You brought back names nobody had spoken in a century. That work now lives in a subscription you pay for, a drive that will fail, and a binder your family will never open. All three outlive you by less than you think.
You already know what happens to records. You have spent years chasing the ones that burned. Now ask the same question about your own.
The 1890 census. The Dublin record office. The parish register that went into a bonfire. You are the one person who does not need convincing that permanent records are not.
Thirty years, four filing boxes, and a family that was never as interested as you were. Somebody has to care enough to keep it. Statistically, nobody does.
The tree lives inside a subscription. Stop paying and it locks. The company gets acquired, the terms change, the site closes. You never owned the place your life's work sits in.
You have hit the wall where a record should be and is not. Fire, war, flood, a clerk who threw it out. Every institution that promised permanence has broken that promise somewhere in your tree.
The DNA result. The adoption nobody was told about. The second family. It is true, it is documented, and it cannot be published while they are alive. So it dies with you, or it detonates.
Not a file. Not a page on a site. A record inside Bitcoin itself, readable by a stranger in a hundred years with no account, no subscription, and no help from us.
The names, the dates, the villages, the sources, the reasoning. Written into Bitcoin where a descendant finds it in a century, without an account, without a subscription, and without us.
One line, public. A name, born, died, and where. A headstone nobody can remove.
Private. The finding that cannot be published yet. Encrypted, dated, opened only with a phrase.
The complete family book is more than one record. The thing you would grieve losing fits in a single one. The conclusion. The source trail. The truth about one person that took you eleven years to find. You always see the exact price before you pay.
A DNA test names a father who is not the father. There is a half sibling nobody was told about. Publish it now and you detonate a living family. Say nothing and the truth dies in your notes.
Every other place your research lives depends on somebody continuing to do something. This one does not, and that is the entire difference.
One payment by card, and it is done. There is no renewal to miss, no card to expire, no lapse that quietly takes your work offline while you are ill.
Not a company that gets acquired. Not a policy change. Not a relative who disagrees with your conclusion. It is in the block, and the block does not have a support desk.
The reader is open source and published. Your great granddaughter recovers the record on her own machine. If PermaWord no longer exists, that changes nothing at all.
A record proves that a specific text existed on a specific date. It does not prove the text is correct. We do not review, verify, or certify your research, and no timestamp turns a conclusion into a fact. What you get is a fixed, dated, unalterable copy of your work and your reasoning, held by no company. The proof standard is still yours to meet.
Write the record. Pay once by card. It goes into Bitcoin, where no subscription lapses, no company closes, and no estate sale can decide it was not worth keeping.