2022-06-10 15:41:23 +02:00
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published: false
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---
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2021-05-24 23:01:22 +02:00
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An evaluation of the Arweave paper
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==================================
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2021-05-18 Dagger Team
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https://www.arweave.org/yellow-paper.pdf
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Goal of this evaluation is to find things to adopt or avoid while designing
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Dagger. It is not meant to be a criticism of Arweave.
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#### Pros:
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+ There is no distinction between full and light clients, merely clients that
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downloaded more or less of the blockweave. (§2.2)
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+ Prefential treatment of peers is discouraged, because nodes are unaware when
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they're being monitored for responsiveness. (§3.4.2)
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+ Interesting 'meta-game' on top of tit-for-tat, in which nodes monitor their
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peers on how they rank other peers. (§6.1)
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+ Because behaviour of nodes is largely based on local rules and the local view
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that a node has of its peers, the network is able to shift behaviour gradually
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in response to a changing environment. (§6.2)
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#### Cons:
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- Proof of Work is used for the underlying blockweave (§3.1), which is
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rather wasteful.
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- Data is stored indefinitely, which is great for public information, but not so
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great for ephemeral private data. This makes storage unnecessarily expensive
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for data with a short lifespan. (§3.1)
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- Network is free at point of use for external users, raising questions about
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scalability of the network when faced with highly popular content. (§3.4.2)
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Incentives for data replication help (§7.1.2), but it is unlikely that it
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will hold up when the network grows in content (§8.2, §8.3). These incentives
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can also lead to unnecessary duplication of unpopular content.
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- Nodes with limited connectivity are discouraged from participating in the
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network, which precludes use on mobile devices. (§3.4.3)
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- There is an economic incentive for a miner to not to share old blocks with
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other miners, because it increases its chance of "winning" the new block.
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(§4.1.1)
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- There is an economic incentive for miners to have the strictest censorship
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rules, because otherwise a block that it mined might be rejected by others.
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(§5.1)
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- The majority of the network determines the censorship rules. This could prove
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troublesome should Arweave's Proof of Work lead to similar geographic
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centralization of mining power as we see in Bitcoin. (§5.3)
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- Transaction ID is used for addressing, instead of a content hash. (§7.1.1)
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- Uses HTTP for inter-node traffic, instead of an established peer-to-peer
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protocol. (§7.1.3)
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