Learn about the Permaweb and Arweave’s vision for a permanent source of truth.
Author : OnlyArweave
Reviewer : Bananaa
Source : Content Guild News
Between all the misinformation, fake news and broken backlinks online, to say the internet’s in poor shape is putting it mildly. While historical buildings continue to stand the test of time around the world, the integrity of our nascent digital landscape is eroding at an alarming rate.
What if there was a solution to store our knowledge securely, capture our most valuable moments in time, and provide verifiable proof that our data has not been tampered with?
That is exactly what Arweave is building.
The risks of relying on centralized storage
The architecture and storage practices of our world wide web have changed dramatically during the short period of time it's been online. From an exciting initiative to connect computers around the world, we’ve now ended up in a position where the majority of data is controlled by a handful of storage providers.
This centralisation of data control is of course not without its risks. To quote a passage from George Orwell’s novel 1984, "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And while solutions like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine do exist, they too cannot always be relied upon as permanent, verifiable sources of truth.
How Arweave fixes this issue
Arweave proposes a solution to the challenges of censorship, data loss and deletion with its decentralized, permanent data storage ledger. By globally distributing its infrastructure over numerous independent storage providers, Arweave operates as a storage solution that functions without the need for centralized control.
The advantages of such a solution are many and varied, here are but a few examples: