There is a wide gulf between the claims of the Blockchain community and the technological reality. For example, I hadn't heard of Arweave before you mentioned it so I looked into it.
From the splash page:
"Store data, permanently." "creating truly permanent data storage for the first time"
From the 'yellow paper'.
"[T]he core Arweave team does not expect that the network as it is currently formulated will continue to produce blocks in true perpetuity. This does not, however, mean that we expect that the information stored inside the weave will be lost after the final block is mined. It is our expectation that when eventually a permanent information storage system more suited to the challenges of the time emerges, the Arweave’s data will be ‘subsumed’ into this network. After the mining of the final block, the financial incentive mechanisms for data preservation will subside and give way to social incentives for data preservation"
The "truly permanent" aspect is based on hand waving and hoping that this system (which was designed with a finite lifetime) will be picked up and stored by someone else.
I have nothing against crypto or this idea (in fact I like that someone is working on this!), but the baseless claims, the barely-honest way that companies present their technology, the blatantly unsolved problems that underly the big claims and dreams - it's all so exhausting. Far too often when I investigate projects in the Blockchain space I try to understand how a company has achieved a shockingly impressive goal only to find that underneath the hype there is no solution, just blind faith and a promise that the core problems will be solved in the future.
I don't know how you can look at the Blockchain space and see anything other than: interesting but very incomplete tech propping up preposterous claims.
What's interesting tech what isn't necessarily whats great for end users. Would you trust your mission critical data to a decentralized store? I wouldn't. What's the latency and throughput of Arweave? Can I serve 100k QPS off of it? What happens in the end of a protocol hack or client, bug? We've seen many blockchains destroyed by bugs and flaws, and we've seen others just fade.
I mean, we've already gone through several distributed file stores, FreeNet, eDonkey, Gnutella, OpenNap, etc. They were still attackable by organizations like the RIAA, but more than that, they were slow and unreliable. Adding financial incentives in I don't really think will improve things that much. How many people are running Ethereum clients and yet DApps are horrifically slow.
I've been using it to host static websites for free personally. You can get free AR to try it yourself, more than enough to last you a very long time. I deploy from localhost and it's on the permaweb almost instantly.
Arweave is based on a new consensus mechanism called ‘proof of access’ (PoA). Arweave is more suitable for slow write (upload) and fast read (download). Download is more useful for most use cases, like hosting websites, unlike other decentralized storage projects which are more suitable for write (Upload)
Arweave has developed a system for data storage which makes it economically sustainable and feasible to store data for centuries. The system allows you to have highly available low latency data storage while maintaining an incentive model where miners will store user's data forever.
Some apps you can check out built on the permaweb:
> Arweave has developed a system for data storage which makes it economically sustainable and feasible to store data for centuries
I see no evidence that this is true. Look at their economic analysis[1]. It uses an extremely idealized view of the cost of storing data - they assume that cost of permanent storage is solely a product of the cost of a hard drive and the rate at which hard drives fail. They ignore so many real world costs - internet costs, electricity costs, paying for space to store the hard drive, maintenance cost, opportunity cost, transition costs (i.e. when the hard drive changes hands, the effort to ensure there is a new maintainer).
Playing with defi applications and dex’s this week got me pretty excited about where the space is headed.
There are now smart contracts that exist where the admin controls are disabled and users can do things like flash loans where you put up some collateral borrow huge sums of tokenized money and then pay it back in seconds or years later. No paper work, no counter party risk, intermediary is code. You pay gas fees and whatever apr you agreed to. https://dydx.exchange/
Dex’s are becoming awesome, https://uniswap.org is friggin rad. So easy to use.
There’s obviously going to be tons more scams and projects that blow up or get hacked, but out of this will come some very useful finance applications that never existed before.
https://www.hyperledger.org/learn/publications/soramitsu-cas... - central bank digital currency in Cambodia built on Hyperledger Iroha
https://defipulse.com - $6b+ locked in DeFi applications
I don't see how tech inclined people don't see value in what's being created right now unless your eyes are closed. A new web is being created.