Interpretation of Arweave 17th Edition White Paper (1): Traveling Through Space and Time

2024/03/27 04:20

Author: Arweave Oasis

After many previous articles on the iteration of the Arweave consensus mechanism, the "preliminary situation". I believe that friends who follow Arweave must have a relatively intuitive understanding of the consensus mechanism of this protocol. But the author always has a little doubt: Since version 2.6 is so landmark, why does its consensus mechanism not have a specific name? (I previously used the speed-limited version of the SPoRA mechanism for naming). With this question in mind, I had an in-depth discussion with Arweave’s official core consensus mechanism engineer and learned that SPoRes concise replication proof is actually the name of the consensus mechanism of Arweave 2.6.

Well, that means that the 17th edition of the white paper entitled "Arweave: The Permanent Information Storage Protocol" released by the official on December and 26, 2023 is basically the official explanation document of Arweave 2.6. But the version number at that time had reached 2.7.0. The good news is that the previous article "understands the iteration process of Arweave’s consensus mechanism" "Arweave 2.6 may be more in line with Satoshi Nakamoto's vision" These two articles basically cover the Arweave mechanism important content. For those who want to have a taste, these are enough.

However, I decided to do some more in-depth chapter-by-chapter interpretation of the 17th edition of the white paper, which is necessary for advanced Arweave participants. Because if you have read it, the pit of mathematical formulas and modeling arguments will be daunting, but perhaps this is the best expression of the beauty of the protocol.

Across space and time

Printing has a profound impact on human civilization. Its emergence dramatically increased the spread and expansion of human information, until it reached its peak with the emergence of the Internet at the end of the 20th century. The efficient dissemination of information increases social transparency and promotes the awakening of individual consciousness. Despite this, the Internet is still controlled and censored by centralized institutions. The information cocoon caused by centralized distribution with the intention of manipulating the spread of information flow is the biggest problem currently facing individual human beings. A certain percentage of useful information is lost every year.

Arweave was born with the mission of solving this problem. At the beginning of its white paper, the Arweave protocol is clearly defined as:

A protocol that transmits information in a disintermediated form in the two dimensions of space and time.

Two dimensions are mentioned here: Space and Time. Different from 99% of the data storage services on the earth, it is like a "time capsule" that not only carries information data, but also adds the important dimension of time to it.

After combining the two, the Arweave protocol becomes a permanent information storage system. The word "permanent" has several definitions: the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "continuing to exist or remain unchanged indefinitely," while Merriam-Webster defines the word as "continuing or persisting without change." Basic or significant changes”.

Based on these two definitions of permanence, Arweave should store data for the maximum possible period without any changes to the data. In order to achieve this goal, Arweave's protocol needs to have three core principles:

Encrypted storage proof: A concise cryptographic proof system for verifying the replication and accessibility of data.
Storage Insurance Fund: A predictable, self-executing insurance fund that takes advantage of deflation caused by technological advances that occur over time effect to cover the cost of permanent storage.
Incentive evolution: By generating and rewarding non-mandatory network upgrades, the protocol is allowed to have a healthy iteration mechanism in the long term.

The main way to achieve them is through "Simple Replication Proof SPoRes", a new blockchain consensus mechanism. It is a protocol that can maximize decentralization while minimizing computing costs and bandwidth requirements. Together with its accompanying storage insurance fund, it creates a model that incentivizes data replication and storage, allowing the network to operate in a completely autonomous, transparent, and predictable manner for hundreds of years.

Adjustments to Satoshi Nakamoto Consensus

Decentralized consensus is a form of distributed computing subfield, which covers the important research on how participants in the network, even competing participants, can reach a consensus agreement on a certain state. This subfield gained widespread attention with the emergence of Bitcoin’s “Satoshi Consensus,” which for the first time allowed consensus to be reached in a competitive and permissionless environment. Thanks to this innovation, Bitcoin created the first digital currency that did not rely on a centralized human actor to manage monetary policy and has been functioning well for over 10 years.

Principles of protocol design

The two main principles of protocol design are:

Minimalism: The protocol design aims to maintain direct and minimal subjective judgment in order to promote the broadest possible network consensus. Arweave uses only well-tested cryptographic primitives when building its data structures and algorithms.
Optimization through incentives: The main goal of the agreement is not to specify its desired behavior, but to motivate participants to achieve their ideal results. main target. So the specific mechanisms that achieve these results will arise naturally and evolve over time.

The Arweave protocol only focuses on the vision of permanent and scalable data storage. Under this minimalist and focused design principle, the Arweave protocol is built on top of the protocol. The application layer is highly scalable and composable, and the application scope of the network has become more extensive and diverse. This has given rise to a large number of decentralized smart contract platforms, databases and applications in recent years. In addition, Arweave’s efficient proof system requires minimal hardware and bandwidth, maximizing participation and decentralization of the network.

Incentives for efficient mining in Bitcoin have led to significant increases in the speed of computing hashes and reductions in costs, and using incentives as a way to promote optimization has also been very effective. Let's take the Bitcoin network as an example. Bitcoin rewards miners for discovering a random number (nonce) that, together with a candidate block, produces a hash value below a certain value (difficulty factor). This incentivized miners to constantly look for ways to compute the greatest number of hashes at the lowest cost, leading to the development of specialized ASIC miners, which have seen the number of hashes computed per second increase by a factor of 10^13 since 2011. The growth rate is faster than Moore’s Law (10^10) in the same period. In addition, this also caused the cost of each hash in the Bitcoin network to drop by a factor of 1 million during the same period. The specific curve can be seen in the diagram. Therefore, inspired by this principle, we adjusted Bitcoin’s incentive mechanism in the Arweave protocol to motivate participants to optimize solutions to storage proof and data transmission problems.

This is the mechanism design principle based on space and time considerations behind the Arweave protocol. The next article will systematically explain a very core part of the white paper - how the stored encryption proof is implemented.