We need a Digital Crypto Museum

[solarsurfer]

Hi
I run many of the older coins on my site, and in fact I have resurrect quiet a few. I have even managed to convert some to auxpow while still keeping the chain as it was.

I also have saved a few of the source codes, but not the blockchain, so I cannot relaunch these without a complete blockchain.

If anyone wants an old coin re-started, they have a fully synced wallet for instance, then I might be able to re-start it and keep it running.

Regards
Andy
sha256-mining.shears.co.uk

[o48o]

But why? Blockchains aren't really build for that.

I would understand if it would be something essential to people. Something that's small enough and should be immutable against government invervention, but from whom such a memeish website should it be protected from?

Wikipedia page would be enough, or snap to internet archive from that hypothetical digital museum website.

it's just one time even though expensive and complicated, honestly since it preserve past project that have unique features, built out of purely innovation and experiment, it's not as simple as just memeish website if the goal is code preservation. Wikipedia page is centralized, can be edited by anyone at some point and internet archive is also centralized. The biggest reason why it's far fetched idea probably the workaround needed to build tool to bypass 24KB smart contract limitation but we actually already have SSTORE2 and Blob, though frankly it's still a buggy and bad workaround method, the purpose is not immutability but long term preservation. Maybe for a small old codebase with not too much bloat, it could work. Well, I guess IPFS is much simpler definitely better than wikipedia or internet achive, imo.

Again, why would we need military grade encryption to secure the code and history or whatever of the past altcoins? For whom this would be more important information then everything else actually important information that's not stored in any blockchain?

Centralization isn't a curseword. In fact it's way more practical way to store information then some bulky blockchains. This is why majority of the information isn't stored in a blockchain, no matter how important it is.

[Abiky]

Github is already enough. The code was available and you can even recycle the dead project by yourself. So why do wee need a digital crypto museum for this? There are also plenties of sites have been storing explanations and implications related to those dead coins with the unique utilities.

However, i know there is a place that already stored thousands of crypto repositories(an aggregate repositories) called https://www.awesomecrypto.xyz/. So i think no need to create another one for that. Just make it as simple as possible.

Github is centralized. It can easily disappear, putting all of developers' hard work and effort at risk. That's why we need a decentralized solution that would help preserve data forever. Only important data, not all of it. Because if we were to store every single content from every single crypto, it would take up a lot of space which will result in time and resources wasted. I'd only choose old crypto projects with unique features not found anywhere else. Projects that are straight up clones from others would be discarded. Same goes for projects with minimal tweaks.

Like I've said, there would be a website that would serve as the front-end interface to access content hosted on a decentralized CDN. The one you've provided is nice, but certainly not enough. For what I know, content is hosted on a centralized server. If there's interest from the community to make a digital crypto museum, it will become a reality. Otherwise, not. Perhaps, it's best to download and preserve crypto repositories ourselves? I have many binaries and repositories stored on a HDD for future reference. If you're a true crypto enthusiast/lover, I'd suggest you do the same.

[Mpamaegbu]

Thoughts?

To be sincere, I don't think it will do anyone any good archiving any of those ancient and extinct tokens and coins. Seeing them is likely to freshen up old wounds, especially to those who lost money in them. That number will be a lot, not kidding you on that. I remember offloading my BNB in 2017 to buy Regalcoin. What did I get out of that? Heartbreak because Regalcoin disappeared barely few days I bought it for lending investment. That was the era lending coins were the rave of the moment. Those who were here around that year will remember lending coins and how they stole from us. Bitconnect also comes to mind.

[Kelward]

I know that GitHub hosts most (if not all) of cryptocurrencies' repositories with their source code. But what if it gets shut down all of a sudden? That's where the "Digital Crypto Museum" comes in.

Thoughts?

Honestly, I don't see the reason for this initiative to be realized. However, you can start working on it if you have enough time and budget because I don't think it will have any utility until GitHub is shut down as you speculated. All of those repositories in GitHub aren't all alive with active projects. If GitHub shut down one day, the communities of active projects will move to a new app. Not sure if it is reliable to call it museum because how much useless content of useless projects can be added. And as I expect GitHub will never shut down at any time sooner, maybe better to suggest add an additional board where dead projects are listed there, and we can call it Digital Crypto Museum.

Too many cryptocurrencies lived short of the high expectations that investors and the crypto communities put on them and I don't think that a lot of crypto enthusiasts would care to relive these disappointing projects, perhaps it would be something to have around but I doubt that it can get a reasonable traffic. A lot of people have moved on from these projects which majority of them are scams, besides there are too many dead coins for us to keep track on except for guys who cares to visit achaived worthless coins which is what majority of these coins were. I'm not quite against a crypto museum but being that many of these obsolete coins don't have interesting memories to remember them by the museum would hardly be visited. Bitcoin and top altcoins like Ethereum will hardly be forgotten in the future because of their obvious utilities.

[Localhostspeed]

To be sincere, I don't think it will do anyone any good archiving any of those ancient and extinct tokens and coins. Seeing them is likely to freshen up old wounds, especially to those who lost money in them. That number will be a lot, not kidding you on that. I remember offloading my BNB in 2017 to buy Regalcoin. What did I get out of that? Heartbreak because Regalcoin disappeared barely few days I bought it for lending investment. That was the era lending coins were the rave of the moment. Those who were here around that year will remember lending coins and how they stole from us. Bitconnect also comes to mind.

I don't know why anyone would want to visit a museum for a coin that collapsed the public investment, the internet is there for search and read, there is nothing there to learn except for teaching history for coins that must have succeeded and have made history, for example, Bitcoin will be a good to start. If they want to go by successful coins, there are many rivals in altcoins that don't like one another, we may end up building a place for hating one coin to another.

Even the intention were to build something useful, where is this going to be located. I'm going to leave my country to visits another region to go watch what is built without a team. Who is going to pay those taxes on the money collected from people. Honestly, this thing will better if it's done online than done offline but in my opinion, it's not even necessary.

[Kavelj22]

I know that GitHub hosts most (if not all) of cryptocurrencies' repositories with their source code. But what if it gets shut down all of a sudden? That's where the "Digital Crypto Museum" comes in.

Thoughts?

Honestly, I don't see the reason for this initiative to be realized. However, you can start working on it if you have enough time and budget because I don't think it will have any utility until GitHub is shut down as you speculated. All of those repositories in GitHub aren't all alive with active projects. If GitHub shut down one day, the communities of active projects will move to a new app. Not sure if it is reliable to call it museum because how much useless content of useless projects can be added. And as I expect GitHub will never shut down at any time sooner, maybe better to suggest add an additional board where dead projects are listed there, and we can call it Digital Crypto Museum.

Too many cryptocurrencies lived short of the high expectations that investors and the crypto communities put on them and I don't think that a lot of crypto enthusiasts would care to relive these disappointing projects, perhaps it would be something to have around but I doubt that it can get a reasonable traffic. A lot of people have moved on from these projects which majority of them are scams, besides there are too many dead coins for us to keep track on except for guys who cares to visit achaived worthless coins which is what majority of these coins were. I'm not quite against a crypto museum but being that many of these obsolete coins don't have interesting memories to remember them by the museum would hardly be visited. Bitcoin and top altcoins like Ethereum will hardly be forgotten in the future because of their obvious utilities.

And too many cryptocurrencies will born during the next few years. I mean thousands if not millions. Unless for those project with real use cases, or those with a considerable impact like scam projects. I don't see the reason why we should archive all of them in one place like we shouldn't forget them as time goes by.

The whole idea came from the hypothesis that GitHub might shut down one day, which is an imaginary scenario in my opinion. Unless OP is talking about a real physical museum for crypto projects, GitHub and other similar websites are like an archive for those projects that will last longer than the majority of them. At extreme cases, he can archive pages from GitHub and save the links.

[hyperminer]

 This is the part that gets missed. A coin's source and binaries are easy to keep; GitHub, Software Heritage and a dozen forks already hold most of them. What disappears is everything else, and it disappears in a
  predictable order.

  I can give one case from the inside. Blazecoin (BLZ) launched on this forum in May 2014, scrypt PoW. Over the years it lost, one by one:
 

• its exchange: Cryptopia, hacked and closed in 2019, taking the order books and trade history with it
   
• its explorers: Cryptopia's and cryptoID's both went dark ("blockchain unknown")
   
• its market record: CoinMarketCap marked it untracked, so the price history stopped
   

The only reason it isn't a museum piece now is that the chain itself never stopped. A handful of nodes kept making blocks, so this year it could be rebuilt on Bitcoin Core 28 with the full history intact,
  block 1 to block 4.3 million. The old market history, meanwhile, had to be pieced back together from the Wayback Machine, which turned out to be the best crypto museum we already have.

  So if anyone builds this, I'd put these in each exhibit, roughly in order of how fast they vanish:
 

• a dated copy of the chain data with its tip height and hash (the thing you can't recreate)
   
• the last working binaries for each OS, and the compiler and dependencies they need, since 2014 code rarely builds today
   
• explorer and exchange pages, saved to the Wayback Machine while they still load
• the original ANN thread and whitepaper

  solarsurfer, I'd be interested in how you approached the auxpow conversions while keeping the chain as it was. That's the one change that would let modern scrypt rigs keep merge-mining LTC and DOGE and still secure
  a small old chain. If a complete BLZ chain is useful for your collection, I'm happy to provide a dated snapshot.