Author: @outprog, found and CEO of everFinance
Source: Contribution from PermaDAO
During the blockchain development of more than ten years, a bulk of applications got born. DeFi and NFT are in full swing, affecting the heart of every Crypto BUIDLer. The representative of blockchain 1.0 is Bitcoin, which opened the era of decentralized payment; The 2.0 is on-chain computing smart contracts represented by Ethereum, which has set off a boom in DeFi and NFT; In the future, blockchain will expand to more application scenarios and enter the era of large-scale applications. Blockchain 3.0 will target more user groups and integrate with Web3. Arweave is a blockchain that provides storage services for consensus data, and will become the most important infrastructure for large-scale applications of Web3 and blockchain. The essence of consensus is to store consensus. Data that is not tamperable and traceable will change the way humans collaborate.
On July 25, 2020, blockchain technology was feverishly discussed in a technical meetup. Zeng Mi used an 11-page PowerPoint and spent 5 minutes introducing the persistence mechanism of Arweave. The PowerPoint has been stored in Arweave. In the next 30 minutes, Uncle Meow introduced the smart contract mechanism SmartWeave on the perpetual blockchain in detail, and demonstrated how to use SmartWeave to write smart contracts and how to make Token transfers. After the Meetup, MyNFT's founder and rising star told the story of Arweave to Mr. Liu Yi. Since then, the first in-depth report on Arweave was born - The potential of Arweave is to revive the Alexandrian Library, not a substitute for Filecoin. Since then, Arweave has officially started the exploration of storage consensus paradigm (SCP).
A week after Meetup, I asked Uncle Meow and Zeng Mi to have a second discussion in a cafe. What can we do if there is a serialized, immutable source that can download data at any time? In the world of Web2, we will go to the official website if we need to download software. Unfortunately, fake websites usually provide dangerous clients with viruses. Arweave provides users with the correct and verifiable download source, so they don't have to deal with viruses anymore. If the network bandwidth in the future is very efficient, can users drop out their hard disks, and download and run the operating system from Arweave? And all they need is only a very lightweight computing client to complete a large number of tasks. Whether the operating system on the cloud is more secure than the original operating system due to its immutability? Finally, even the user's data is stored and loaded through this infinite data source. Immutability will enable all clients to become verifiable and trusted terminal devices. After the discussion in the cafe, I had a lot of discussions with the scientific research partners of the Spark Mine Pool about the technology of Arweave, ETH 2.0, Rollup and sharding. Everyone can feel the novelty of the Blockweave model proposed by Arweave. It’s a very ingenious design. Sam first explained the feasibility of permanent storage from the perspective of economics. Then he explained that the mining mechanism of PoW+PoA could be used to achieve permanent storage of data. As for feasibility, Arweave has calculated the variation of storage cost in the past decades. The storage cost is decreasing at a rate of about 30% every year. Assuming that the storage cost is still decreasing at this rate with the sustainable development of science and technology, the storage cost will be a constant for infinite years to come. Arweave charges rely on this assumption. Currently, it only costs $2 to store 1 GB of data on Arweave. As for the mechanism of permanence, Arweave does not force any miner to store, and the miner does not need to provide storage certificate. In Arweave network, the more data stored, the higher the income will be. At the same time, Arweave network also provides higher income for rare data. Arweave network will not care about how much each miner has saved or what data they have saved. These are all miners' own businesses. Under this incentive model, miners will store data as much as possible, especially rare data. Higher weight of rare data will also make rare data not rare anymore. Finally, in the whole Arweave network, data will be evenly distributed to all nodes. How to ensure data not to be lost has become a problem of probability. Suppose that there are 200 nodes, 200000 blocks, and the block replication rate of each node is 50%. It can be calculated that the probability of a single block being inaccessible is 6.223 times 10 to the negative 61st power [6.223x10^(-61)]. The rate of data loss is far lower than the current cloud storage service facilities.
From this, we can confirm that Arweave can ensure us an immutable and traceable data source. On this basis, we began to expand our thinking to computing and smart contracts.
In the traditional on-chain computing model, the same computing is repeated on tens of thousands of servers, resulting in a large amount of redundancy and waste. Unlike Ethereum, SmartWeave just stores the source program of the smart contract and all the input of the program on the blockchain. Since the storage of Arweave follows sequence, the input of the smart contract will also follows sequence. A deterministic program plus deterministic input will only produce a deterministic state by calculation. SmartWeave no longer cares about the state on the chain, but is more concerned about verifiability. With the use of Arweave storage program, the program has a feature of immutability. If Arweave storage contract is used for input, the input will also be immutable. At this time, the immutable program and input will produce a unique status output. In this way, any person or organization can install the SmartWeave client to generate and verify this unique output.
SmartWeave model can be abstracted as a standard Turing model, that is, the program and input/ output parameters are placed on an infinite paper tape. Furthermore, we can think that Arweave is a tape of Turing machine. Because this infinite storage tape has the characteristics of immutability and traceability, it will make all applications that use Arweave for storage become immutable and traceable. In this process of thinking, I put forward the concept of Storage Consensus Paradigm (SCP). The English version of the earliest SCP was released in Medium on November 23, 2020. Its original name was Storage Computing Paradigm, which was renamed Storage Consensus Paradigm on October 11, 2021.
SCP English version:https://medium.com/everfinance/a-storage-based-computation-paradigm-enabled-by-arweave-de799ae8c424
Storage Consensus Paradigm: https://mirror.xyz/0xDc19464589c1cfdD10AEdcC1d09336622b282652/KCYNKCIhFvTZ1DmD7IpXr3p8di31ecC283HgMDqasmU
I further expanded the concept of SmartWeave into a paradigm, and SmartWeave became an implementation of the paradigm. Separating from the fixed development framework, SCP can be regarded as a kind of development thinking. Any developer can use Arweave without any restrictions of development language, and the storage of Arweave enables applications to gain a consensus of trustlessness. This unchangeable storage can become the underlying foundation of the consensus layer, that is, the essence of digital consensus is storage consensus
In late October 2020, I left imToken to start the exploration of SCP applications. After two months of development, everPay, the first SCP based application, finally came out. At the end of 2020, an introduction to everPay was released: the trusted cross-chain payment protocol. everPay is a real-time financial protocol that locks encrypted assets on other public chains in smart contracts and then maps them to the protocol to provide users with real-time payment and settlement.