Fused quartz for private keys and eternal blockchains?

[marcus_of_augustus]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/02/17/1931200/data-written-with-superman-memory-crystal-could-last-billions-of-years

Researchers have demonstrated a method of femtosecond laser writing in self-assembled crystaline nanostructures that can withstand temperatures of up to 1,000 degree Celsius and last indefinitely at room temperature. The storage method enables up to 360TB of capacity on a single disc. Data is written to a file comprised of three layers of nano-structured dots separated by five micrometres. The technology was first demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kilobit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

[OROBTC]

...

That's some great new technology.  It does seem like it will take years before we see that kind of permanent memory in products.  A good technology for permanent memory is not available yet IIRC.

If accessing that information is fast, then it would be easy to store & use the whole blockchain.  And have room for whole lot more.

Then I guess we are back to the issue of speed of moving data around.

[7788bitcoin]

I think at the moment it is still a very expensive technology. Hopefully it will be cheaper in future. For bitcoin's blockchain data, it will need to be a system to allow continuous addition of data...

[Straux]

Just imagine how expensive it will be though. Even if it became very popular and easy to manufacture, if you could get 320 TB of data on a disk for cheap, how much would a 1gb USB cost?

[Kakmakr]

Superman will be proud of the human race now. ^smile^ Just when we thought the technology they used in the movie, was far fetched, it becomes real. You can now make your backups on salt crystals. ^Whoaa^
It is a very interesting concept and we have a abundance of quartz, so the storage media will possibly be cheaper.

Who would have guess, go go Clark Kent!

[7788bitcoin]

Just imagine how expensive it will be though. Even if it became very popular and easy to manufacture, if you could get 320 TB of data on a disk for cheap, how much would a 1gb USB cost?

You can look at the price of memory over time: http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm

In 1957, 1Mbyte would cost $411 million;
In 1977, 1Mbyte would cost $36,800;
In 1997, 1Mbyte would cost $2.16
By 2015 Dec, 1Mbyte would cost $0.0037...