Micropayments on their own can seem pretty insignificant. A half a penny here. An eighth of a token there. Yet slowly and consistently, they accumulate over time. And they can catch you by surprise.

A couple of years back, the Internet Archive signed up to be a Brave ‘creator’. Brave, the web browser that prides itself not only on its speed but also its commitment to privacy and security, launched a program where anyone with a website can get paid by its users. So if you install Brave and spend time on archive.org, you can express thanks in the form of a tiny tip, right there in your browser.

Two years ago, this seemed like a fun experiment. A way for the Internet Archive to support a like-minded tech organization, and at the very least, try out something new. This experiment, turns out, has amounted to something far more significant. And worth sharing.

Last week, we hooked up our cryptocurrency wallet to our Brave creator account. Those tiny micropayments that Brave users had tossed into the Archive’s virtual tip jar had accumulated, growing into more than 9k Brave Attention Tokens (BAT) – the equivalent of $2500 USD!

This was an unexpected windfall. It was also proof that the current web, the one that’s driven by ads that know our every move, doesn’t have to be the web of the future. There could be a better way that’s secure, private and supported by its citizenry. To all of our Brave browser tippers, we thank you. Every little bit makes a big difference.

If you use Brave and would like to tip the sites you love, learn how here.

If you publish content on the internet, here’s how to become a Brave creator.

Thank you, Brave, for your push into micropayments to find alternatives to advertisements. And thank you for including Internet Archive early in your program in such a way that we have earned $2,500.

Guest blog post by professor Tom Gally

As international travel becomes cheaper and easier, many of the tourists who now swamp Venice, Barcelona, San Francisco, and Hong Kong are visiting a foreign country for the first time. Surprised, fascinated, and sometimes repulsed by what they see, they eagerly post to social media their photos and impressions. Such reports are the source of much of what we believe, consciously or unconsciously, about places we haven’t visited yet.

Centuries ago, too, travelers were eager to tell their stories to people back home, and those stories helped to create the images and stereotypes that were formed about other lands and people. Many of those stories can be found in the thousands of travel books that are available in the text collections of the Internet Archive.

Here is a description, from a book published in London in 1701, of an Englishman’s first impressions of Paris:

Having enter’d this famous City, we were set down near the Louvre, and drop’d in first at a paltry House where the Fellow call’d himself in his Sign Le grand Voyageru, (or great Traveller) and pretended to Speak all Languages, but could scarce speak his own. Finding here but indifferent Accommodation, our Man provided us a Lodging in a House, where liv’d no less than two and twenty Families; thither we were carried in Sedans with Wheels, drag’d along by one Man, no Hackney-Coaches being then to be had. This was on a Sunday, and I was not a little surpriz’d to see Violins about the Streets, and People singing and dancing every where, as if they had been mad.

Though the language is archaic, the sentiments—bragging about visiting a famous city, complaining about accommodation and transportation, frowning at the local customs—would not be out of place in a tourist’s Facebook post today.

In the early 1790s, King George III sent an envoy to the Emperor of China. Though the diplomatic mission was unsuccessful in its main purpose—to obtain trade concessions for Britain similar to those granted to the Portuguese and Dutch—it yielded a three-volume official report, by George Staunton, that contains a fascinating account of the long voyage halfway around the world (volume 1) and of the Chinese empire as seen through British eyes (volume 2). The report also includes many carefully engraved illustrations of sights in China—the Instagram posts of the era (volume 3).

Other travelers’ accounts I’ve dipped into include Travels from St. Petersburg, in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia by John Bell (1763) (volume 1, volume 2), Travels in America by George Howard (1851) (here), and a large compendium titled Cyclopædia of Modern Travel by Bayard Taylor (1856) (here).

Lately, I’ve also been exploring the Internet Archive’s rich collection of books written by British and American visitors to Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Until the 1850s, Japan had been shut off nearly completely from the rest of the world for more than two hundred years, and people elsewhere were eager to learn about the mysterious country. Many sailors, traders, diplomats, missionaries, journalists, and individual travelers who were able to visit Japan wrote later about their experiences, and I’ve compiled a list of more than 240 of their books.

I myself moved to Japan in 1983 and have lived here ever since. As I read now the accounts of Westerners who arrived at Nagasaki or Yokohama in 1858 or 1869 or 1880 or 1905, I recall my own vivid first impressions of the country 36 years ago. While there are many differences—they rode rickshas, I took commuter trains; those Victorians were shocked by the casual nudity, this Californian was surprised by how formally people dressed—our experiences were also similar in many ways. And those who, as I did, stayed for more than a year or two and learned the language gradually came to see how their initial assessments had also been incomplete and sometimes biased.

Several times a week, I pass through the bustling Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, and in recent years I’ve noticed more and more foreign tourists taking pictures of that famous location. After reading travelers’ accounts from more than a century ago, I increasingly wonder how tourists today are perceiving this country that is now my home, and I speculate how people elsewhere, seeing those photos posted to Instagram and Twitter and Weibo, will come to view that intersection and this country. I never would have thought deeply about this, and I certainly wouldn’t be contrasting our experiences with those of 19th-century visitors, if it weren’t for the great collections of books that the Internet Archive makes available for anyone in the world to read.

Tom Gally was born in Pasadena, California, in 1957. Since moving to Japan, he has worked as a translator, teacher, lexicographer, and writer. He is now a professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo and has compiled a book of excerpts from travelers’ accounts to be titled Japan As They Saw It. The book can be read and downloaded at the book’s website.

For all of our donors who prefer Clams to Monero, Ripple over Dash, Dogecoin over Litecoin or vice versa, do we have good news for each and every one of you. The Internet Archive now accepts donations in them all!

We’ve completely redesigned our cryptocurrency donations page to include a ShapeShift ‘Shifty button’ allowing you to choose from over 30 tokens and altcoins and easily make a contribution.

With ShapeShift, you can make a donation in your favorite coin and it magically converts it to the equivalent value in Bitcoin, sending it to the Internet Archive’s public Bitcoin address.

Once you select your coin of choice, ShapeShift will provide a QR code / target address to send your donation. You can set a return coin address to get a refund in the unlikely event that the transaction gets interrupted, and enter your email address to receive a summary of your shifted donation. ShapeShift updates its token choices often, so if your favorite coin isn’t listed, it very well could be soon.

We still happily accept donations in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Zcash – the addresses and QR codes are listed on the newly redesigned site.

As a long-time supporter of the cryptocurrency movement — our community has been donating Bitcoin since 2011 — we have long believed that philanthropy can and should have a place in this evolving peer-to-peer monetary system. We have done what we can to support the evolution of decentralized technologies, and we are thrilled this community is supporting us in the same way. Many thanks to the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Zcash communities. We hope this Shifty button will help bring to light and further support the various tokens in the ecosystem.

by Katie Barrett and Lawrence Wilkinson

Looking 10 years ahead, try and imagine a world without trust, but rife with monopolies. Walled gardens of tech giants solidify. The DOW and Nasdaq are up, civic engagement is low, surveillance is ubiquitous. In this world, do users trust publishing on the open Internet? What does this mean for news organizations? Will there be more country-based firewalls?

Now imagine a completely different world where antitrust laws have ensured many tech winners. Equal access to knowledge is attainable. Open Source tech flourishes. Risk-­taking is on the rise. Workforces become distributed across borders. Are civil liberties organizations as needed? Do people still value privacy? Is there enough coherence to solve big issues like climate change?

Over the last several years, political and cultural changes have caught many unaware and unprepared. As a bulwark against such unpreparedness, leaders from Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive gathered together to discuss the future of the ‘Open World.’ What role should each organization play in fostering healthy civil discourse? Are there areas for collaboration?

The four organizations joined on a yearlong journey through a process known as Scenario Planning. Led by Lawrence Wilkinson, Chairman of Heminge & Condell, the process asked participants to construct a set of very different, yet plausible stories about what the future might hold. With civil discourse as our North Star, we crafted strategies that responded both to opportunities and risks.

Questions which began as open ended and abstract led to future modalities that were distinct and concrete. Exploring a future possibility led to some clear ideas about what hurdles an open Internet may face. If, for instance, a country becomes less democratic, with weakened journalistic institutions, transparency will suffer. If economic hegemony shifts to a different part of the world, the cultural imperatives of social media giants will likely shift as well. In this spirit, the four orgs found areas for collaboration while also uncovering distinctive gaps in our ability to evolve in a changing world.

The beauty of this experience is that it offered each individual organization the time and space to do some deep, long-term thinking about its roles in civil society. It also deepened our personal relationships, which seems just as valuable as the process itself.

The Internet Archive, specifically, has emerged with a sharper vision and new projects on the horizon to foster healthy civil discourse:

• Help make the web more useful and reliable:
  • Weave the best of human thought into the web. An Open Libraries project would bring millions of books from public libraries’ collections to billions of people.
  • Work with Wikipedia to fix more broken outbound links using the Wayback Machine and make footnotes link straight into ebooks and journals.
• Take a leadership role in the evolving Decentralized Web
• Bring permanence and light to the words of politicians and government that are being disappeared through the:
  • End of Term Crawl
  • Trump Archive
• Increase our operational security

How to Build Scenarios — General Overview
To get a better sense of the overall Scenario Planning process, click here.

Scenario Planning for the future of civil discourse
To view a summary of the scenarios and general implications created by the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla and EFF, click here.

How to Build Scenarios at Your Organization
If you have questions or an interest in applying the scenarios in your own organization, you can contact Heminge & Condell here.

The Internet Archive is a treasure trove of fascinating media, texts, and ephemera. Items that if they didn’t exist here, would be lost forever. Yet so many of our community members have difficulty describing what exactly it is…that we do here. Most people know us for the Wayback Machine, but we are so much more. To that end, we’ve put together a fun and useful guide to exploring the Archive. So, grab your flashlight and pith hat and let your digital adventure begin…

1. Pick a place & time you want to explore. Search our eBooks and Texts collection and download or borrow one of the 3 million books for free, offered in many formats, including PDFs and EPub.

2. Enter a time machine of old time films. Explore films of historic significance in the Prelinger Archives.

3. Want to listen to a live concert? The Live Music Archive holds more than 12,000 Grateful Dead concerts.

4. Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men? Only the Shadow knows. You can too. Listen to “The Shadow” as he employs his power to cloud minds to fight crime in Old Time Radio.

5. To read or not to read? Try listening to Shakespeare with the LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection.

6. Need a laugh? Search the Animation Shorts collection for an old time cartoon.

7. Before there was Playstation 4… there was Atari. Play a classic video game on an emulated old time console, right in the browser. Choose from hundreds of games in the Internet Arcade.

8. Are you a technophile? Take the Oregon Trail or get nostalgic with the Apple II programs. You have instant access to decades of computer history in the Software Library.

9. Find a television news story you missed. Search our Television News Archive for all the channels that presented the story. How do they differ? Quote a clip from the story and share it.

10. Has your favorite website disappeared? Go to the Wayback Machine and type in the URL to see if this website has been preserved across time. Want to save a website? Use “Save Page Now.”

What does it take to become an archivist? It’s as simple as creating your own Internet Archive account and diving in. Upload photos, audio, and video that you treasure. Store them for free. Forever.

Sign up for free at https://archive.org.

A little bit(coin) funds a lot of bytes. If you use the Internet Archive regularly, no doubt you saw the banner flying above our navigation bar during the month of December. As a charity funded by you —our users— the Archive relies each year on the generosity of the tens of thousands of people worldwide who donate to keep our servers running, pay our staff, and help make our collections bigger, better, and more open.

As we look back at the 2017 contributors, one group stands out: the cryptocurrency community.

On top of an incredibly generous 69.38 BTC (~$1 Million!) gift from the Pineapple Fund (celebrated earlier in this blog post), this year alone the Archive received over $60,000 in Bitcoin donations, more than $5,000 in Bitcoin Cash, and more than $1,200 in Zcash.

As a long-time supporter of the cryptocurrency movement —our community has been donating Bitcoin since 2011— we have long believed that philanthropy can and should have a place in this evolving peer-to-peer monetary system. We have done what we can to support the evolution of decentralized technologies, and we are thrilled this community is supporting us in the same way.

Ours is a shared vision of openness on the web.

We see continued promise in crypto-philanthropy. We want to do all we can to support this community and provide robust options for charitable support. That is why today, we are pleased to announce that we have added Ether to the list of donation options.

Ethereum Address: 0x635599b0ab4b5c6b1392e0a2d1d69cf7d1dddf02

We think this option will help make giving to the Archive easier, and lower the cost, since Ether’s transaction costs are currently much lower than Bitcoin’s, which have increased as new users enter the market.

If you would like to make a donation in Ether, or any of the cryptocurrencies we accept, please go to https://archive.org/donate/bitcoin.php

We hope you’ll check out this new option and, if you’re so inclined, try gifting to the Archive in Ether.

And to the crypto-currency community, we want to say, THANKS!

More stories about our adventures in digital currencies have been written by our founder, Brewster Kahle, here.

This year, Christmas came early to the Internet Archive. On Saturday, the generous philanthropist behind the Pineapple Fund gave $1 million dollars in Bitcoin to the Internet Archive. This anonymous crypto-philanthropist explains, “I saw the promise of decentralized money and decided to mine/buy/trade some magical internet tokens. …Donating most of it to charity is what I’m doing.” We so admire this donor using Bitcoin as the currency of giving this season, and are honored to be the recipients of such a gift. Whoever you are, you are doing a world of good. Thank you.

Permanent access to websites, software, books, music…that is our mission. These gifts help make it happen.

It is especially gratifying to see those who dreamed big about Bitcoin using their wealth to support innovation across the world. The Internet Archive has been actively involved in this community since 2011. Encouraged, we are dreaming big and dreaming open.

Thank you to Pineapple Fund and thank you to the thousands that have contributed already.

Please consider donating this year— it really helps. Looking forward to 2018!

More information about the Pineapple Fund:
Original Reddit Post
Reddit Post Update
Pineapple Fund Interview with Hacker Noon
Pineapple Fund Interview with Bitcoin Magazine

This week, as you’ve watched your Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin rise and fall and rise again, perhaps you’ve been wondering:  how can I put my cryptocurrencies to good use?  Should I buy a new car or yacht?  Plow it into Amazon stock?  Well, at least some of you have turned to the Internet Archive—a place where you can donate your cryptocurrencies directly to help ensure that the Web is free, secure and backed up for all time.

At the Internet Archive, we are big fans of the cryptocurrency movement and have been trying to do our part to test and support alternative means of commerce. We’ve been accepting Bitcoin donations since 2012, and starting this week, we are now accepting donations of Bitcoin Cash and Zcash.

This week it all started when UKcryptocurrency tweeted us asking the Internet Archive to start accepting Bitcoin Cash. We love a good challenge and got that link up within hours.

Here’s how you can donate in cryptocurrency:

Bitcoin is an experimental, cryptographically secure, semi-anonymous method of transferring value between parties. Introduced in 2008, it has been successfully used as a token system between thousands of people. The Internet Archive has proudly experimented with bitcoin including paying some employees with it and encouraging local businesses to experiment as well.
Internet Archive Bitcoin Address: 1Archive1n2C579dMsAu3iC6tWzuQJz8dN

When Bitcoin was first created, developers and miners questioned whether the cryptocurrency could scale properly. To ensure its future, on August 1, 2017, developers and miners initiated what’s known as a ‘hard fork’ and created a new currency called Bitcoin Cash. For more information, visit: https://www.bitcoincash.org/
Internet Archive Bitcoin Cash Address: 12PRZjrLo5yqnHMmUCtPUse4kCyuneby3S

Zcash is the first-of-its-kind cryptocurrency that offers both privacy and selective transparency for all transactions. Zcash gives you the option of using a transparent addresses (what the Internet Archive uses, listed below) or shielded addresses which keep sender, receiver, and amounts private. For more information on Zcash visit https://z.cash/, and for details on the differences between transparent and shielded transactions visit: https://z.cash/support/security/privacy-security-recommendations.html
Internet Archive Zcash Address: t1W6JqMECmbqmDGZ9uLSXWQZ6EgxFkfuty8

We are a non-profit organization with a huge mission: to give everyone access to all knowledge—the books, web pages, audio, television and software of our shared humanity. Forever. For Free. But to build this digital library of the future, we need your help. If you’re feeling flush from a cryptocurrency-windfall, please consider giving to the Internet Archive today.

More info on why cryptocurrencies matter to us: http://blog.archive.org/2017/09/02/why-bitcoin-is-on-the-internet-archives-balance-sheet/