Gage, Full-Stack Developer — Internet Archive

I chose to donate to the Internet Archive because of their dedication to preserving the history and culture of the internet. It was so much fun growing up during the “Wild West” of the Web, when it was teeming with ideas, content, and games just waiting to be discovered. But unlike the physical Wild West, there will be no lasting remnants of these digital yesteryears, nor of those to come, unless they are actively preserved.

The Internet Archive is committed to this task. Their digital collections include more than 40 petabytes of data: 340 billion Web pages, 2.2 million films and videos, 3.5 million recordings, 170,000 live concerts, 14 million texts including 3 million digital books, 100,000 items of software and 5 million hours of television.

No amount of money can recover what is lost in the sands of time. But together with the proactive diligence of the Internet Archive, and a little collective help from us all, perhaps we can preserve some of our digital history for the future.

Katya, Community Advocate — Internet Archive

With the overwhelming amount of information that we are exposed to on a daily basis, it’s easy to take the availability and permanence of this information for granted. Once we start “googling” things, it can become a dependency: a good one if it feeds intellectual curiosity and provides reliable guidance, a bad one if the information is biased and there is no recourse for objectivity.

The history of human progress is in many ways a history of record keeping. Whether through the oral tradition, writing, or now, digital storage, the records of human experience inform the next steps we must take. A cultural repository that demonstrates both the brilliance and the folly of past generations is invaluable for holding ourselves accountable. Importantly, all these records must remain accessible, transparent, and immutable. This is what the Internet Archive strives to achieve with our collective digital heritage. It is also what the blockchain aims to someday make possible, for all information, for all humanity.

Donating to the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive accepts probably the largest range of cryptocurrencies among all the organizations we’ve researched, which is perhaps as it should be, given the Archive’s work with digital assets. You can even donate altcoins — Changelly helps the organization swap the coins to BTC. Of course, you can also swap coins for ETH in MEW with our integrated exchanges Kyber and Changelly before donating. Right now, the Internet Archive is running a 2-to-1 Matching Campaign for all donations, so it’s a great time to give.