Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Post-interview chat – Sam Williams of Arweave

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

In this inaugural post-interview chat, Friederike and Sebastien discuss their recent interview with Arweave Co-founder and CEO, Sam Williams.Moving forward, these conversations will be released every week on Substack. Subscribe to never miss an episode at https://epicenter.rocks/substack

Hi there, this is Sebastian. What you're about to hear is a conversation between Frederica and I. We recorded this immediately after our interview with Sam Williams of Our Weave. We shared our off-the-cuff thoughts about the interview, about the project, and where we think it could be going. So this is new, and it comes from a desire to want to share more of our thoughts with. you, not just the interviews themselves, but also what we think about the projects that we have on the show. And it's also an opportunity for us to talk to each other. I mean, we often meet in the context of interviews, but the epicenter hosts rarely get to just kind of sit down and chat. We'll do this after every interview, and we'll post them here for the next little while, just

so that people know that we're doing this. But moving forward, the place that these will be published is on the Substack newsletter, and you can subscribe at epicenter.rocks slash substack. These will be free, at least for the time being, but at some point we might turn this into a subscriber bundle or some kind of paid product. But we'll let you know if and when that happens. So enjoy. What did we learn? What surprised us the most?

What did we disagree on or have doubts about? Where could have we done more prep or what topics were we unprepared to address that we might address in the future. What is our outlook for the future of this project and our final thoughts on the interview? So what I learned, what also surprised me the most, was that, so basically I'd always seen our weave as targeted at crypto projects. And seeing that that is in the long term, not the plan, to me that was super interesting because I've always kind of perceived it in the realm of other crypto projects. So you mean you thought that R-Wave was, say, for example, a way to achieve,

to like solve data availability for like layer two solutions or this sort of thing? Yes. And as he said, you know, this is apparently a common mistake, but it's a mistake. Really interesting. See, I didn't, I mean, I have had limited exposure to R-Wave and for me, it was always about like the perma web thing. And that's maybe because Lace of 1KX, who invested in RWeave every time I see him, it seems he's like sending me some RWeave link of something that he's stored there.

And yeah, it was always like this perma web thing to me. What I learned here that I think was interesting is like it were personally kind of interested in is the ability to host applications on it. And it's funny because at the end when he was talking about at the end of the interview, when he was talking about like the perils of the Web3 space and as you grow,

like you have to monetize because you have to be able to pay for the infrastructure cost. In my last conversation with David Fork, he said the exact same thing about SIA. And like even though they come from different places and they address the issue of data storage from a different vantage point, the, I think the outcome of like what they're looking for in terms of what these platform, could become as decentralized application platforms is very similar.

They have very similar kind of value propositions there from that perspective. Yeah, I see that. So where I disagree, I have doubts, is the defense strategy. Basically, I mean, what he said was it's the same model as Bithorren, and Bithorren was never successfully attacked. or, you know, in any significant way. And I think for a protocol that deals with money or entails money, the attack surface is just potentated.

So basically saying Bittoran had the same model and they were fine, to me is not convincing enough. Yeah, and I think that this idea that BitTorrent was not attacked, it misses an entire aspect of that problem. BitTorrent was attacked and it was attacked by nation states. Like download a torrent file in Germany and you'll see what happens to you. Like you're going to get a letter in the mail and probably a fine like some hefty amount because you're transferring packets that look a certain way. And, you know, with R.Weave, obviously, it's different because the content isn't necessarily

or is less inherently, you know, of a, of potentially like an illegal nature in terms of the fact that like it, you know, violates copyright. But it could, right? Like content that gets sent on RWeef could potentially violate copyright. Or this is something we talked about briefly in the, in the episode with John Chippton is, you know, any, any protocol or any technology that gets built that potentially, you know, disrupts the power of a nation state can be attacked by external actors. It doesn't necessarily always have to be, you know, attacking the system itself. It could be attacking the system from a different sort of layer, which is like the legal layer.

Yeah. I also think he puts too large a burden on the miners. So basically, requiring the miners to basically screen what they want to save and whatnot from like a legal slash moral point of view. That seemed totally unscalable. That seemed, that to me seems undoable because there are so many different things that you are not allowed to do. And I still think that their approach is probably the right one, because I do think that copyright is not going to exist in the form that it exists today in the future. So basically kind of ignoring this, to me, is the right approach. But basically giving the short stick to the miners at this point in time and basically just

saying, look, we're just the protocol, the miners are the people who store the data. To me, that feels unjust. Yeah, and it doesn't scale. Like, just look at an organization like YouTube or SoundCloud, you know, like these are companies that have struggled with this, even though they're like massive companies have money, you know, and still it's difficult. You know, like YouTube still, I think,

takes down content that it shouldn't and also misses a bunch of content that it should take down it but doesn't. Yeah, for sure. But I think what kind of plays to the weev's advantages that miners can be based in different locations and that basically some places are much more relaxed about this, which I mean, basically, yeah,

I mean, jurisdictional arbitrage, right? Yeah, but jurisdictional arbitrage from the miner's perspective, but from the user's perspective, I mean, like, if all of a sudden on R-Weave, like, you have a bunch of Hollywood movies being stored, and, okay, maybe those, maybe the miners are in some country that is, you know, like, unscrupulous towards this stuff. But your users in the U.S., well, that's going to cause a problem for, you know, for those users in the U.S. that are using R.Weave. What do you think? Yeah.

Yeah. I see the point. I think copyright laws are going to change because basically I think the way that they are, they won't be sustainable in the long run just because they won't be enforceable. So I think, yeah, so basically, I think while it's a midterm issue,

it's probably not a very long-term issue, I think this is a super exciting project. I think basically having this Pama Web and having these applications that basically store information forever, I think this is super powerful. Yeah. Yeah, it is for sure.

Like, you know, if you go to their website, they already, like, they've got a bunch of applications there. There's, I don't know, maybe like a hundred? Yeah, it's like, it's like literally a hundred. And they even have a DAO basically to decide what kind of applications to sponsor and so on. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it certainly already have an ecosystem.

It has an ecosystem. Yeah, it has an ecosystem for sure. Like there's a thing here where you can send like a URL to a tweet. And it will create like a permanent picture of that tweet. There is a like a permapaste, which is like a kind of paste bin type thing. There's a blogging platform. So I'd be interested in taking my like own personal blog and moving it to RWeave and having it hosted there forever, like all my pictures and my stuff that I post on my blog and

stuff, not that anybody reads my blog, but it's like interesting, interesting experiment. Yeah. So what do you think? So I mean, in preparing for this, I had done a lot of reading and research on the sort of like storage, like the storage technology side. I hadn't done so many, so much research on the economics, so I'm glad that you had seemingly more preparation there. Is there anything here that you felt, you would have wanted to be a little bit more prepared for? If you had another chance to do this interview, where would you spend more time? I think I would have looked more into BitTorrent, because while I used BitTorrent at the time,

I'm not super intimately familiar with the optimistic Tid for TAT protocol. So I think I would have used more time to look into that. I didn't even know about the optimistic tip for that. I thought that all of the reputation and incentive mechanisms happened at the sort of like platform layer where we were talking about. I didn't know that the protocol itself had that kind of mechanism built into it. So it could be interesting at some point to do an episode about BitTorrent and like how it relates to. Because like some of the technologies in BitTorrent, you know, exist in Bitcoin and exist.

in like all these other systems. Didn't the BitTorrent guy, you know, like concede all his, you know, rights to BitTorrent and so on to Tron a while ago? I think so. Yeah. I think he's no, and I think he's no longer allowed to talk about it. At least that's what I took away from this. I didn't know he wasn't allowed to talk about it.

Yeah, but maybe you should ask Justin's son. Yeah. So any final final thoughts here? I thought Sam was for a technologist. He was really good at putting things in a larger context and constructing this vision for how he'd like the perma web to be. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like he seems to be quite a visionary from that perspective, I think.

which, you know, it's not surprising that like A16Z and USB, you know, in multi-coin and invested in their project, I think like they are funds that, you know, often will stand behind projects that are highly visionary and have like this long-term vision and it's like a reflection in him. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks for doing this. Absolutely. I wouldn't have it any other way.