Arweave: Permanent Censorship-Resistant Storage For The Web3 World

In the early hours of June 17th, 2021 the Hong Kong police raided the offices of Apple Daily and arrested five employees. Whatever you may think of Apple Daily’s role in the 2019 protests, crypto networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum were devised initially to prevent censorship and the crypto community is generally hyper-pro free speech. One of the primary original goals in Satoshi’s 2008 paper is for Bitcoin to be censorship-resistant.

The emergent decentralized web – termed Web3 – demonstrated its usefulness in countering censorship, in this case of the press, allowing Apple Daily to upload and preserve all of its content and files to a permissionless, censorship-resistant, and permanent storage network, Arweave.

The ability to prevent the censorship of information is possible thanks to a new type of network. Arweave founder, Sam Williams, initially devised the Arweave’s “blockweave” network with the goal of preventing the control of autocratic governments in order to avoid the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984:

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth. – George Orwell, 1984

Source: Wikipedia under license viaCreative Commons.

The term for a fraction of an Arweave token (AR), the Winston, is even named after 1984’s protagonistWinston Smith.