Sam Williams: Arweave – Bringing Permanence to the Web

The internet was originally created as a platform to communicate freely, but it soon became a place where people could be monitored, controlled, and censored. 98% of content on the internet is deleted every 20 years. More surprisingly, based on a Twitter study, a third of links change their content fundamentally or are removed completely, within three months of their creation. 

Arweave is a new data storage protocol that enables economically sustainable permanence for the very first time. Built on a blockchain-like structure called the blockweave, one of the applications on Arweave is what they have coined “the permaweb”. This is an array of data, websites, and decentralised applications, to which anyone can contribute and maintain. This system provides an incentive to store your data without compromising your privacy, solving one of the key issues facing the current web.

Sam Williams, Co-founder & CEO of Arweave, talks about the technical solution they have built, the economic model around endowment, and the ethical and philosophical questions the permanence of information against concepts like “the right to be forgotten” raises.

Topics covered in this episode:

- Sam’s background and how he got into the blockchain space
- Breaking down BitTorrent – the first scalable decentraized file sharing system
- Data sustainability on the web and what should be kept
- Arweave under the hood and what is a blockweave
- How data is stored and retrieved in blocks
- Arweave’s economics and incentive model
- Data replication within the infrastructure and ensuring decentralization in the future
- The AR tokens and how the Arweave endowment works
- Arweave vs Skynet vs IPFS
- Does Arweave help with the data availability problem in Ethereum?
- Arweave's business model
- Community projects that Arweave are involved with and what’s next for the project

Episode links: 

- [Arweave website](https://www.arweave.org/)
- [Welcome to the Permaweb](https://medium.com/@arweave/welcome-to-the-permaweb-ce0e6c73ddfb)
- [Arweave Whitepaper](https://www.arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf)
- [Arweave on Medium](https://medium.com/@arweave)
- [Arweave Twitter](https://twitter.com/ArweaveTeam)
- [Sam Williams Twitter](https://twitter.com/samecwilliams)
- [Mainnet 2020 – Messari's Flagship Crypto Event (June 1 to 3)](https://mainnet.events)
- [Free tickets to Web 3.0 Forum (June 8 to 10)](https://ti.to/cogx/cogx-2020/discount/TPDODSFP100)
- [Casual meetup for friends of Epicenter](https://epicenter.rocks/virtualmeetup)

Sponsors: 
- ShapeShift: ShapeShift is the leading crypto platform offering zero-commission trading - https://shapeshift.com/

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/341](https://epicenter.tv/341