Hey there! Welcome to my home on the permaweb 👋
I founded the Arweave protocol along with my friends at the ArweaveTeam. Our goal is to create an open, permanent collection of all of humanity's important ideas and history, outside the control of any individual or group. We believe that free speech and expression is a foundational component of any just society -- just as much in cyberspace as in physical space.
I now focus my time on helping new founders and builders creating the permaweb on top Arweave -- a permanent, decentralized web of applications which respect user rights.
Drop me a weavemail using the button above if you would like to collaborate!
Recommended Reading
The following titles have profoundly shaped my thinking. If you haven't read them yet, I would strongly recommend them -- there is a good chance they will have a high return on investment of your attention. Some of them might change your entire perspective 🙂.
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl.
From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel Dennett.
Propaganda, Edward Bernays.
Irrational Exuberance, Robert J. Shiller.
Zero to One, Peter Theil, Blake Masters.
My Latest Stamps
Stamps is a protocol on the permaweb that let's you leave a trail of the cool things you have found, so that others can follow along. Its like a social network for content discovery on the permaweb. You can stamp this page using the button on the right, if you like it!
Here are my latest finds:
Selected Writing
@fwdresearch is 50% research lab, 50% startup. We communicate the ideas we have been thinking about via paper drafts and threads, only a few of which make it to a 'final' paper form. Accurate and up-to-date information about Arweave and the permaweb can always be found on the ArWiki.
If you are curious, here is how our thinking has evolved:
2022
Fair Forks: Towards Incentivized Protocol Governance
Collaborators: Abhav Kedia
In this paper we introduce Fair Forks, the first step towards a form of fork-based futarchy. In this system, ‘refounders’ are rewarded for implementing protocol upgrades, which are adjudicated for acceptance via a market mechanism. Through fair forks, market participants are incentivized to vote in favour of proposed upgrades that increase net protocol value by buying or selling tokens associated with proposed upgrades of the protocol. Collectively, this system rethinks protocol governance as a pro-social, incentivized and market-based process, rather than a risk-center arising from a tragedy of the commons.
Arweave 2.6
Collaborators: Lev Berman, Vird
Arweave is a permanent data storage network. This document describes version 2.6, an upgrade to the network that achieves the following objectives:
- Lowers the storage acquisition cost for the network by encouraging miners to use cheaper drives to store data, rather than optimizing for drive speed.
- Lessens energy wastage in the network by directing a greater proportion of mining expenditure to the useful storage of data.
- Incentivizes miners to self-organize into full replicas of the Arweave dataset, allowing for faster routing to data and an even more 'flat' distribution of data replication.
- Allows for better dynamic price
Per GB/Hourstorage cost estimation in the network.
O: Provable Scarcity and a Trustless Mint Without Explicit Consensus?
Collaborators: Abhav Kedia
In this paper we propose a new digital currency ledger, O, for discussion. O is an experiment in digital currencies without a consensus layer. This protocol exists without work or stake. Typically, in such a consensus-free system the dominant strategy is assumed to be overwriting other node's blocks perpetually ('Greedy Mining'), however we hypothesize that at some point in order for any participant's work to be credited at all they must negotiate with one another. We theorize that the Nash equilibrium of this game may in fact still be consensus, but with long latencies in the early phases and potential recurring periods of consensus change. This paper describes the O protocol and explores a number of its architecture's advantages and disadvantages.
2021
A Transparent Electoral System Technology (ATEST): Increasing trust in elections through an open, immutable ledger.
Collaborators: Sebastian Campos Groth, India Raybould
In this paper we present ATEST (A Transparent Electoral System Technology), a new technological infrastructure for administering elections that removes the need for trust in human-operated procedures. Instead, this trust is placed in the mathematics...
ANS-103: Succinct Proofs of Random Access.
Collaborators: Lev Berman
This document describes the new consensus mechanism for the Arweave network based on the competition to find a chunk of the past data in a set of historical chunks inferred from the latest agreed-upon blockweave state....
2020
Scarcity and Cyberspace
In cyberspace, unreal experiences can be summoned at extraordinarily low cost. Further, it costs no more to create and deploy idillic experiences, than it does experiences of suffering. Once generated, experiences in cyberspace can be scaled to almost arbitrary populations...
Arweave 2.0: Fast Write
Collaborators: Lev Berman
The release introduces Fast Write: a major modification to the core Arweave protocol that removes relevant limits to the write speed of the network.
Silo: Immutable and anonymously addressable storage
Collaborators: Kee Jefferys, Simon Harman
Silo is an abstraction on top of an immutable storage medium called Arweave. Silo provides a way to upload and share immutable data anonymously, by using a novel human readable content addressing scheme, and allowing data to be accessed using the Lokinet anonymous onion routing layer.
2019
Arweave: A protocol for economically sustainable information permanence
Collaborators: Viktor Diordiiev, Lev Berman, India Raybould, Ivan Uemlianin
Blockchains have been used as mechanisms to store memoised representations of history since the very first Bitcoin block [47]. Despite blockchain technology’s clear potential in the area of resilient archive construction without single points of failure, advances in on-chain data storage techniques have remained elusive. This paper addresses this problem through the introduction of the Arweave protocol: a new mechanism design-based approach to achieving a sustainable and permanent ledger of knowledge and history. As well as outlining incentive mechanisms for achieving sustainable data permanence, this paper outlines key technologies to allow scalable on-chain storage.
2018
Arweave Lightpaper
Collaborators: Will Jones
In this work we present Arweave – a new blockchain like structure called the blockweave. The blockweave is a platform designed to provide scalable on-chain storage in a cost-efficient manner for the very first time. As the amount of data stored in the system increases, the amount of hashing needed for consensus decreases, thus reducing the cost of storing data.
2017
Archain: An Open, Irrevocable, Unforgeable and Uncensorable Archive for the Internet
Collaborators: Will Jones
Widespread internet access has changed almost every aspect of human life. A vast proportion of the combined knowledge of humanity is housed on the internet, and available in our pockets at any time. While the internet has had a staggering impact on the organisation of society, some fundamental flaws with the system remain. Primary among these is the ephemeral nature of the information stored on the network – it can change or disappear at any time. In this paper we present a sister network that seamlessly integrates with the world wide web, providing a permanent cryptographically verified archive for the internet. This archive makes use of a novel blockchain-derivative data structure called a blockweave, as well as a new kind of Proof of Access algorithm.