--- title: "The original URL for this prediction will no longer be... description: A long-running web bet (2011–2022) between Jeremy Keith and Matthew Haughey over whether the URL www.longbets.org/601 would still resolve after eleven years.... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-original-url-for-this-prediction-will-no-longer-be-available-in-11-years-2011--fqkdfoqvb twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: "The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years." (2011) | daily.dev og:description: A long-running web bet (2011–2022) between Jeremy Keith and Matthew Haughey over whether the URL www.longbets.org/601 would still resolve after eleven years.... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-original-url-for-this-prediction-will-no-longer-be-available-in-11-years-2011--fqkdfoqvb og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/FQkdFOqVB.png og:image:alt: "The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years." (2011) og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # "The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years." (2011) **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A long-running web bet (2011–2022) between Jeremy Keith and Matthew Haughey over whether the URL www.longbets.org/601 would still resolve after eleven years. Keith predicted link rot would claim it; Haughey argued that mature web technology and stable URI strategies make long-lived URLs achievable. The bet resolved on February 22, 2022, with the winner's charity receiving the prize — Bletchley Park Trust if Keith won, or the Internet Archive if Haughey won. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What did Tim Berners-Lee say about URL stability and link rot? Tim Berners-Lee wrote 'Cool URIs don't change' in 1999, arguing that web URLs should be permanent. Link rot — the tendency for URLs to break over time — is described as the entropy of the web, with the probability of a document surviving at its original location decreasing greatly the longer the time period. _Developers building for URL longevity track web standards discussions like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 47 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-09). **TL;DR:** Commenters find the bet clever and self-referential, with most agreeing the URL survived thanks to 301 redirects and institutional will — though several note the real threats (JS-rendered pages, hosting economics, organizational death) were barely addressed by the bet's terms. **Sentiment:** 45% positive · 40% mixed · 15% skeptical **The case for** - The 301 redirect clause in the bet terms was praised as clever foresight that covers the HTTP→HTTPS migration scenario. - Keeping URLs stable is technically achievable with discipline: static HTML conversion, automated tests, and redirect rules can preserve links for decades. - The bet's self-referential nature (the prediction page itself surviving) was seen as a satisfying meta-win for both sides. **The pushback** - JS-heavy pages that deliver no content in the HTML itself represent a growing threat to URL-based content permanence that the bet terms don't fully capture. - Long-term URL survival depends on someone continuously paying hosting and registrar fees — a problem that outlasts any individual's lifetime or organization's existence. - Some other longbets.org URLs (e.g. /6/) are already offline, undermining confidence in the platform's own longevity. - The bet is essentially just a bet on whether longbets.org itself stays up, which narrows its broader significance. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Engaged and amused by the self-referential cleverness, but quick to poke holes in the bet's terms — especially around JS rendering, HTTP deprecation, and the economics of long-term hosting. **Hottest debate:** Whether today's LLMs genuinely pass the Turing test (a tangent sparked by a linked longbets prediction about AI by 2029). **Open questions** - Who maintains a URL after its owner dies or the hosting organization folds — and is there any sustainable model for truly permanent web content? - Will browsers eventually break plain HTTP URLs in a way that a 301 redirect can't save? - How should the bet's win condition be interpreted if the page content is loaded entirely by JavaScript rather than present in the HTML? **Highlights** > In my mind, the part that is most likely to fail is "return an HTML document that still contains the following text." Nowadays, more and more "HTML documents" do not contain any content at all, just some JavaScript that is responsible for then fetching and displaying the content. > — [ludwik on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228659) > The detailed terms of the bet include this: > A 301 redirect from www.longbets.org/601 to a different URL containing that text would also fulfill those conditions. I assume this would cover the HTTP->HTTPS redirect scenario. > — [ywain on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228571) > The fact that this bet page itself still exists is a win for both sides. Internet Archive gets $1000 either way, so we all win. > — [RinatNabiev on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229172) > It is actually pretty easy to keep alive URLs if there is a will to do so. Just have tests in place so you can't mess them up accidentally. And convert things that are not changing anymore to static html. One of my first web projects involved a music forum and I have been keeping the URLs alive for 24 years now: https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/ville+valo.html I feel like I owe it to the people who participated to keep it online forever. Also as a document of history. > — [mg on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228893) > It's worth noting that some prediction URLs, for instance: https://longbets.org/6/ are offline. The original long bet was whether or not computers could pass the turing test by 2029: https://longbets.org/1/ You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities. https://longbets.org/9/ is another interesting one depending on whether you think covid leaked from a lab or not. > — [CSMastermind on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229041) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228458) · 57 points · 47 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Where did the old web go? 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