The topic of storage doesn’t excite many people. It should, however, given the impacts I will explain in this article.
Before I lose you to the boredom of “storage” – think about this –>
What if you could pay once and save all of your family memories forever to share with generations to come. No monthly fees. One payment. Forever. They can never be deleted.
This is not just important for family memories but also recording human history. This spans all aspects from journalists, laywers, courts, major events, and so on.
The current storage wars carry on with Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Safe, Arweave they are all working tirelessly to relieve us of the centralized control, lack of privacy, censorship and risks of loss from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – but there is a hidden gem in this mix that is taking the story a little deeper.
We all want cheaper storage – but keep in mind that these blockchain projects are not trying to save money or be less expensive. They are more concerned about censorship and who controls your data which is very important also.
We all know that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will always find a way to undercut everyone and snag the masses through cost. For the most part – the public will sacrifice privacy for low cost. Otherwise, these companies wouldn’t exist.
Given this – I am going to focus on a project that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will never achieve at scale.
Problem # 1 – Pay Up or Lose It All
We all use cloud storage by Amazon, Google, or Microsoft because it is cheap and there is no other easy-to-use option, for now. We are at the mercy of their monthly fees and fear loss of all of our content, so we keep paying. The problem is that if you don’t pay or renew – you or your family lose a lifetime of photos, documents, and keepsakes. It’s a trap.
Problem # 2 – Censorship and Dead Links
We have all experienced a “broken link” on the internet. How that happens can be anything from government censorship to someone not paying the renewal fee for storage.
As an example, 49% of links cited in Supreme Court Decision papers are broken. The internet, as a whole, is losing data in droves each day. This is a big issue. The data is just gone, forever.
What is the solution?
We need to create a system that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google cannot create or compete with. Let’s fix the problem they cannot.
The answer is creating a system where we store anything on the “web” with a one-time payment for permanent, forever storage. No renewal fees. You control it. No one else can delete it.
Filecoin, Storj, Sia and SAFE all use a similar model of contract-based storage. You pay a monthly or annual rate for a storage contract. These are amazing projects, but not what I am after with this article.
Then there is Arweave.
Their goal is something called “permanent storage”. With permanent storage, users pay a one-time, up-front fee to store the data forever.
How does it work?
To store a file on Arweave, a user creates a transaction that pays some amount of AR tokens as a network fee (currently $5/GB) to store data forever. It’s more expensive than Amazon – but depending on your use case – it is cheap considering it will be permanent.
Why is this important?
There are more reasons that we need this than I can cover in this article. I will just cover a few.
- Blockchains are meant to store the entire history of their chain forever. Arweave allows these other systems to store their data on Arweave permanently for redundancy. Solana and SKALE are some projects already doing this.
- NFTs, for the most part, are stored on centralized servers. Sorry bro – your $300,000 ape NFT may be useless in the future. Download the JPEG.
- Archive the Internet. Arweave has a project in motion to archive the internet to resolve all of these broken links and to preserve history. No more dead links.
- Journalists who want to make sure their reporting is available forever to shine light on the truth;
- Political dissidents who want to ensure that governments can’t censor their thoughts;
- Lawyers working on personal estates or trusts;
- Memories. People who want to store personal memories for distant future generations.
There are so many exciting things happening with blockchain. The spotlights are on finance, but don’t let these powerful projects slip under the radar too long.
