Long before blockchains, humanity faced the same question we do today. Do you carve your words into clay tablets that will outlast empires, or write them on papyrus scrolls that can travel the world but crumble with time?

That choice between permanence and portability, durability and speed, is the same one confronting builders in the digital age. When you decide whether to build on a blockchain or on the web and cloud, you are not just making a technical decision. You are choosing a medium. And every medium carries its own constraints, its own philosophy, its own declaration of intent.

The Babylonians chose clay. Hammurabi’s Code, one of the earliest and most complete written legal systems, was carved into stone and clay so that its laws would endure across generations. Once inscribed and fired, a tablet could not be altered. It could survive millennia buried in the earth, immune to fire, immune to decay. Clay gave permanence. But permanence carried a cost. Clay was heavy. It was slow to work with. It was hard to copy. Only the most important things, like laws or contracts with the gods, were worth carving into tablets.

The Egyptians chose papyrus. Lightweight and flexible, papyrus could be rolled, carried, and copied with relative ease. It became the medium of letters, poetry, philosophy, and commerce. Papyrus spread ideas widely across the Mediterranean world. But its portability came at the price of fragility. Scrolls decayed quickly outside of dry climates. They burned easily. Much of what was written on papyrus has been lost.

Neither medium was superior. Each carried constraints that shaped what it was used for. Clay was for what had to last. Papyrus was for what had to travel. The decision rested on the intent of the writer. What was worth the burden of permanence? What was meant to be light and ephemeral?

This tension between permanence and portability has shaped every medium since. Parchment offered durability and was chosen for sacred texts and royal decrees. Paper brought accessibility and became the backbone of trade, scholarship, and storytelling. The printing press unlocked scale, flooding Europe with books and pamphlets that fueled revolutions in religion and politics. Digital systems gave us instant global distribution, though at the cost of centralization and fragility. Each advance shaped not only what was recorded, but how it spread, and what survived.

Media are never neutral. They embody choices about what is meant to endure and what is meant to fade.

Our current digital age rests mostly on the papyrus of the internet: lightweight, fast, easy to copy. Websites, apps, and cloud databases can reach billions of people in seconds. But they are fragile. They live on servers owned by companies. They vanish when those servers go dark. They are mutable, editable, and sometimes erased without a trace.

We rarely stop to notice how impermanent our digital world is. Old websites die quietly. Links rot. Platforms shut down. What was once public record is lost in the churn of technological progress. The speed and scale of the web have come at the cost of durability.

This is not a flaw, but a feature. The cloud was designed for flexibility, not permanence. It excels at what papyrus excelled at: circulation. It is the perfect medium for fast-moving information, for things meant to be shared widely and updated constantly. But just as ancient scholars knew not to entrust their most sacred laws to papyrus, modern builders are beginning to realize that not everything belongs in the cloud. Some things demand a different kind of medium.

At first glance, blockchains look like ordinary databases, slower and more expensive than the ones we already have. But they represent something new. They are the latest link in humanity’s chain of record-keeping mediums, inheriting traits from their predecessors while introducing properties that did not exist before.

Like clay, blockchains offer permanence. Records etched onto them are tamper-resistant and extraordinarily durable. Like papyrus, they are distributed and portable, carried not on scrolls but across thousands of nodes spread around the world. And, like every medium, they impose constraints. Computation is costly. Storage is scarce. Scaling is slower than centralized servers. Yet within those constraints lies a new affordance: extensibility.

A blockchain is software, but with unusual properties. It is shared by all participants. It is verifiable by anyone. It is composable, meaning new programs can plug into existing ones without permission. And most importantly, it is not controlled by a single institution. The rules live at the protocol level, enforced by consensus rather than decree.

Bitcoin marked the first major experiment. Traditionally, digital files could be copied endlessly. Bitcoin’s supporters argued that it changed this by creating a digital record that was inherently difficult to duplicate, a form of digital scarcity. Whether one sees it as a revolution or speculation, it was a break from the past: the digital could now behave a little more like the physical.

Ethereum carried the idea forward. Instead of a single ledger for money, it offered a platform for agreements of many kinds. What if contracts, communities, or even artworks could exist as records no one could erase? Developers referred to these programs as smart contracts, although the term is somewhat misleading. They are closer to public rulebooks: code that anyone can inspect and no one can alter once set in motion. The result was a shared environment where logic could act like law. For some, this promised a new foundation for finance. For others, it opened a canvas for culture.

Consider Nouns DAO. Each day, a new pixelated character is generated and auctioned on the blockchain. The funds flow into a collective treasury managed by the holders of those NFTs. What emerges is part artwork, part funding mechanism, part social experiment. The art, the rules, and the community are inseparable because the blockchain ties them together. The medium sustains the project as much as the images themselves.

Other artists have extended this spirit. Snowfro, the creator of the pioneering generative art platform Art Blocks, released a recent project called LIFT (a self-portrait). It is both a game and a sculpture, recorded on-chain and playable on devices like the Game Boy. Each of the one thousand editions is unique, preserving its own DNA in the blockchain. Players can extract the game’s ROM to run on an emulator or load it onto a physical cartridge.

The project works on multiple levels. On the surface, it taps into nostalgia with pixel art and chiptune sounds. But it is also a meditation on persistence. The Pixel Man, endlessly raising a stone with the support of players, becomes a metaphor for artistic struggle and collective endurance. It is not just art displayed in a gallery. It is a living system, coded into permanence, where the act of play becomes part of the work itself.

These projects demonstrate that blockchains are not limited to being narrowly financial tools. They are a new medium, constrained and costly, but powerful in what they enable. Like clay and papyrus, they can carry law, art, stories, and games. The medium does not dictate the message. It shapes it.

The lesson of clay and papyrus applies again. Blockchains are not inherently superior to traditional systems. They are different. The web and cloud are the papyrus of the digital age: fast, flexible, and ephemeral. Blockchains are digital clay: slower, heavier, more constrained, but enduring. Each has a place. Each serves a purpose.

For builders, the question is not “Why blockchain?” The question is “What deserves blockchain?” What is worth the cost of permanence? What should exist in a shared state that no one can erase? What deserves to outlast us?

Maybe it is a financial ledger like Bitcoin. Maybe it is an agreement between strangers. Maybe it is a piece of generative art, or the persistent physics of a game world. Maybe it is the record that binds a digital object to its physical counterpart. Just as paper and clay found uses their inventors never imagined, blockchains will find purposes beyond our current vision.

Civilizations crumble, but clay tablets endure. Scrolls rot, but fragments of poetry still surface in desert caves. The web moves fast, but websites vanish when their servers go dark. Blockchains invite us to think differently. To ask not just what we can build, but what we want to leave behind.

The deeper question is not technical. It is creative. It is moral. What should last? What should fade? What belongs in the permanence of digital stone, and what belongs in the quick decay of papyrus?

Clay, papyrus, parchment, print, blockchain. Each one carried more than information. Each one carried intent. The choice of medium has never been neutral. It has always been a declaration of what a culture wants the future to remember.

And so the question returns to us. What will we choose to carve into digital clay?