New reports of long-term media enshrining of a Bitcoin digital code repository is leading to questions of who will rediscover this source code in future centuries – will it be like the unearthing of today’s “peat man” – or somewhat different?
Cointelegraph reports Norwegians are planning to encode the popular cryptocurrency’s codebase as generated through GitHub onto film reels and install these heartier media inside of Arctic ice.
Partners in the project include the Software Heritage Foundation, Arctic World Archive, and Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
The plan detailed under the general philosophy of LOCKSS(lots of copies keeps stuff safe) takes the cold storage of information to a new level – this isn’t your gradnfather’s tape vault!
Cointelegraph’s Jack Martin explains that hot and warm layers of coverage support resilience for data archives, but successful cold storage plans will allow for much longer term integrity. The archives will be updated every few years – specifically, planners estimate that it will be at least five years between updates.
Duplicates of these buried data assets will be held at the Bodleian library in Oxford.
“With the ephemeral nature of much of today’s modern storage media, a solution requires the archiving of software across multiple organizations and longer-term storage forms,” Martin writes. “The program has adopted a “pace layers” strategy, to maximize both flexibility and durability. … The ultimate aim of the program is to archive all public repositories for 10,000 years, through a partnership with Microsoft’s Project Silica. This will involve etching them into quartz glass platters with femtosecond lasers.”
If all of this sounds pretty permanent, that’s by design – although the latter Project Silica plan sounds similar in some ways to a new consumer technology that already walks among us – solid state hard drive technology. It’s likely that the tech world will soon be promoting forms of digital media storage that will greatly outlast the old traditional platter hard drive. Look for these changes in tech holdings.
