eli5

whats the difference between arweave and ipfs? why choose one over the other?

They're completely different. One (IPFS) is a data retrieval protocol and one (Arweave) is a storage solution. Ideally Arweave would work with IPFS but it doesn't, which is a big pain. 1/

Computational biologist, data scientist, digital artist | 
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Arweave promises "pay now store forever (or at least 100 years)". It's a storage solution. It works like a pension fund. The idea is that future generations of storage use will cover the costs of keeping the old files around. This will work fine as long as the system is growing. But it makes me uncomfortable. 3/

Just like any pension system that may run out of sufficiently many new paying members to pay the old obligations Arweave could in principle run out of sufficient demand to store the old data. They try to ensure this is not the case, but 100 years is a long time. 4/

Ideally we would use IPFS for retrieval and Arweave for storage, and then we wouldn't have to worry about potential failures of Arweave because we could also make independent backups. But that's not how Arweave currently works and this makes backups much more complicated. 5/

But I don't know enough about Arweave to know exactly how it works, I just know the ClubNFT people don't see an easy way to make backups of data on Arweave, and that's a shame. 6/6

IPFS guarantees that if you know what file you want and somebody has it they can give it to you. But it doesn't guarantee the file exists. Somebody needs to make sure the file continues to be stored. The nice thing is this could be you. Hence IPFS backup solutions -> https://www.clubnft.com/ 2/

This reminds me that Sam Williams from Arweave should really be on farcaster. Awesome guy (I did an incubator on arweave stack w him in 2020 when I first started building in crypto). I’ll send an invite 💌

great explanation, thanks! so the thought by Protocol labs was that Filecoin would be used for storage and IPFS for retrieval?