It is estimated that every 20 years 95% of all digital information is lost. Before the blockchain, the concept of eternal information didn’t exist. All information is eventually forgotten if there is no active effort to maintain it, but even in that case, information remains vulnerable when it relies on trust.

The amount of knowledge that we did not inherit from previous civilizations because it was not properly maintained is incalculable. How much information was lost in the library of Alexandria or in the Viking invasions?. How many web pages with valuable information were lost because of expiring domains or failing servers?.

With the invention of bitcoin, a new concept was introduced, which is the eternity of information. A transaction in the blockchain cannot be deleted or modified, even if multiple nodes (miners) go down, a datacenter catches fire, or because the state decides to censor it. As long as the network lives, the information will live. Nobody has the power to make it disappear as happens with centralized services managed by large companies.

At least it is the most eternal possible version that we know of, since the transactions of the blockchain are highly distributed and replicated. Protected by cryptography and have strong economic incentives lined up among millions of independent actors to stick around.

But talking about transactions on a blockchain is only part of the problem. Transactions are a specific, limited and small information format. What if we want to eternally keep scientific papers, images, blog posts, art, books, etc.

With the current architecture, when storing digital information there are 4 points of failure. The domain can fail, the server can fail, the person who uploaded the file can fail, and the cloud company that stores the file can fail. It is ironic to think that all the decentralized applications that are being created in crypto and web3 have to be hosted on the servers of Google or Facebook, which are the same monopolies from which we are trying to become independent.

Decentralized Storage

Luckily, there are projects that try to definitively solve this problem, such as Arweave. Arweave is a blockchain that allows users and developers to store any type of data, forever, for the first time. This system is structured in a way in which, by paying once, the miners guarantee that a file is maintained over time, without the need to renew a service or depend on the owner of the project.

According to the logic of this blockchain, in order for miners to be able to validate a new transaction and receive the $AR token, they have to be able to demonstrate access to a random file at all times. This forces the miners to keep copies of the old files because otherwise they would not be able to validate transactions and therefore they would not be able to receive tokens.

Current situation

By the end of 2025 it is estimated that the internet will weigh 200 Zettabytes (1 zb has 21 zeros '0' and is equal to 1 trillion gigabytes). It is estimated that 50% of this will be hosted in the datacenters of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.

Due to the quality of services and cheap prices (economies of scale) this companies become monopolies they now have more than 3 million servers combined. It is inevitable for society to have a scalable storage infrastructure so that open and decentralized systems are possible.

Decentralized storage protocols are growing day by day trying to provide an alternative to this centralization by putting information in the hands of their users. The information of humanity belongs to everyone, not to a few.

It is estimated that every 20 years 95% of all digital information is lost. Before the blockchain, the concept of eternal information didn’t exist. All information is eventually forgotten if there is no active effort to maintain it, but even in that case, information remains vulnerable when it relies on trust.

The amount of knowledge that we did not inherit from previous civilizations because it was not properly maintained is incalculable. How much information was lost in the library of Alexandria or in the Viking invasions?. How many web pages with valuable information were lost because of expiring domains or failing servers?.

With the invention of bitcoin, a new concept was introduced, which is the eternity of information. A transaction in the blockchain cannot be deleted or modified, even if multiple nodes (miners) go down, a datacenter catches fire, or because the state decides to censor it. As long as the network lives, the information will live. Nobody has the power to make it disappear as happens with centralized services managed by large companies.

At least it is the most eternal possible version that we know of, since the transactions of the blockchain are highly distributed and replicated. Protected by cryptography and have strong economic incentives lined up among millions of independent actors to stick around.

But talking about transactions on a blockchain is only part of the problem. Transactions are a specific, limited and small information format. What if we want to eternally keep scientific papers, images, blog posts, art, books, etc.

With the current architecture, when storing digital information there are 4 points of failure. The domain can fail, the server can fail, the person who uploaded the file can fail, and the cloud company that stores the file can fail. It is ironic to think that all the decentralized applications that are being created in crypto and web3 have to be hosted on the servers of Google or Facebook, which are the same monopolies from which we are trying to become independent.

Decentralized Storage

Luckily, there are projects that try to definitively solve this problem, such as Arweave. Arweave is a blockchain that allows users and developers to store any type of data, forever, for the first time. This system is structured in a way in which, by paying once, the miners guarantee that a file is maintained over time, without the need to renew a service or depend on the owner of the project.

According to the logic of this blockchain, in order for miners to be able to validate a new transaction and receive the $AR token, they have to be able to demonstrate access to a random file at all times. This forces the miners to keep copies of the old files because otherwise they would not be able to validate transactions and therefore they would not be able to receive tokens.

Current situation

By the end of 2025 it is estimated that the internet will weigh 200 Zettabytes (1 zb has 21 zeros '0' and is equal to 1 trillion gigabytes). It is estimated that 50% of this will be hosted in the datacenters of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.

Due to the quality of services and cheap prices (economies of scale) this companies become monopolies they now have more than 3 million servers combined. It is inevitable for society to have a scalable storage infrastructure so that open and decentralized systems are possible.

Decentralized storage protocols are growing day by day trying to provide an alternative to this centralization by putting information in the hands of their users. The information of humanity belongs to everyone, not to a few.