To really double down on the hype, someone (TK? me?) should write an article on storing blockchains in DNA. Since replication is so cheap, you can have a huuuge number of auditors... Use CRISPR to detect&destroy malformed blockchains. [There *are* some analogies between blockchains & DNA: blockchain construction is relatively energetically cheap in terms of kT's per bit, just as DNA replication is relatively cheap in terms of kT's per bit; the expense comes in when fending off alternative futures, which cost at least 10x kT's for DNA, and considerably more for blockchains.] BTW, how long before implantable Google/Snapchat glasses which store video in DNA storage? At 09:12 AM 3/3/2017, Tom Knight wrote:
The hype surrounding this, like the "dna computing" hype is so large as to be palpable.
No one can make DNA at the petabase scale in a controlled way, and there are not even good ideas on how to go about it in principle.
DNA can be copied relatively easily, but construction of new sequence is very hard, slow, costly, and error-prone.
Reading is also slow and costly.
It is true that DNA is probably a very good way to store information for a long time, especially if encoded in a living system, where accurate replication and correction of errors is automated.