Debian APT Repository on the Blockchain?

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Considerations if it would be feasible to store the Debian Repository on the Blockchain.

At time of writing in January 2023, as a starting point, cloning all of Debian's "normal" repository would require "only" approximately just under 5TB. "Normal" means that the repository contains only the most recent package versions which have been uploaded to the various suites (such as stable, testing, etc.).

How much space would be needed if one was to archive all old versions? https://snapshot.debian.org is a service that does that and publishes file sizes for the full archival repository. Here are the data points extracted from snapshot.debian.org's news.

• 2012-09-23 16TB
• 2014-06-01 24TB
• 2018-02-13 60TB
• 2019-09-29 90TB
• 2022-09-28 135TB

So in 10 years from 2012 to 2022 the size increased from 16TB to 135TB. That's approximately 8TB per year. To be on the safe side we should probably round that up to 10TB per year.

In other words, if snapshot.debian.org was blockchain based in 2012 the size of their blockchain would have grown to 135 TB in 2022.

Having all binary packages on the blockchain might be too much. A tremendous amount of disk space could be saved by storing only signatures/hashes/timestamps on the blockchain.

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