Yeah that's right, I'm not sure how you could possibly value or incentivize indefinite storage. All storage mediums are consumable and require upkeep, a "one time" pricing model doesn't really make sense.

Arweave (https://www.arweave.org/) is attempting it. Of course, we'll have to wait and see if they're successful.

I would assume that eventually the cost of "old storage" will be too much and new payments wouldn't be able to subsidize it anymore (sort of like a failing Ponzi scheme) but to be fair I haven't heard of this. Thanks for the link!

You're welcome! I have some questions about how the network is going to play out over time wrt mining centralization and access incentivization, but their overall funding model seems sound to me. It's based an endowment that pays out over time to fund storage mining. Their yellow paper (https://www.arweave.org/yellow-paper.pdf) is worth a read if you want to learn about all the details.