Rohit on Warpcast

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Jonny Mack pfp

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

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Claus Wilke pfp

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/

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Claus Wilke pfp

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/

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Claus Wilke pfp

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/

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Claus Wilke pfp

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/

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Claus Wilke pfp

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/

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Rohit pfp

Hey @clauswilke curious what you think are the potential failures of Arweave that concern you in this regard?

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Claus Wilke pfp

I don't understand. You're replying to a thread where I spelled out in detail what my concerns are.

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Rohit pfp

Apologies, I missed one cast from your thread regarding the demand for storage of old data. But to clarify this point, Arweave uses a mining mechanism where in order to store new data, a proof from some randomly selected historical data must be submitted. This incentivizes miner to continue storing old data.

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Rohit pfp

This blog outlines the process in more detail in case this piques your interest: https://www.communitylabs.com/blog/your-faq-guide-to-arweave-how-does-arweave-s-mining-mechanism-work

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Claus Wilke pfp

The incentive mechanism only works if the token is valuable. For the token to be valuable there needs to be demand to store _new_ data. If that demand goes away, for whatever reason, then the old data is no longer safe either.

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