How the Blockchain is One Baby Step to Forever
On average how long would you say your characters from your favorite online games last? My bet is 2 years on the average online game, since those games get shut down the minute the publishers are not making a profit. Very successful games I'd guess the average your character would be saved is ~8 years.
Time flies and we are just dust in the wind. Well that just irks me enough to do something about it!
Forever is LONG time. And, I know the word Immortal implies that your IPCs will live on forever. When we say immortal in Immortal Player Characters, it means a promise of our intent. We can only get to forever one decade at a time. The culture of IPCs is that they not only live forever but grow and evolve and become more interesting and valuable over time.
How do we make them live forever?
Blockchain technology helps a lot. As long as people keep copying the blocks over and over and over again, the IPCs will also be copied again and again. Why would people lend their electricity and computers to the blockchain? As you probably know "miners" do this so they get rewarded for providing the infrastructure for the ecosystem. As long as they keep mining, your IPCs get copied onto hard drives all over the world. Just like life itself, copying the copier keeps the copier copying into the future.
But the blockchain can eventually go away! The miners might stop mining! IPCs currently live on the Ethereum blockchain. I think that buys us at least 20 years, probably a lot more. But, we can't depend on it if we want the "Immortal" part of Immortal Player Characters!
Thinking about this obsessively I conclude there needs to be a plan to back up the IPCs (and their inventories and experience.) With that in mind the question is, what form of back up media can last the longest?
I researched various forms of information storage. Most CDs go bad after just a few years. Hard drives fail after several years, maybe a decade. It's not practical to print out all the IPCs because its a lot of data and paper really doesn't last long.
After hours of research into this question, I found M-Disc which is rated for over 1,000 years! Even the U.S Navy tested these discs to identify the best data archival media in existence and concluded M-Discs will hold their data integrity for at least 1,000 years!
So, for as long as I live, every year, on January 1st, I promise I will back up ALL the IPCs onto and M-Disc and stash multiple copies on as many continents as I could.
In fact, if you are willing to keep and save a disc for a few decades please email me with your name and physical address. I will send you backups to make sure IPCs outlive us all.
ed at playchemy.com