Keeping documents online forever for free isn't that hard of a task nowadays.
how do you do that exactly?
Google cloud, Microsoft cloud, Apple cloud, Dropbox, post the file to Facebook, Twitter, The Internet Archive, send a copy to every one of your Email contacts, open a few fresh email accounts and send it to yourself, create Torrents, ...
I did not elaborate because the answer seemed (seems) trivial. It is sometimes harder to get stuff off the web than to get it online, actually
Timestamping is harder and actually useful and I agree that using OpenTimestamps is a much better solution than Ordinals. By only saving the hash, it also reduces disk usage and legal issues for node operators.
the problem with just timestamping is that there's no permanent storage for the data that produced the hash. and the only way to have permanent storage is to have it on a blockchain.
The last sentence is wrong, and I do not think it is a problem to just save a hash, either. Quite the contrary.
the problem with just timestamping is that there's no permanent storage for the data that produced the hash. and the only way to have permanent storage is to have it on a blockchain.
You can store the data on all shitcoins in existence
(mostly for "almost" free, in contrast to Bitcoin's).
You could now argue that Bitcoin could be the only really "permanent" blockchain and all others will eventually die, but I'd disagree here -- the incentive to keep an altcoin running is quite high, so storing it on 20-30 of them (at least 2 of them in the top 30 by marketcap, preferently chosing those with a long life already) and checking each year should be enough.
Exactly, add 30 shitcoins with data storage to the list above and get a little creative, then your data will literally be online forever.
Yep, there's the problem when you die you can't check, but even Bitcoin could fail eventually. There's no 100% security.
but if bitcoin fails, it fails at a certain point that doesn't mean you won't be able to download all the blocks and get your data.
Bitcoin has failed if there are no nodes online anymore. In that case, there is no place to 'download all the blocks and get your data'.
However, just like you don't immediately deploy untested software to production servers, you shouldn't experiment with Bitcoin as a data storage cloud, on mainnet. Did they have a long testing period on testnet that I missed? Lightning did...
The real question is what happens if they choose to not deploy on testnet first?
Nothing happens, but we should criticize reckless developers that go straight to mainnet and question their competence, instead of praising them as Bitcoin's saviors
[1].
[1]
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/02/07/the-ordinals-protocol-has-caused-a-resurgence-in-bitcoin-development/