Internal strife in the Arweave community is about to fork, and the founder publicly accuses the ecological project of being greedy and short-sighted

Sharon

23-12-18 12:02

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Table of Contents:

· Arweave Founder: Irys Forked in an "Anti-Community" Manner, Project Team is "Too Greedy and Short-Sighted"

· Irys Responds: Arweave Founder's Behavior is "Disappointing" and a "Tragic Irony"

· Community: Sam Accuses Irys of Being Like "Vitalik Suing L2"

Forking is not a new thing, but there have been debates among many projects on how to fork. This debate has now come to the veteran decentralized data storage protocol Arweave.

December 18th, Arweave founder Sam Williams (@samecwilliams) tweeted that according to reliable sources, Irys, a Web3 storage solution in the Arweave ecosystem (previously known as Bundlr Network), is considering forking Arweave in an "unsafe and anti-community" manner.

Behind this, the reason why Sam does not support the form of Irys fork is because it wants to fork by causing harm rather than helping the Arweave ecosystem.

Arweave Founder: Irys Forks in "Anti-Community" Way, Project is "Too Greedy and Short-Sighted"

This time, the players in dispute are Arweave and Irys, both of which belong to the decentralized storage track.

其中，Arweave is a decentralized data storage protocol based on blockweave technology. Its main network was launched in June 2018. Arweave utilizes the data structure of BlockWeave and the consensus mechanism of SPoRA to provide a new solution to the problem of permanent storage. Arweave offers a one-time payment for lifetime usage, eliminating the need for users to constantly subscribe. Arweave has also promised to provide users with at least 200 years of storage service.

And Irys (formerly known as Bundlr Network) is one of the leading projects in the Arweave ecosystem, known as the extension solution for Arweave. In the first month of its launch, it processed over 10,000,000 transactions, while Arweave only processed 1,000,000. It is reported that Irys processed about 95% of Arweave transactions. When it was renamed Irys by Bundlr Network in October this year, Irys claimed to have completed over 1 billion transactions.

According to CoinGecko data, after Arweave founder Sam Williams posted, the price of Arweave token AR has seen a slight decline, with a 0.6% decrease in 1 hour and a 12.3% decrease in 24 hours. At the time of writing, the price is quoted at $9.28.

In Sam's lengthy article, there are four key points worth noting.

Firstly, about the correct way to fork Arweave.

For a permanent storage network, forks need to be done in the correct way: preserving and building the state, rather than destroying it. When forks are done in this way, they can continuously improve the network and solve problems over time, while maintaining the security of the dataset. When forks are not done in this way, they will not achieve information permanence - because all data will be regularly deleted.

This system allows forking competition and protocol improvement in a pro-social way: the dataset remains secure, a market is created for new ideas, and innovators are rewarded. It also allows token holders to accumulate a range of tokens across a set of forks in the network, or actively trade these tokens if they believe one fork is more viable: "a win-win for everyone".

There is a mechanism called "protocol evolution" within the Arweave network itself, which allows project parties to fork and upgrade the network securely. Here is more information about this mechanism.

Secondly, regarding the forking method chosen by Irys.

Unlike forking correctly, Irys plans to delete the dataset and reset the token supply. Sam believes that this "seems to be motivated by greed" because users have entrusted their trust in Irys and uploaded data to Arweave: "Forking has pro-social and anti-community ways, and Irys is pursuing a way to fork Arweave in an anti-community way."

Sam also pointed out that, after communicating with Irys, they stated that they "do not want to support existing data and give tokens to a group of idiots." Sam defined Irys' actions as "greedy" and stated that this approach shortsightedly hindered the development of their own permanent storage project. If the dataset and token supply are constantly reset, then any fork will not be able to achieve long-term development successfully.

We still hope that they will understand and build their forks in the right way. If their experiments contribute to the ecosystem, we are always willing to communicate and support.

Thirdly, regarding how Irys users can solve problems.

Due to the possibility of Irys stopping the upload of user data to Arweave at any time, Arweave has pointed out a new, completely free and 100% compatible bundler for the protection of user rights. Irys users only need to replace the node URL with this URL to use it.

Fourth, regarding how Arweave can make a counterattack.

If Irys does not plan to fork correctly, Arweave plans to remove the Irys bundler from the main Arweave gateway, but this will result in a more noticeable delay in network availability before user data is available. Therefore, Arweave will also soon organize an X Space to respond to more follow-up processing.

Irys Responds: Arweave Founder's Behavior "Disappointing" and a "Tragic Irony"

Regarding this, Irys quickly responded on social media, stating that Sam's behavior was a "tragic irony". As someone who is committed to building technology that can protect humans from tyranny, seeing him behave like a tyrant and attempting to remove Irys from Arweave, which is intended to be open source and permissionless software, is "truly disappointing".

Meanwhile, Irys pointed out that they have never and will never deprive users of the choice of data storage location, and have always been committed to resisting censorship, open source, and permissionless technology: "If users are unable to retrieve data due to Arweave's active censorship, they can direct the application to the gateway hosted by Irys."

In addition, Irys also stated that they are developing new traceability technology and considering many powerful new features.

Community: Sam accuses Irys of being like "Vitalik suing L2"

Regarding this incident, Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures (@pythianism), commented in a post saying, "Sam threatened to sue 90% of middleware that supports the Arweave network. Imagine Vitalik suing L2."

However, overall, Irys did not give a positive response to Sam's proposed forking method, which has led to community questioning. Many users have pointed out that they hope Irys will respond positively to forking-related issues.