Data is forever
As touched upon in the previous issue, the information we store online doesn’t really live forever - it lives in a cloud. To be even more specific, it lives on someone’s server for as long as the monthly bills are paid. More importantly, you don’t own the your data / content.
If someone wants to censor you on centralised platforms like Twitter etc, they can do it very easily (in fact that’s exactly what happened to Mr Trump this week):
If someone wants to challenge your claim that certain content was published by you - they can do it. In fact, any content you publish can be erased, blocked, censored or simply lost by mistake.
Crypto networks allow for things to change. Decentralised storage providers like Arweave allow to save traditional web pages directly onto the blockchain. This means that the saved information can never disappear or be censored and it can never be debated who published it and when.
It would obviously be a great loss for humankind if this newsletter were to disappear in the future, so to save us from that (and as an experiment), we archived one of the issues on the Arweave blockchain. It can be viewed here:
Everything looks exactly the same, but the data lives on the blockchain network instead of the cloud infrastructure used by this newsletter provider.
Below is the visualisation of how the blockchain processed this transaction.
The network confirmed the transaction, it has a timestamp and this page is linked to YatswUppDKZqIepfL6qTMsaKEYAm-leXnYlkk - the address of the publisher.
Now not just diamonds can be forever, but data as well.