Storing (whistled?) information (that some people might want to suppress) in a blockchain based 'web' seems like a good idea. It sounds like it wants to make removal of published information next to impossible. Is that a bad idea? Is that a thread? Can it be used for large file sharing? :-P
From what I understand it’s still very expensive to store anything more than a few kb on the Blockhain as it’s distrbuted. So you still need a platform that will store the actual content and reference the transaction. In the end, it’s like web2 to me, if you kill the host / platform, you still have the blockchain but you lost the content.
You understand the concept correctly. This is one of Web3‘s great advantages, and it‘s already being used to circumvent real-world censorship and information decay. Also it prevents problems like dead links and expired domains.
HN likes to hate on everything crypto. Not sure why.
How is it working? Who will host the terabytes of content is this really take off? Who will pay for it? Sure it’s easy to host a blockchain on a number of computers when it’s small, but if it really become THE source of truth, then you need actual $$$$$ to keep it alive.
I hope you still see this, it took me a few days to get back to you.
> Who will host the terabytes of content […]
Those people [1], among others. You too, if you want. The great thing is that you don‘t need to store the entire weave to participate. If you store only 10TB, you will earn rewards at roughly 10TB/72TB = 1/7 efficiency.
> […] if this really take off?
Arweave has taken off, and the weave size is already above 72TB. [0]
> Who will pay for it?
The uploader. You pay for 200 years of storage AT CURRENT COST upfront. The trick is that this is not paid out immediately. Instead, an endowment is created, which pays for the continued storage over time.
Under the very conservative assumption that storage costs decrease by about 0.5% pa, this endowment will shrink over time, but never be exhausted (because storage gets cheaper over time). Essentially it is exponentially decaying. [2]
Or did I completely misunderstand the concept?