Arweave — Grappling with Eternity
Arweave the Permaweb and the Future of Information Storage. Part 1.
When I first found out about Arweave I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about how this technology would affect the way information is stored and distributed and what all the potential implications were. How had I not looked into this until now? I thought about what it meant to have our words and memories stored forever. I thought about how this technology may be able to add meaning to people’s lives now and in the future. What did it mean to be able to say something and know it would exist forever? To know that there is a platform that can guarantee the preservation of history in a way that is unchangeable and resistant to censorship? To know that a record of a precious artifact is preserved and wouldn't be destroyed or lost in war? Memories of our loved ones? DNA? All stored..Safe..Forever.
Its been weeks since I first started researching Arweave and I still wake up thinking about it.
For the uninitiated Arweave’s presskit describes itself like this:
“Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever — for the very first time. As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. By preserving history, it prevents others from rewriting it.
The utility of Arweave is very different from all other data storage platforms and services. The primary difference is that Arweave enables you to be able to store data once and forever. This is no small feat — it is a guarantee of permanent data storage. This not only means peace of mind for the user but also has the potential to change the way that many other applications built using Arweave to store data can operate. In recent months Arweave has seen a massive uptick in applications utilizing its unique permanent data storage. More and more reports of applications using Arweave are being announced whether its on Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana or most recently as a part of Cardano Sounds.
Secure and permanent data storage for all makes Arweave an invaluable new variable in the decentralized blockchain equation.
Could anything truly be permanent?
Like anything else that is a new concept, it seems there is an acceptance phase. In mankind's current state our lifespan and the things we interact with day-to-day tend to be finite. It’s a concept we understand and accept, and although we may feel limited and restricted by it — it also makes us feel comfortable because it’s what we know. In fact when we are presented with something infinite like “time” we will take that concept and break it down into finite parts..hours, minutes, seconds.. and assimilate it into our finite world. It’s not that we disagree with the idea that time is infinite, it’s just that we seem to prefer not having it always poking us in the face.
But time is not so easily constrained. As time and technology move on we find ourselves becoming more and more a part of a digital realm that has the potential for different properties and rules than that of the physical realm. This makes it possible that our concept of time and how we interact with it may also change.
For example, until now it seemed the digital world experienced its own kind of entropy similar to what we see in the physical world. In the physical world our bodies and the materials we use break down and decay over time. As we integrate more with the digital world — the concepts we felt comfortable with are changing as new possibilities emerge from new technologies. The development of distributed networks and blockchain has made possible infinite immutable records and information storage. Erasing the cycle of digital entropy, the failed hard drives, and expired cloud service subscriptions.
As crypto technology evolves beyond currency and defi protocols we are starting to see how this technology is enabling things that were not possible before. Arweave is one such technology. One way to conceptualize it would be to liken it to a “forever” cloud service or an endless hard drive that is at the same time immutable, indestructible, censorship-resistant and permanent. Arweave is like an “I love Mom” tattoo you can never erase. You pay once and it is stored forever. It sounds simple, and in a sense it is but what it means for the future and for the storage of information and knowledge may again cause us to challenge our concept of “forever”.
How Arweave Works
To help us understand how Arweave works let’s take a look at one of Arweave’s most direct and understood use cases. The permaweb. The permaweb makes it possible to permanently archive any web data using the Arweave token ( at the time of writing the approximate price to do this less than $5/GB). This may sound somewhat similar to what other crypto protocols like Filecoin, Sia or centralized cloud servers like AWS provide. But we have to remember what permanent means in the context of Arweave technology. This is not the same as saving a file to a backup hard-drive or uploading to your cloud service provider. It means that what you upload will be stored as long as Arweave exists on the nodes running it. Could Arweave be abandoned at some point? There is real financial incentive to run the network as long as the data is being asked for. It is important to realize that there is no other decentralized system providing this service. So, if you believe there is a market for permanent decentralized data storage then you also realize Arweave is here to stay. As of the writing of this article transactions on the Arweave network are reaching all-time highs:
Currently, there are about 500 data nodes across the world whose mining is incentivized by the Arweave protocol’s game theory-derived algorithm, ensuring fairly incentivized distribution and fast access to data in exchange for Arweave tokens. For a more in-depth explanation of how Arweave works on a technical basis please see the end of this article for some references to further reading.
Simply put, Arweave makes it possible for you to upload something once and know that it will be saved forever.
So this is real. Now what?
It needs to be acknowledged that the very things that make Arweave so unique and powerful are also the things that make it a target of those who want the ultimate say and control over how information is stored and distributed. These powers and individuals don't believe people should have the choice to store data permanently or to have the ability to record something in a way that is uncensored and outside of their control. Maybe you yourself have reservations as to whether or not you would want something stored so permanently.. And that’s ok. But whether you choose to use Arweave or not — its very existence is important to all of us. In the following articles, I'm going to do my best to explain why I feel strongly that this is the case.
Stay tuned.
For more information about Arweave please check out the following links:
https://www.arweave.org (official website of Arweave)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdM3INQ5NAsNjWU8-2y_xjw (Arweave Youtube Channel)
