Dear DPL community,
Firstly, we would love to extend our sincere thanks for your amazing efforts in the first few months of the DPL crowdsourced archiving campaign. It has been great to see how the DPL community has grown, and begun to integrate with the wider Arweave protocol ecosystem.
As we are a few months into the campaign, we would like to share with you some of our strategic thinking around the DPL and the reasons why we are thrilled to support it as the permaweb ecosystem expands.
Because permanent information storage has never been available before, helping people understand how information permanence is valuable to them is a core part of our mission. The Arweave community likes to show, not tell. That is why we are happy to be funding the Decentralised Public Librarys crowdsourced archiving initiatives to store valuable information inside the network, forever. This serves four core strategic functions:
- Education: As the DPL community absorbs more information from the centralised web, much of this information will be lost from its original location over time. Via media coverage and other outreach activities, these pieces of data that would otherwise have vanished from the web allow us to demonstrate the value of archiving immutable, timestamped copies of information (see examples below).
- Security of scale: As the original copies of data archived by DPL community members are lost from the centralised web, the permaweb will contain the only provably unmodified copies of that information in existence. As these instances become more frequent, the effects will be compounding: If you are looking for a safe place to store your family photos, your contracts, etc., why not store them alongside the only remaining records of valuable historical artifacts? It is akin to having the ability to store your important documents inside the vaults of a modern national archive -- the safety provided to the historical artifacts is also given to your data. With enough storage of socially valuable records, we are reaching the point of critical mass at which maintaining the archive will have enough social as well as financial incentives to make its perpetuation even more certain.
- Information-backed currency: Information is the heart of the new economy. The Economist has famously described data as the new oil. Because the Arweave cryptographically entangles its tokens (AR) with the data stored in the network, we believe that filling the network with valuable knowledge and history will be positive for the Arweave community. Imagine if the Bitcoin blockchain was filled with the only remaining copies of records of history over the last decade. This is where the Arweave network is heading.
- Pro-social use cases: Like all communication technologies, the Arweave has many possible uses. The Decentralised Public Librarys campaigns and community engagement efforts help demonstrate the pro-social uses of Arweave and steer the early permaweb adopters towards helpful and valuable behaviour. You can read more about how the Arweave protocol itself combats potential malicious uses on the Arweave website.
In the opening stages of the DPLs archiving campaign, we have been excited to see these strategic aims realised in practice. Here are just a couple of examples:
- Aiding mainstream international affairs reporting: The DPL community has saved numerous valuable historical records from permanent loss since its inception. An example of this is their effort to store and verifiably timestamp valuable documents relating to the 2018 Kerch Strait naval incident between Russia and Ukraine, in real time. The communitys efforts led to the permanent preservation of numerous documents that were subsequently erased from the centralised web. Some of these documents were later used by reporters in major mainstream press and tech outlets to write about the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. Through this, a broad international audience was exposed to and educated about the benefits of the permaweb.
- Holding blockchain projects accountable: One of the uses of the Arweave is as an accountability ledger -- recording who said what, when. In mid-2018 the DPL community undertook a campaign to archive whitepapers and documents related to many crypto projects. Since that time, many of the original documents have been removed from the websites of the projects involved. These efforts highlight how the preservation of information helps drive accountability and transparency in the blockchain industry.
...and the DPL has only just begun! We are excited to see where the amazing DPL community takes the project next and to support its large-scale archiving efforts.
-arweave-team