New ArDrive Bounty Aims to Build a Permanent Public Library for the Future

ArDrive has announced a public drive bounty with a price pool of 3 AR per month for the entrants which upload the most useful content to ArDrive public folders around a particular theme. This month, starting November 1st, the team has a call out for “records of historical significance about food […] anything the future world should know about what we eat”.

As far as the contest’s rules go, the winning entry will be selected based on the quality, quantity and originality of the material inside. All content must by royalty free and thoughtfully organized to make the drive as useful as possible to the widest audience.

For Halloween, the ArDrive team published the ScareDrive with documents and images to preserve knowledge about the holiday – check it out for a good example of a well-organized folder with useful content.

Submissions for the ‘food’ theme must be tweeted (@ardriveapp, #ArDriveBounty) by November 13 to be judged on November 15 in the ArDrive community call.

We’re looking forward to the upcoming themes and excited that the thoughtful creation of useful, permanent information is being incentivized by the ArDrive team!

Permanent information is a public good

The original vision of the permaweb described an immutable parallel internet, immune to a ‘Library of Alexandria’-type event, and storing the most critical knowledge for future generations. While Arweave has evolved as a host for application data, smart contracts and NFTs, this vision is still being championed by many archiving enthusiasts, including the ArDrive team.

The ArDrive Discord already holds a list of public drives from community contributors, including music, public domain movies, the cypherpunks mailing list archives, web3 technical documents, and more. We recently curated a list of ‘forbidden knowledge’ stored on ArDrive – everything from banned books to government UFO documents.

Collating public drives for future generations could be paralleled with the Voyager mission’s Golden Record – a phonograph record launched into space in 1977 containing the ‘sounds of the Earth’ as well as mathematical diagrams to communicate the building blocks of human intelligence with aliens or future civilizations.

Like the Golden Record, the permaweb will outlast this generation and provide a reference point to information that either would never have been uploaded, or be 404’d long before its time.