Bitcoin Codebase Preserved for 1,000 Years in Archive Under Arctic Ice

A snapshot of the Bitcoin codebase will be encoded onto film reels and stored for a thousand years under the arctic ice in Svalbard, Norway. The move is part of the GitHub Archive Program, with a mission to preserve open-source software, for future generations to learn about the culture of today.

GitHub has partnered with institutions such as the Software Heritage Foundation, Arctic World Archive, and Oxford University’s Bodleian Library to ensure the long-term preservation of code, which could otherwise be abandoned, forgotten or lost.

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. Online archivists use the acronym LOCKSS for this, which stands for “Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.”

Storage layers from hot to cold

The program has adopted a “pace layers” strategy, to maximize both flexibility and durability. Every push to GitHub triggers the replication of…