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Go to a big legal firm that's been around for at least a few hundred years. With them, set up a trust with a sufficient endowment to be run indefinitely (barrin

Go to a big legal firm that's been around for at least a few hundred years. With them, set up a trust with a sufficient endowment to be run indefinitely (barring total societal or economic collapse), with the mission of maintaining this specific website in accessible format (including updates and format shifts as necessary). It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations with one mission or another.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
I know of one that was over a hundred years old, and was gone in a few months. One of the grandsons took most of the money, and it folded.
novaRom 5y ago
I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.
- t-writescode 5y ago
  Nintendo is over 100. There are breweries with *thousand* year leases to the British Monarchy. Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world transformations.
  - laurent123456 5y ago
    Looks like many of the oldest companies in the word are indeed Japanese. Kongo Gumi, a construction firm, dates back from 578. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
    - thih9 5y ago
      Kongō Gumi seems no longer independent though. > In January 2006, after falling on difficult times, it became a subsidiary of the Takamatsu Construction Group. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongō_Gumi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongō_Gumi
- SoylentOrange 5y ago
  There are plenty of Italian and Swiss banks that are over 300 years old. They’ve survived reformations, wars including World Wars, plagues, purges, and the transition from feudal monarchies to empire and to democracy. For example, the British banking giant Barclays was founded in 1690. Here’s a partial list of other ancient banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_continuous_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin... I think it’s more reasonable to assume that they’ll survive any future calamity (especially something so close as 20-30 years) than to assume that our current age is somehow special.
  - _tom_ 5y ago
    And Bearings Bank was founded in 1762. And made it to 1995 before imploding. Likely to survive, yes. But at least one is likely to fail over any reasonable period.
  - necovek 5y ago
    When worrying about surviving for hundreds of years, you need to compare with the data about how many have existed for hundreds of years and then folded anyway. Note that the above list includes a bunch of "national banks" which were founded at the peak of "national movement" in 1800s (as "nations" started forming "national countries") — with many of them, you can't really leave a deposit and they instead regulate an economy of a country (not sure about "many", but at least National Bank of Serbia is one of those).
  - satellite2 5y ago
    But I doubt Barclays is currently upholding contracts signed 200 years ago.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Benjamin Franklin's endowments to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia are still being maintained as trusts to this day.
    - thinkingemote 5y ago
      There are hundreds of thousands of trusts being run to this day that were set up over 200 years ago, mostly to do with land.
- kgin 5y ago
  Can you tell us more about what transformations are on the calendar?
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
Was going to say this. Great answer
robocat 5y ago
You couldn’t trust one firm. Many firms in many countries? Or even better, diversify, and use multiple different plans, not just lawyers.
acid__ 5y ago
Yup. Setting up a trust is the best way to do this. -- Many solutions here suggesting physical storage mechanisms which defeats the whole purpose of hosting a widely and public accessible document. A trust would have the finances and most aligned incentives to keep the content online and in a format that is accessible. Many other solutions involve telling your children to tell their children to ... etc. But again, you have no incentive to give a damn about the whims of someone who died 300 years ago, and it only takes one uncaring child to cut the chain short. A trust's hefty financial incentives can keep anyones incentives aligned. It makes sense that there's sexy technical solutions here (we're on Hacker News), but the most important thing is to keep the incentives aligned. That's what a trust is for.
jiveturkey 5y ago
can't believe this isn't the top post
nathan_f77 5y ago
How expensive do you think this would be? It would be fun to estimate the potential costs over 500 years. I would never run this kind of website on free hosting (e.g. GitHub pages.) I think it's dangerous to assume that this business model will continue to exist for the next 500 years. It would be much safer to pay the ~$0.02/mo to store and serve your files from an AWS S3 bucket. A $5/mo DigitalOcean VPS would be safer, but probably overkill. I really like the idea of paying $0.24 per year to cover the exact costs of electricity, storage, servers, and bandwidth. These costs might continue to decrease over time, but they can never be 0 (e.g. Landauer's principle [1].) I don't know how to estimate the cost of a domain name over the next 500 years. It's definitely not going to stay $10 / year forever. Maybe registrars will start charging higher prices or taxes based on the market value of your domain. Or some company will really want to take over your domain. Like Nissan [2] for example. Ethereum name service (ENS) [3] could be interesting. Pricing [4]: * 5+ character .eth names: $5 in ETH per year * 4 character .eth names: $160 in ETH per year * 3 character .eth names $640 in ETH per year The world seems to have decided that names are worth roughly $10/year, for a single planet with a population of 7.9 billion humans. We'll probably be a multi-planet species at some point during the next 500 years. It's hard to imagine what the universe will look like 5,000 or 50,000 years from now. Imagine there's trillions of sentient beings living throughout the universe, and a "universal internet" (even if information still takes many years to propagate throughout the universe.) Maybe names will become far more expensive. I think the safest option would be to choose a random string of letters and numbers: 2g39pz6jygjd.com + 2g39pz6jygjd.eth. It would still point to a page that includes your name and all of your content, so you'd still be indexed by search engines. And it's very unlikely that someone will start a company called "2g39pz6jygjd" and try to file a trademark. This kind of random name would probably continue to be worth around $10/year, or perhaps up to $100 / year. It might continue to cost around $0.20 per year to host your static website on AWS S3 (or similar). Bandwidth would be interesting to think about. Let's say you're trying to keep a blog running forever. Probably a good idea to keep it very simple and use a very basic CSS them, so each page could be around 20 kb. Serving your page to 50,000 visitors would require 1 GB of bandwidth. But let's prepare for a worst case scenario: Everyone on earth visits your website once a day for a month. 7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days (average number of days in a month) * 20 kB = 57709.5 TB. (That's actually way more than I expected! I find it really hard to understand just how many people there are in the world.) I used this AWS calculator [6]: * 0.25 GB monthly storage * 7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days = 233,287,000,000 requests (let's say we serve a single HTML page that includes inline CSS.) * 57709.5 TB transfered S3 Standard cost (monthly): $134,680.98 USD. Or $1,616,171.76 per year. That was just an exercise to figure out the maximum possible cost of hosting a simple web page. It was a fun tangent but we can ignore all of that. Let's just say it could cost up to $100 per year. Assuming an extremely safe withdrawal rate of 0.5%, you'll need to ask your trust to invest $20,000 (100 / 0.005) in a mix of ETFs, bonds, cryptocurrencies, gold, etc. That should guarantee that you can continue paying for web hosting through the next 1,000 recessions, nuclear wars, ice ages, etc. [1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Landauer%27s_principle https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Landauer%27s_principle [2] https://nissan.com https://nissan.com [3] https://ens.domains https://ens.domains [4] https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions [5] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing [6] https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/S3 https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/S3
Ir0nMan 5y ago
This is the actual answer.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

I know of one that was over a hundred years old, and was gone in a few months. One of the grandsons took most of the money, and it folded.

novaRom 5y ago

I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.

t-writescode 5y ago
Nintendo is over 100. There are breweries with *thousand* year leases to the British Monarchy. Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world transformations.
- laurent123456 5y ago
  Looks like many of the oldest companies in the word are indeed Japanese. Kongo Gumi, a construction firm, dates back from 578. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
  - thih9 5y ago
    Kongō Gumi seems no longer independent though. > In January 2006, after falling on difficult times, it became a subsidiary of the Takamatsu Construction Group. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongō_Gumi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongō_Gumi
SoylentOrange 5y ago
There are plenty of Italian and Swiss banks that are over 300 years old. They’ve survived reformations, wars including World Wars, plagues, purges, and the transition from feudal monarchies to empire and to democracy. For example, the British banking giant Barclays was founded in 1690. Here’s a partial list of other ancient banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_continuous_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin... I think it’s more reasonable to assume that they’ll survive any future calamity (especially something so close as 20-30 years) than to assume that our current age is somehow special.
- _tom_ 5y ago
  And Bearings Bank was founded in 1762. And made it to 1995 before imploding. Likely to survive, yes. But at least one is likely to fail over any reasonable period.
- necovek 5y ago
  When worrying about surviving for hundreds of years, you need to compare with the data about how many have existed for hundreds of years and then folded anyway. Note that the above list includes a bunch of "national banks" which were founded at the peak of "national movement" in 1800s (as "nations" started forming "national countries") — with many of them, you can't really leave a deposit and they instead regulate an economy of a country (not sure about "many", but at least National Bank of Serbia is one of those).
- satellite2 5y ago
  But I doubt Barclays is currently upholding contracts signed 200 years ago.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Benjamin Franklin's endowments to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia are still being maintained as trusts to this day.
  - thinkingemote 5y ago
    There are hundreds of thousands of trusts being run to this day that were set up over 200 years ago, mostly to do with land.
kgin 5y ago
Can you tell us more about what transformations are on the calendar?

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago

Was going to say this. Great answer

robocat 5y ago

You couldn’t trust one firm. Many firms in many countries? Or even better, diversify, and use multiple different plans, not just lawyers.

acid__ 5y ago

Yup. Setting up a trust is the best way to do this. -- Many solutions here suggesting physical storage mechanisms which defeats the whole purpose of hosting a widely and public accessible document. A trust would have the finances and most aligned incentives to keep the content online and in a format that is accessible. Many other solutions involve telling your children to tell their children to ... etc. But again, you have no incentive to give a damn about the whims of someone who died 300 years ago, and it only takes one uncaring child to cut the chain short. A trust's hefty financial incentives can keep anyones incentives aligned. It makes sense that there's sexy technical solutions here (we're on Hacker News), but the most important thing is to keep the incentives aligned. That's what a trust is for.

jiveturkey 5y ago

can't believe this isn't the top post

nathan_f77 5y ago

How expensive do you think this would be? It would be fun to estimate the potential costs over 500 years. I would never run this kind of website on free hosting (e.g. GitHub pages.) I think it's dangerous to assume that this business model will continue to exist for the next 500 years. It would be much safer to pay the ~$0.02/mo to store and serve your files from an AWS S3 bucket. A $5/mo DigitalOcean VPS would be safer, but probably overkill. I really like the idea of paying $0.24 per year to cover the exact costs of electricity, storage, servers, and bandwidth. These costs might continue to decrease over time, but they can never be 0 (e.g. Landauer's principle [1].) I don't know how to estimate the cost of a domain name over the next 500 years. It's definitely not going to stay $10 / year forever. Maybe registrars will start charging higher prices or taxes based on the market value of your domain. Or some company will really want to take over your domain. Like Nissan [2] for example. Ethereum name service (ENS) [3] could be interesting. Pricing [4]: * 5+ character .eth names: $5 in ETH per year * 4 character .eth names: $160 in ETH per year * 3 character .eth names $640 in ETH per year The world seems to have decided that names are worth roughly $10/year, for a single planet with a population of 7.9 billion humans. We'll probably be a multi-planet species at some point during the next 500 years. It's hard to imagine what the universe will look like 5,000 or 50,000 years from now. Imagine there's trillions of sentient beings living throughout the universe, and a "universal internet" (even if information still takes many years to propagate throughout the universe.) Maybe names will become far more expensive. I think the safest option would be to choose a random string of letters and numbers: 2g39pz6jygjd.com + 2g39pz6jygjd.eth. It would still point to a page that includes your name and all of your content, so you'd still be indexed by search engines. And it's very unlikely that someone will start a company called "2g39pz6jygjd" and try to file a trademark. This kind of random name would probably continue to be worth around $10/year, or perhaps up to $100 / year. It might continue to cost around $0.20 per year to host your static website on AWS S3 (or similar). Bandwidth would be interesting to think about. Let's say you're trying to keep a blog running forever. Probably a good idea to keep it very simple and use a very basic CSS them, so each page could be around 20 kb. Serving your page to 50,000 visitors would require 1 GB of bandwidth. But let's prepare for a worst case scenario: Everyone on earth visits your website once a day for a month. 7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days (average number of days in a month) * 20 kB = 57709.5 TB. (That's actually way more than I expected! I find it really hard to understand just how many people there are in the world.) I used this AWS calculator [6]: * 0.25 GB monthly storage * 7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days = 233,287,000,000 requests (let's say we serve a single HTML page that includes inline CSS.) * 57709.5 TB transfered S3 Standard cost (monthly): $134,680.98 USD. Or $1,616,171.76 per year. That was just an exercise to figure out the maximum possible cost of hosting a simple web page. It was a fun tangent but we can ignore all of that. Let's just say it could cost up to $100 per year. Assuming an extremely safe withdrawal rate of 0.5%, you'll need to ask your trust to invest $20,000 (100 / 0.005) in a mix of ETFs, bonds, cryptocurrencies, gold, etc. That should guarantee that you can continue paying for web hosting through the next 1,000 recessions, nuclear wars, ice ages, etc. [1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Landauer%27s_principle https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Landauer%27s_principle [2] https://nissan.com https://nissan.com [3] https://ens.domains https://ens.domains [4] https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions [5] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing [6] https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/S3 https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/S3

Ir0nMan 5y ago

This is the actual answer.