I can buy Real Russian Brides with Bitcoin!
But the AOL days remind me of well dial up and a 10000000000000 Free CDS at the bank or were they floppies
Still I remember some of this and internet bubble makes me wonder what happens next
AOL first gave out floppies and then towards the end CDs. I still remember taking a flight in the 90's in the US where the airline gave out AOL floppies to the passengers with their drinks. Some of the passengers actually thought they were some kind of weird airline food and one older lady literally was about to take a bite out of one. I explained to her what it was and that it was not edible. She said she had no use for it and gave it to me. Well I ended up collecting the AOL floppies from all the passengers around me. When I got home I formatted them all, to use them as blank floppy disks. Today I still have them and they are perfectly fine and usable after 20 years.
This brings me to my next point. I just completed a test of a floppy that was used as part of my Bitcoin backup strategy. The wallet.dat dated from November 2012 and the floppy in question had been sitting in a bank safety deposit box for the last 9 months. The wallet.dat from the floppy was copied onto the an existing Bitcoin-qt installation on Ubuntu and there was all of my Bitcoin savings wallet perfectly recovered.
As for floppy failure the most common reason is that people pull them out when data transfer is still in progress. This will lead to data and disk corruption and will also in many cases damage the drive. When properly taken care of they can last for years. I have read data from floppies that were well over 20 years old.
I wonder if we compare technologies which lasts longest
I'm with you on the floppy disks for lifespan I still have a bunch of them and they still look brand new and likely run need to get a Floppy Drive out to test but they do not look old at all hardly look their age.
Remember when they were two dollars a dozen ah inflation
CD's can be a bit heat sensitive but last fairly well until they get scratched which can happen more often than I want to admit or someone sits on them mumble.
Digital USB sticks work pretty well until they crap out then you lose all your data or you break the power cable but the storage still runs then its just a pain finding a replacement unit to access the hard-drive.
Vinyl - Cassettes -Floppys -CDS -Digital Storage
Were talking about a lot of tech but if Bitcoin did exist in the 90's it would amuse me because people could be seen saying
OMG Bitcoin Hit 1 TH that's GODLY powerful and we could snicker at that 20 years later as were in Petahashes.
It does make me curious how far we can take Moores law and what computer processing power will be in 20 years vs the blockchain and miner difficulty. Possibly beyond Zettahash
But back to AOL disks they brought the internet to the world through spam
On the other hand we have them to thank for the Eternal September
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/“At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it,” she wrote. Wow.
Still most effective strategy can just be bulk spam
http://web.archive.org/web/20070820184342/http://www.nomoreaolcds.com/
