I got a question on how one can "outcompete" without focusing on
   financial return: an example of the pattern I describe is wikipedia,
   which has replaced most search results on the internet but has no
   profit.  If your benefit is strong enough you can eventually replace an
   industry entirely: cloud storage instead of encyclopedias.
   Note the proposed idea is vulnerable to malicious crucial data change a
   little more than a blockchain (even if the protocol rejects it, system
   compromises could alter what is expected), which could be patched by
   some clients plugging into a blockchain to produce proofs-of-existence
   for now.

   On Sun, May 24, 2020, 7:25 AM Karl <[1]gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:

   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?

References

   1. mailto:gmkarl@gmail.com