What can live forever?

The archival gold standard — readable in any century, by any machine, with no decoder beyond UTF-8. Manifestos, testimony, poems, letters to the future.

• UTF-8, LF line endings; gzip is automatic and typically shrinks text 3–4×.
• Say it plainly — future readers won't have your context. Date it in the text itself.

live proofThe Architect's Scroll · The Spec — the protocol's own wire format, stored in the format it defines.

Full documents with styling — reports, dossiers, whole books. Rendered in a fully sandboxed frame: hash-verified is not the same as safe-to-execute, so scripts never run.

• Self-contained only: inline all CSS, embed images as data: URIs, no external fonts, no CDNs.
• Anything that phones home is a broken promise by the time it matters.

live proofThe Holy Bible — 4.7 MB, 237 pages · The Reader — a working reader app, stored as a scroll.

Photographs, documents-as-scans, artwork, diagrams. Stored byte-for-byte; what you mint is exactly what every future reader sees.

• Strip EXIF first — GPS coordinates and camera serials become permanent public record.
• PNG: run oxipng. JPEG: re-encode at quality 80–85. SVG: minify, no scripts or external refs.
• For evidence photos, consider minting the SHA-256 of the untouched original alongside the cleaned copy.

live proofa PNG in a single locked coin, on-chain since January 2026.

Court filings, contracts, leaked reports, scanned records — the native tongue of institutional paper. Browsers render verified PDFs directly.

• qpdf --linearize shrinks and normalizes; strip author/creator metadata unless you want it permanent.
• Scan at readable-not-archival DPI — 150 dpi grayscale is usually plenty and 10× cheaper than 600 dpi color.
• Consider minting the extracted plain text as a sibling scroll — searchable, and a fallback if PDF ever dies.

live proofThe Protocol on One Page — this project's one-pager, stored as a PDF in the system it describes.

Recorded testimony, interviews, music, voice memos to the future. The viewer plays verified audio inline.

• Opus is the archival pick: 24–32 kbps mono for speech, 32–64 kbps stereo for music.
• Encode once, from a lossless master (WAV/FLAC) — transcoding an MP3 compounds artifacts and costs more bytes for worse sound.
• MP3 only when maximum legacy-player compatibility matters; never mint WAV — convert first, ~10× smaller.
• Five minutes of clear speech ≈ 1.2 MB — well within everyday cost.

live proofLedger Scrolls — The Theme — the project's own music, 473 KB of Opus rebuilt and played from the chain.

The heaviest medium — and already proven on mainnet. Sound rides in the same file.

• H.264 + AAC in MP4 for maximum survivability: ≤480p, CRF 30, -movflags +faststart.
• WebM (AV1/VP9 + Opus) is 30–50% smaller where modern browsers are enough.
• Cost scales linearly — trim ruthlessly; mint the clip that matters, not the whole recording.

live proofFirst Video on Cardano — a 175-page MP4, reconstructed and verified in the browser.

Datasets, ledgers, registries, machine-readable evidence. Data published this way can be cited by hash — anyone can prove their copy is the copy.

• JSON: canonicalize (sorted keys, stable formatting) before hashing and minting.
• CSV: keep the header row — data without column meaning is noise in 20 years.
• Structured text compresses spectacularly; 100 KB of records often gzips below 20 KB.

live proofThe Card Catalog — the library's own index as a CSV, citable by hash.

Fonts, firmware, archives, formats not invented yet. If it's bytes, it stores. The viewer verifies the hash and hands you the original file instead of rendering it.

• Prefer open formats — a scroll outlives the software that made it.
• Ship a small plain-text sibling scroll explaining what the file is and how to open it.

Every scroll — whatever its type — downloads as original bytes from The Library after verification.