GitHub
to Bury Bitcoin Bode Inside Arctic Mountain to Last 1,000 Years
GitHub is set to store reams of
open-source code in an arctic mountain in Norway’s Svalbard, an uninhabitable
zone covered in glaciers inhabited by polar bears. Part of the open-source
code being buried 250 meters below the mountain’s permafrost is that of
Bitcoin Core. The plan, is to preserve the code for future generations.
The project, called the 2020 Artic Vault program, will see the
developer community create a “snapshot” of active repositories in GitHub that
will be copied onto film reels and placed in steel containers designed to
last at least 1,000 years. These will then be buried in the arctic. The
project’s page reads:
“As today’s vital code becomes yesterday’s
historical curiosity, it may be abandoned, forgotten, or lost. Worse, albeit
much less likely, in the case of global catastrophe, we could lose everything
stored on modern media in a few generations.”
While the Bitcoin Core code is
featured, most cryptocurrency projects stored on GitHub will also be
included. These include popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Dogecoin,
as well as the code for BTC’s layer-two scaling solution, the Lightning
Network.
The program, it’s worth noting,
will be creating multiple copies of open-source code on an ongoing basis, to
store the data in various formats and locations.
