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Proofreader: Orange @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Reviewer: Viya @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Yeah, so let's dive in. I’ll talk about how the Arweave mechanism works. So today, we're going to be talking about scaling Arweave and discussing the scaling of on-chain history from Bitcoin to Arweave. We'll delve into the history of storing human history on blockchains, unlock on-chain data, and explore where we go from here.
Human history has always been part of blockchains. To see how, we have to go back to the first block of the first decentralized blockchain, which is Bitcoin's Genesis block. Bitcoin's Genesis block had a single transaction in it, known as a coinbase transaction. This special transaction in the protocol awarded the producer of the block with the block rewards. In this case, it awarded Satoshi Nakamoto 50 BTC. Another special property of the coin-based transaction was that it allowed the block producer to write 100 bytes or 100 characters of information to the blockchain. In this case, Satoshi took the opportunity to write the following quote: "The Times 3rd of January 2009 Chancellor on the brink of a second bailout for banks." In doing so, he inscribed human history into the very first block of the first blockchain.
Bitcoin launched in January 2009 and proceeded to get a number of updates and improvements. Even Satoshi himself stepped back from the protocol during this time, up until about 2015. During this period, a conflict started brewing within the Bitcoin community. Half of the community wanted to increase the block size to allow more transactions in Bitcoin, while the other half wanted to keep it small to preserve the decentralized properties of the network. This conflict stalled all development on Bitcoin for about two years, called the block size wars. It ended with the big blockers splitting off and creating a new chain called Bitcoin Cash, while the existing mainline of Bitcoin continued with a soft fork called SegWit.
Now, what did SegWit do? Well, you can see here on the left that before SegWit, Bitcoin blocks had their coinbase transactions, followed by a number of transactions moving tokens from one address to another, and their signatures.
After SegWit, somehow they did this with a soft fork, which meant it was backwards compatible with existing mining software (some sort of magic there). SegWit moved all of the transactions to the top of the block and increased the overall block size while still limiting the transaction portion to 1 megabyte, preserving the original intent of the protocol. What it did was move the signature data and metadata into the witness data, increasing the amount of information that Bitcoin could store that wasn't purely transaction data. This ultimately led to some pretty interesting things down the road, like very compressed images being added to the witness data of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Going back to 2017, a Ph.D. student by the name of Sam Williams was reading some very depressing books like "Gulag Archipelago" and "1984". He worked himself up into a frenzy and decided to create a blockchain to permanently preserve the world's knowledge. He was reading these books about how authoritarian regimes manipulate their society by manipulating history. So Sam put together a team sometime in 2017, and a year later, Arweave Mainnet was launched. And if you thought I was kidding about the depressing books, it was launched on June 2018, which was the 39th anniversary of the publishing of George Orwell's "1984."
Now, Arweave had some impressive stats when it launched. It had 1,000 transactions per block and operated at 2-minute block times. Each transaction could be 5.8 megabytes in size. That means a single Arweave transaction could store an entire Bitcoin block - witness data and transaction data together. Just like Bitcoin, Arweave progressed with updates and improvements over the next couple of years until March 2020.