interesting things for you 🙌
1. effort (Blog)
2. Something from my Twitter
3. WATCH THIS 👇
4. How come I’m only seeing this video todayyyy.
5. Interesting experiment of the week:-
6. Question of the week:-
7. Picture of the week:-
8. Current read:
9. Meme of the week:-
10. Quote of the week:
Love people and use things because the opposite never works. ~ The Minimalists Podcast (2022)
(Tweet this quote)Peter theil’s professor told him that writing a book was more dangerous than having a child because you could always disown a child if it turned out badly.
(Tweet this quote)“Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.” — Lucius Seneca
(Tweet this quote)
Check out some previous newsletters:
Diderot Effect (Read)
Life’s lines of Closeness (Read)
Cathedral Thinkers (Read)
Join in if you want me to trigger your curiosity every week👇
Personal Announcement 🚨
Today I bought an ENS domain and last night I bought a .sol domain.
Pradologue.eth & Prado.sol
In This Together,
Prado
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Hey Prado, if the wordcel website goes down for some reason, how will you access your essay? I know it's on blockchain but how can it be viewed independently?