Stephenson:Neal:Leibniz Archive

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

The Leibniz Archive is an artifact that features in the novel Cryptonomicon and consists of thousands of sheets of gold punched with tiny holes.

From Stephenson:Neal:Cryptonomicon:459:hammered_gold...like_a_computer_card(Electricinca)

..it's a sheet of hammered gold, maybe eight inches on a side and about a quarter of a millimeter thick, with a pattern of tiny neat holes punched through it, like a computer card.

The archive's creation seems to be proposed by Gottfried_Wilhelm_von_Leibniz in a letter to Daniel_Waterhouse written in 1700.

It follows that you are the man best suited assemble and organize the data that our machine shall require, and to place it in a form that may be read and understood bya machine. This is a matter of assigning prime numbers to the symbols and then encoding them in some medium, probably as binary digits. The medium needs to be something enduring, for it may be generations before machines can be constructed that are capable of doing the work. Best would be thin sheets of gold.

These sheets of gold seem to pose the same problem for Randy and crew as the stolen Gold of Solomon did for Jack. What holds the higher value—the medium or the message?