By utilizing Arweave, a single up-front payment ensures that your data is both immutable and permanent with miners economically incentivized to replicate the data, greatly increasing its fault tolerance and censorship resistance. 🐘🚀
For data to be permanent it must be...
- Fault tolerant (multiple replicas in multiple locations)
- Tamper Proof (detect alterations with hashes)
- Paid for (profitable for the storage providers)
Permanent data is not only immutable, it also has assurances around the fault tolerance of its data. For that, permanent data requires multiple copies (replicas) of the data and it's best if replicas are distributed globally making them difficult to alter all at once.
If the immutable storage solution has only a single copy of our data and that copy has been altered it's going to be difficult for us to reverse any detected alterations.
This is the pivotal difference between permanent data and immutable data.🤩
Let's consider a storage solution that provides immutable data. If the data is hashed when stored, detecting any alterations to the data will be easy.
That's great! 🥳 But once an alteration is detected how do we go about restoring the original data? 🤔
If the original data is altered even by a single bit, applying a hash function will result a completely different hash. This makes it easy to detect any changes made to the original data as the new hash won't match the original.
This means anyone with a copy of the data can run the hash function on it producing a new hash to compare with the original. If the hashes match it's an exact copy.
If someone has only the hash, they can't recreate the original data making hashes safe to share in public.🔒
For that, we use a mathematical formula called a one-way function to calculate a unique digital fingerprint (known as a hash) for the data. 🕵️
This "hash function" is easy to calculate in one direction but practically impossible to calculate in the opposite direction.
Immutability is the concept of making data unalterable after storing it. Storage devices often allow modification of data, making it difficult to ensure it remains unaltered. 😔
So, to achieve immutability, we first need a means of detecting if alterations occur.🤔
See the following video for examples of this regulation worldwide… youtu.be/6-GO8QMM-sI