Dead Money

I've been thinking of an interesting project, something to bring awareness to the digital dark age problem. The digital dark age is the idea that changing software, incompatible hardware, and explicit copy protection could mean that there will be some information that, despite being perfectly preserved, will be completely inaccessible to future generations.

A good example of this is the ISEE-3 reboot, where a group of crowd-funded amateurs (with NASA's approval) attempted to repurpose a decommissioned satellite. Unfortunately, the original electronics, software, and technical documents were gone. The electronics could be more or less simulated with a combination of software-defined radio and the dish from GoldenEye. But the software? Luckily, several people from the original project were still alive, and enough documents survived that, with their help, it was possible to communicate with the craft. By its next flyby in 30 years, though, the original engineers will no longer be available. Human life is a very fragile storage medium.

Our loss of knowledge is a loss of value, and I think it'd be interesting to represent that literally, by storing bitcoins in old file formats and old devices. There's an amazing breadth of scope for this idea. You could start with small values by putting a few dollars worth of bitcoins on floppy disks and cd-roms, forcing laptop-owners to hunt for disused PCs or more dongles. You could put higher values on minidisks, zip disks, 8 inch floppy drives, Diablo drives, etc. It works for software, too: bitcoins embedded in VisiCalc files, Virtual Boy roms or Multics boot tapes.

Of course, this is all a bit self-defeating; in order to put the bitcoins in those formats, you need to be able to write them, which means that the information hasn't been lost. To really make the point, you want a significant amount of money locked away in hardware or software that nobody can read; a kind of buried treasure hidden in plain sight. You could do this by figuring out how to write an old format or interface with old hardware and not telling anyone else how, but that's really the opposite of what you want.

Instead, you need to think long term. Produce the works now, keep them in storage, and release them on a schedule. A floppy disk in the year 2016 might only be worth $1 because we still have lots of readers around, but what about in 2050? 2100? The promise of higher-valued bounties waiting might act to encourage keeping that knowledge around, or at least to think twice before discarding it without any thought for the future. You could even do similar things with online services; if you're worried Twitter is going to go bust, encrypt a bitcoin wallet address using a bunch of randomly chosen tweets as keys and wait a decade to publish the tweet IDs.

Of course, maybe the price of bitcoins will crater, rendering the whole process useless. Unfortunately, any alternative would have the same problem. You could have hidden tokens that you send to some web service, but then that service could stop running. You could have secret account details with a bank, but banks can fail. In a sense, this problem is the whole point: our knowledge should last longer than our institutions, and the fact that it doesn't at the moment is why you can perform this sort of creative value arbitrage.