Scam or legit? Arweave's answers
Original link: Scam or legit? Arweave
Here is an update with answers from the Arweave team. We did not receive a reply in their Discord. Their team member in Telegram was helpful, but It took a while to get the answers, and so we are publishing the answers we received so far.
Answers to our questions from the Arweave team:
Q: What do you mean, “permanent”? Isn’t data stored on the blockchain not permanent already? Any information stored on the blockchain remains there permanently. So this sounds like pure marketing.
distributed - wow, really? Distributed app on the blockchain? No way!
cheap - so how will they make money? Just by cashing in via an ICO?
A: Good question - the key issue is that other blockchains don't offer on-chain data storage (we do, at large sizes). This means that typically with other blockchains you have to store your 'actual' data off-chain and then store a hash, etc., on the blockchain (and of course the location you store your real data such as a cloud service will eventually delete your data if you do not continue with payments)
And it's inexpensive for long-term storage with us, because you only have to pay once (when you store the data) rather than an ongoing monthly subscription
Yep there's a price indeed - but as I say unlike other storage solutions, it's one payment when you first store the data, rather than you having to continually keep up with payments to keep access to your data (like monthly subscription ot Amazon cloud services, etc.)
So, the tokens that pay for storage are given as rewards to the miners (again there are a series of mechanisms to ensure that storage prices and rewards are reasonable, and reliable).
So the project itself is undertaking the token sale currently as fundraising to support our running costs for the next few years, there are some tokens reserved (with appropriate lockups) if we wish to raise more funds for running costs in the future, which we could choose to sell.
Q: Self-Organising Network
So the most basic logic of routing metrics on which every network is based (form local to the Internet) is now a "Self-Organising Network"? Seriously?
A: Again, good question - basically this is a series of incentives that ensure miners are encourged to pass data around the network quickly (to keep our transaction speeds so high), plus the underlying 'self-organising' nature of the recall block technology. The selection of recall blocks means that everyone storing data on the network is incentivised to store different components of the network (and as many blocks as possible). This means that without having to mandate that everyone stores all data, the network 'self-organises' this data distribution and redunancy provision by human-centric incentives
Q: Document storage on the blockchain? Ok, let’s assume they are encrypted and the encryption is air-tight. BUT if they are openly stored - anyone can see them and use for their own purpose (like to get a credit or a car using your personal information). And what if the encryption gets broken or the key to the encryption compromised? What if quantum computers come online? Who will re-encrypt the entire blockchain to keep these documents safe? All this data will suddenly become exposed - permanently!
A:
Q: The “Our Ecosystem” section of the site. Where are any links to projects? Or even project names.
A: Here’s their post on the Charite partnership: https://medium.com/@arweave/arweave-charit%C3%A9-staff-solving-the-reproducibility-crisis-with-the-blockweave-a9c946315d6b
Journal of raw data - http://journalofrawdata.org/
Permanent internet archive - this is self-built by Arweave team members, and you can download the archiving web extension for the testnet already on Google Chrome store
Legal document storage -we have a couple of private companies (not announceable) beginning to utilise Arweave technology to store extremely sensitive and useful legal, administrative, and technical documents (e.g. industry blueprints for large-scale constructions, etc.)
Verifiable democracy - this is a pre-release idea that we've been working on ourselves - we'll be talking more about this in the future.
REST API - the repo is live of course for the API, and we have a number of people using it to make projects on their own apps, but of course I don't currently have permission to share those details yet. Actually, so many
Q: We found their old whitepaper: https://arweave.org/whitepaper.pdf
So no one deleted their old whitepaper from the server? Would it be so difficult for them to do? Looks like they’ve had since August 2017 to write a real, detailed, comprehensive whitepaper… and didn’t.
A:
Q: They don’t show percentages or even the mechanism of miner rewards. Just: "peers are financially incentivised to..." and that’s it. WTF?
A:
Q: Where are their tokenomics? On what will they spend their ICO money?
A: They are sharing this only with those who pass KYC since their sale is a private one.
Q: They promise that the system is protected against high transaction commissions even at high intensity usage of the network. Theoretically, 5,000 TPS on a 100mbps network. How is it protected? What commissions are established? Who establishes them?
A:
Q: If something happens in the system, the developers can process it using the API. And that’s supposed to shock us? Why are they even making a special note of this? Any API allows this, so…
A:
Q: They say this platform is really good for authorizing various documents. So other platforms/blockchains are not?
A:
Conclusion
Not a scam - real people; working SDK. Still, even though the answers we did get make sense and clarify key concerns about the project - questions still remain, and their slow response is not encouraging.
New Verdict
Questionable!
Disclaimer: The above audit is not in any way financial advice or a solicitation to buy - it's merely our collective opinion that we are kind enough to share with you. Don't make us regret that.
The report is prepared in partnership with https://t.me/ico_reports
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