What does that even mean?

The Web3 Library of Alexandria will be a place where any media content can be stored, for the entire lifespan of the Ethereum network. We believe that the economic incentive for keeping its lights on (at least until such a time that it can be replaced) has passed a critical threshold, and has become one of the safest places to store valuable information in a permanent way.

Doesn’t Arweave do that?

Kind of, but not really. Arweave is an awesome platform for giving things permanence, but is not as censorship resistant as the blockchain itself. It has a governance and incentive models which allow for the content on its network to be forcefully ejected.

Okay, but isn’t the Ethereum blockchain technically censorable?

Yes, you’re technically right, which is the best kind of right. But technically, we are not building a platform that is immune to censorship, rather one that has the quality of being the most censorship resistant to date. It would take extremely drastic measures by a bad actor to censor access to Ethereum, all of which would come with significant financial repercussions to said actor.

Why is that important?

We’ve seen the hand of tyranny be swift to remove access to vital forums.

During the Arab Spring of 2011, websites that allowed the coordination of protests were censored in both Tunisia and Egypt. Eventually, the Egyptian government would go on to shut down Internet access in the entire country by shutting down their four major Internet Service Providers as well as all mobile phone networks. In 2019, the government of Iran sanctioned a country-wide Internet blackout. In 2021, there were over 159 shutdowns imposed by 29 countries. In 2022, Russia has banned any media presenting a contrarian view to the state, and disseminating banned information can result in up to fifteen years of jail time.

We’ve seen natural disaster destroy anthropological records beyond recovery.

Family history researchers lost critical genealogical records in the 1890 Census Fires. Many families lost documentation of birth and marriage records, some of which are critical for things like claiming restitution as a Native American.

Hewlett-Packard's archives were destroyed in a California wildfire, vaporizing irreplaceable letters, speeches and documents from an era that saw the birth of the microprocessor, personal computers and the Internet itself.

We’ve seen the negligence of man lose important documents.

The 1890 Census Fires were mentioned, but in reality, different swaths of the census were lost in two fires. After the second, larger fire, the surviving records were left neglected, and silently destroyed by government administrators years later.

Okay, how does it work?

Each smart contract can allocate a total of 2^261 bytes of information. That’s a whole lot of content. We don’t have to worry about running into a max, but in case that ever becomes an eventuality, we will build scaling into the Library’s smart contract.

Anyone will be allowed to upload content to the smart contract, simply by paying the gas costs associated with storage. No protocol fees, this is a public good. Anyone will be able to access any content, for free, forever. We will build both a centralized viewer as well as an open source, decentralized viewer.

Why can’t anyone just do this on their own?

In theory, this is a pretty simple thing. But it comes at a cost. Specifically, it costs around 0.032 ETH (at 50 gwei) to store 1KB of data. That means, without any sort of compression before storage:

• King James Version of the Bible - 120 ETH
• Mona Lisa (High Resolution) - 90 ETH
• Anarchist’s Cookbook - 29 ETH
• Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” - 0.27 ETH

That is why it is important to follow in the footsteps of NPOs such as the Internet Archive, AccessNow, or Amnesty International. The storage and access of critical anthropological media is a basic human right.

Fine, but how does it benefit Leave Me Alone holders?

Leave Me Alone token holders will be able to curate (by vote) specific content from the Library of Alexandria to be published as ERC-1155 tokens. These tokens will have criteria (such as collection cap or mint time window) set by the governance process.

We also will attempt to secure partnerships with prolific freedom fighters and luminaries, storing important cultural media from them on-chain, and allocating special editions to Leave Me Alone token holders.