There should be more follow-up articles like this. You could probably do a biannual roll-up for battery tech, to say nothing of more overtly political topics.
I suspect your downvotes are due to HN being tired of people proposing blockchain for problems it wouldn't solve.
Assuming your comment was sincere, I'll engage with your content instead of downvoting:
1. You don't need a distributed, P2P database to archive news. Archive.org already does it, for example. So do some libraries.
2. Saving things in immutable, distributed databases does not require a blockchain. BitTorrent has been mostly successful at this for decades, for example.
3. It's common for stories like this to be covered in thousands of reputable and unreputable publications. The reputable ones already have policies against changing old stories, though none seem to do routinely change stories in practice. Either way, to update a story like this, you only need one example of the coverage.
There was an article (and accompanying thread) a few years ago that I sent to everyone who didn't understand why blockchain was a hype bubble[1]. It may be informative for you, too.
At this point, the word blockchain itself is very stigmatized. It doesn't help that a lot of the pro-blockchain social media world (reddit, Twitter, and Instagram) is populated by nutjobs and scammers.
Side note: I recommend you think of downvotes as "this isn't the most informative comment and should be lower" rather than "I hate you as a person". It's almost always the former rather than the latter. The latter is usually flagged instead of downvoted.
Not really. The problem isn't that we don't have a record of past news, it's that we're not critically reading the records we have. IMO it's fundamentally a social issue between journalists and readers.
But I do somewhat agree with sentiment of having immutable news archive as the present Internet is more 'what we can see' oppose to 'what we can know'.
This fizzled because bulk producing the protein is pointless when it still needs to be spun. I remember being amazed at their bizarre hubris in expecting that just pressing the goop through a small hole would create a silk strand
Looking into it a bit, they have a spinning machine and my best guess is they use that to spin (in the crude, wool sense not the molecular-level spinneret sense) some of, I guess their extruded goop, into a thread. You can assume from the vague wording, obtuseness in every article and lack of mention of any mechanical properties, that this thread doesn't have anywhere near the strength of spider-spun spider silk.
No matter how much I admire it technically, from an ethical point of view things look a bit different and one might wonder if going forward with this and introducing yet another large scale industry abusing animals is really the best thing to do at this point.
Silkworms are killed in the production of silk whereas simply milking the goats would let a kind of continuous process happen. It would still need to be untangled and spun which is a pain, but that would hopefully make for a better industrial process than vapour cooking tons of insects, which is also icky.
That is in fairness a pretty weak response. Being "very close" in quality to another solution which can produce in greater bulk isn't useful, unless you anticipate outdoing it in the future. In what proportion of usecases are they actually superior, I wonder?
