Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on December 29, 2019, 08:29:37 PM

It's an interesting article and experiment, but there are certainly some pretty big flaws in his arguments.

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If, for example, someone received today a floppy disk or a Sony minidisk from the 90s, it would be very hard to find a device able to read it now.

This is nonsense. With Amazon Prime and 10 bucks, I can have a floppy disk drive delivered to my door within 24 hours. With a car and a local computer store, I can get one within the hour. And this is a technology with is 50 years old and from a time when some houses had a single computer, maybe. We now live in time where every person, let alone every house, has multiple devices using USB - computers and all their peripherals, TVs, games consoles and peripherals, mobile phones, chargers, power banks, cars, etc. There is no way you are going to have any problem using a USB device in 20 years' time.

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possibly requiring the beneficiary to derive manually from the seed in order to find the keys where the coins are

Again, although wallets may move on from BIP44 or BIP84, support for these will always exist. There is no way in 20 years people will have to manually derive these keys. There are far too many sites, repositories, programs, etc. out there. Only a complete failure of the internet would make every single one of these inaccessible.

If storing coins for 20 years I would also choose something like steel engraving, but rather because I wouldn't want to trust that the digital hardware wasn't going to degrade in that time rather than the reasons above.

You are absolutely right, but also you have to consider you are giving this to a complete unknown person, with an unknown set of skills. Of course I think We both can figure out how to connect a 5 1/4 floppy disk to almost any device, or find the correct derivation or standard for any key, but you have to consider he probably wanted to keep things as simple as possible to deal with non technical person.