This is just a small part of outcompeting blockchains, but it's a big one to me. (I'm using here the survival trait of sustaining everyone else giving you community support, to plan the outcompetition.) If people got together and made a globally usable filesystem using something like ceph, lizardfs, tahoe-lafs ... we could together replace the role of storage history in blockchains. This would help soften the global shock around them, letting more people run nodes and making fewer people need to. You'd want to make a small patch to the system preventing deletion of important stuff. Siacoin (which I only remember because I use their web interface) actually has enough storage to back thousands of terabytes on FUSE for reasonable cost if we wanted to preserve everything entirely. I would let anybody mark something crucial with some kind of rudimentary spam detection (e.g. low entropy in file, only so much data from single source) to start with, and not let crucial things be deleted by anyone. The open source community that would sprout as usage grew could handle the spam detection breaking. You'd shift your sense of security such that the ability to write to the filesystem is shared publicly and directly, via e.g. a public private-key. Once it got going, storage-based chains like storj and siacoin would pay such a network for providing storage. Any thoughts?