Imagine you went on vacation with your family. You took countless pictures of precious memories that you planned to put in a scrapbook for your kids to give to their kids.

The thing is though, is that you forgot to back-up your photos onto the cloud, and at the airport on the way home, mad from a game of angry birds, your 5-year-old accidently drops your phone into your cup of coffee.

Now, besides what’s in your mind, all those memories are gone forever, and your scrapbook will have an empty page where the best part of it should have been.

As you might have guessed, blockchain is the solution to this problem.

Yes, they are several different projects that involve storage on decentralized servers, but only Arweave ensures that your storage, stays there FOREVER.

Let’s get it

Obviously Arweave’s use case goes far beyond making sure you don’t lose the photos on your camera roll.

Imagine if there is sensitive information archived on the internet, and the elites of the world don’t want people to find that certain fact…

They could easily go into that archive and change or censor that piece of information to avoid people from finding it. Trust me, this happens everyday.

Listen to this clip of Pennsylvania’s Senator Pat Toomy explain how Arweave was used to stop the Chinese Community Party from blocking the message of a pro-democracy newspaper.

Given how the world is so trigger happy with censorship these, you just saw firsthand from the mouth of a U.S Senator how important Arweave really is.

So how does Arweave accomplish this? Let’s look into it.

Arweave is a decentralized storage platform that started in the U.K. and launched its mainnet in 2018.

Led by CEO Sam Williams, the team set out to create a permanent, immutable, storage solution for the internet, and with support from The web3 foundation, The Ethereum Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation and several others, they did just that.

Like I will always say when talking about servers, it’s always best to side with decentralized servers over their centralized counterparts.

How much can you really trust google or amazon web services anyways? You know that they are interwoven with the elites of the world and they’re on board to cover up what they need to. If someone is going against the grain of their belief systems, they have no problem shadow banning or censoring them.

Instead of being controlled by big tech corporations and having a single point of failure, decentralized servers spread out the information from a plethora of servers all over the world, creating a more secure, tamper proof, censorship resistant environment, which makes for a more fair and democratic internet.

Some of you may be thinking, “But Ben, Wait. Didn’t you just talk about Filecoin? Are Filecoin and Arweave doing the same thing?”

Well, yes, they are both projects that utilize decentralized storage, but they use different tech, and therefore have different features.

While Filecoin uses the Interplanetary File System to provide decentralized storage, Arweave, on the other hand, uses the Blockweave to provide permanence. This means that they want to permanently store your data forever.

Think of it like this, Filecoin is renting their users storage space in exchange for their coin where Arweave allows users to store data permanently…and as long as the network doesn’t go down, you can retrieve that data for a small fee.

So obviously we know WHY it’s so important to have permanence on the internet, how do they do this?

Structurally speaking, Arweave’s blockchain, is very different from your traditional blockchain. The Blockweaving technology they use is more like a Distributed Ledger Technology. This acts as like a hard drive and the permaweb that the users access sits on top of that.

A block in a normal blockchain is connected to the block in front of it and the block behind it. With Areweave, a block is connected to the one in front of it and TWO blocks behind it, (hence the weaving) where the second block is called the recall block.

Without getting into the weeds with consensus mechanisms and all that, what’s the end game here? What’s the point, and why does it matter?

From a trading perspective, Arweaves all time high is a little over 89 dollars per token. It is down about 90% from that price point, but at the same time, it is up about 50% from its 6 dollar low at the end of 2022. It’s current price point is, just (check price when you shoot) under 9 dollars, which is about a 10x back to all time high.

From a utility perspective, we already mentioned why decentralized servers are important and how permanence is the death of censorship, but does it end there? No, of course not.

Arweave has a MASSIVE eco system that incorporates smart contracts, NFTs, music storage, identity and the list goes on and on.

But say YOU want to save your photos, videos, music or Data on Arweave…how do you do that?

You can do this at ardrive.io to permanently store your memories/ data on a decentralized server for a minimum of 200 years, but probably much longer than that depending up how much they improve along the way.

Unlike normal cloud subscriptions, you only pay one time to put your data on ardrive, and it will be on there forever.

Pricing for to do this changes from 1.50 to 4 dollars per gigabyte because of dynamic pricing, but when I checked, it was only 1.63 per gigabyte to store your data forever.

This is more expensive compared to say Google, but since that’s a subscription based service, in a few years, (photo below) you will cut even by using Arweave, and if you really want to store your memories, data, music, forever, would you rather do this on a corporate centralized server that charges you monthly and changes the rules as they go, or on a decentralized server that has you best interest in mind. You be the judge. That’s all I got.