INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
What if you could pay now to store something online permanently? You could preserve a website against censorship, save legal contracts or
offer an app even after your company fails
Users pay for a few hundred years upfront (about half a cent per megabyte), and the interest accrued by the excess payment will perpetually
cover the costs of shrinking storage prices.The Permaweb quietly launched last June
objects were stored on the Permaweb in October alone
As long as some node operators keep hosting the data on unused hard drive space, they keep getting paid, and the sites, apps or files remain
Crypto, and joined by other top blockchain investors Union Square Ventures and Multicoin Capital, which have exchanged the cash for tokens
dropouts trying to address the fake news problem
despot.The team discovered blockchains could handle this at small scale
But to decentralize large amounts of data, they developed a special kind of blockchain where miners are rewarded for storing a random old
block from the chain, not just the most recent one
fund their wallet, and make a one-time payment
alternatives like AWS in the short-term, the Permaweb could theoretically keep files alive forever
Williams says that data storage costs have declined around 30% per year for a while, but the decentralized network would still be able to
payments would cover 200 years of storage.Another benefit is that users of applications can choose to use the original version of a Perma
app instead of an updated one
That way if a developer polluted later versions with ads or privacy invasions, users could rely on the old one.An important concern is that
the Permaweb could be used to enable piracy
But Williams tells me the majority of node operators have to vote to approve hosting a file, so they could refuse copyrighted music or
And anyways, torrenting is free and so likely more appealing to pirates
on academic uses for shallow web preservation.Arweave likens itself to an Uber for storage, matching users needing to save files with those
with excess storage capacity
crypto projects are long on white papers but short on code
something climate change deniers might want to suppress.The goal was always to stop misinformation
