Arweave’s potential is to revive the Library of Alexandria, not a Filecoin alternative (www.blockcast.cc)

Why is Arweave not a replacement for Filecoin, but a major innovation that deserves more attention?

Written by: Liu Yi, Founder of Cdot Network, Partner of Random Capital

Arweave is “atypical” block chain project, most people know nothing about them, who have some understanding, often see it as one of many rans Filecoin of decentralized storage project. Very few friends who have the patience to find the white papers and yellow papers of the project, they will inevitably be confused after reading them. Because the whole article is about the unpopular concept-” permanent storage of information “, I can’t see the concepts of expansion, cryptography innovation, DeFi support, value capture, etc. that can make the currency and chain circles shine.

Who needs a persistent data store and paid for? Life is only a hundred years old, why should we care about preserving human knowledge and history forever?

The founder of Arweave and the core team have their own reasons for being unique. As the Chinese translator of the Arweave Yellow Paper , I intend to interpret Arweave from the perspective of a typical currency circle and chain circle, so as not to miss domestic blockchain entrepreneurs and investors with this major innovation. First of all, please allow me to Arweave transliterated as “Avi” (although the Chinese name is still Chinese community discussion, not yet finalized) in order to facilitate the spread of encryption in the Chinese community.

Comparison of Avi and Filecoin/IPFS

IPFS is the central storage area of pioneers, from the beginning of 2014 on the line, like BT generally free growth, a large amount of data has been stored. But let IPFS become commercially available storage systems, rather than random data sharing platform, we must provide a quality of service guarantee. This is the problem Filecoin wants to solve, which is the economic incentive layer of IPFS. From the time when the Filecoin concept was proposed to the “coming soon” launch of the mainnet this year, it can be described as a long delay. As developed IPFS, libp2p and other hard-core technology laboratory protocol (Protocol Labs), why the delay can not handle Filecoin?

Filecoin agreement to build the two markets: data storage market and data extraction market. Users with storage needs go to the data storage market to declare their needs: I want to store data of ** size, require ** copies, and store it for ** days. Storage service providers (storage miners) in the market quote this storage demand, and users accept the quotation and sign a contract with the miner and pay the fee. When users need to use data, they will go to the data extraction market to put forward their needs; then the extraction miners will give a quotation to meet the data access needs.

The above process does not seem complicated, but there are several difficulties in implementation:

1. Miners need to provide a password stored unforgeable user data science to prove;
2. During the validity period of the contract, the agreement shall continue to check that the miners have kept the data as agreed. If the contract is breached, the miner will be fined;
3. In order to encourage miners to store data and make data storage capacity than has been vacant for more additional capacity to earn rewards. At the same time, it is necessary to prevent miners from defrauding additional issuance rewards by water injection garbage data.

Filecoin copy proof design (PoRe) to solve the first problem, the use of time and space to prove (PoTS) and pledge mechanism to solve the problem 2. By precisely tuned economic models [1], and the introduction of certification of real users to solve the third problem.

Although Filecoin solves the above problems to a certain extent, it inevitably produces some undesirable consequences. The first is the high complexity of the system, in addition to the miners to pay the necessary costs of storage, but also bear the cost of the option proved costly and pledged Filecoin loss. You know, relatively speaking, computing is more expensive than storage. According Filecoin provided for small-scale mining [2] recommended configuration [3], 8TB SSD hard drive for only $ 300, but AMD 3.5Ghz 16-core high-end CPU will need $ 700, as well as the cost of more than $ 500 at least 128GB of Memory (for comparison, the recommended minimum memory for Avi Mining is 8GB).

High mining costs will inevitably lead to higher prices Filecoin storage service system. In addition, verifying real users is a delicate issue. Too strict verification will affect user experience, and too wide to prevent miners from pretending to be users. Verification loses its meaning, and the balance between them is difficult to grasp.

Meanwhile, Filecoin as an encryption asset, the price will be highly correlated with the overall encryption market, that volatility is high. If the price of Filecoin plummets, miners may confess to leave the market, causing loss of user data. In addition substantial price fluctuations has increased the cost of embedded options of miners pledged Filecoin. Implied option costs are ignored by most PoS economic model studies. I believe that at least the option cost of the lock-up period should be taken into account (some people even think that the option cost of the entire lock-up period should be calculated).

Unlock period from the unlock request made to get through the period tradable permit, during the pledge person can not be transferred through certificate, the equivalent of giving up a European option price (different from the American option, European option can only be exercised expire) [4]. Take Tezos as an example, suppose the current price and the exercise price are both US$2.53, the annualized volatility is 185% [5], the unlock period is 14 days (a longer unlock period means higher option costs), and a risk-free interest rate 4% (does not affect the calculation result), using the BS option calculator [6], the value of each European option is 0.363 USD (because the exercise price is equal to the current price, the call and put options are equal in value), which is equivalent to the value of the principal 14.3%. It can be seen that due to the high volatility of encrypted token prices, the implicit option cost caused by pledge should not be ignored.

Filecoin protocol storage and retrieval is divided into two markets, we need to create two sets of incentives and pricing, and user access to the data can not be guaranteed. Suppose you store important data through Filecoin and pay a certain amount of storage fees. Follow you or other users (such as your client) to access the data, but also according to market prices to pay extract, extract if the market price is high, the equivalent data miners “held hostage”, the user is facing either pay a premium or migrate data Dilemma.

I read the Filecoin white paper in 2017 and then gave up on the project. The programmer’s intuition tells me that complex extrapolation schemes usually fail. What is an extrapolation scheme? It is a solution that comes naturally without deep thinking about the problem, and it can also be called a ” take it for granted. ” Filecoin extrapolation is this: Now that the miners need to (continue to) prove that the user has been properly preserved data, the protocol should include a set of cryptographic algorithms to achieve these certificates. As for the highly complex proof that inevitably brings high system complexity and high cost, it can only be left to be solved slowly in the future. But Filecoin competitors – centralized cloud storage does not require proof and verification, signed between the cloud service vendors and customers is a legal contract, the law ensure that the customer’s access rights and recourse. It can be seen that as long as it proves that the cost remains high, it is difficult for decentralized storage to provide competitive prices.

Sia, Storj other agreements, although technically different and Filecoin / IPFS, but they are all based on the contract of decentralized storage protocols. That is, the user and the miner sign a contract through an agreement, the user pays the fees stipulated in the contract, the miner assumes the obligations stipulated in the contract, the agreement (or the user) checks (challenges) the performance of the miner, and punishes the breach of contract. Contract-based decentralized storage protocols all face the basic problems analyzed above.

Science and technology development is normal, when most people tried to “take it for granted way” to solve complex problems, someone could open a new path, with others unexpected, usually much simpler way to solve problems. Sure enough, after three years of observing the field of decentralized storage, by chance, I learned about ” Arweave ” -the decentralized storage breaker.

Only understand Filecoin difficult to understand Avi’s clever. Avi is a complete decentralized storage protocol, not based on IPFS, or it is equivalent to Filecoin + IPFS. How does Avi solve the problem of miner certification? The answer is no proof. Avi agreement as much as possible data stored by a mechanism designed to encourage the miners, and less of a priority store a copy of the scarcity of data. As for how much each miner has saved and what has been saved, that is the miner’s own business, and neither need proof nor inspection. Just like the school expects students to study hard, two methods can be adopted. One is that the teacher is staring at everyone every day, whether he listens attentively, completes his homework carefully, and criticizes and punishes those who are not serious. Another method is to pass the exam, no matter how usually learn to speak with final exams, do well with prizes. Both methods can improve the learning effect, but obviously the second one is much simpler.

Contract-based decentralized storage is similar to “peer-to-person”, and the Avi protocol is like ” exam “. This method is called incentive-based decentralized storage. You can intuitively understand its advantages like this: Filecoin has to manage thousands of different storage contracts, check the execution of each contract, and provide rewards or penalties. The Avi Agreement deals with only one contract- all data is stored permanently . Therefore, the agreement is very simple, the operating cost is low, and the price and reliability of the service are better than the contract-based system.

Avi’s ” Proof of Visit ” (PoA) is a simple extension of PoW. Each round PoW puzzles related to a past block (memory block) is related only to store the memories of the miners are eligible to participate block PoW quiz. Since the recall block is randomly determined and cannot be predicted in advance, the more blocks the miner stores, the greater the chance of participating in the PoW quiz, and the higher the probability of obtaining block rewards. If the miner’s storage space is limited and cannot save all the block history, he will preferentially save the blocks with fewer copies in the network. Because each block was selected with equal probability recalls block, when a block is selected as scarce memories of the block, only a few miners PoW eligible to participate in the competition, the memory block to the scarcity of the miners more favorable.

A friend might ask, if all the nodes are not just a memory block that this block is not permanently lost yet? Yes, this possibility exists. However, we can quantify the risk of permanent loss of a single block [7].

Necessary to introduce the concept of copy, the copy rate is the ratio of the average block-old miner stored. For example, there are 100 blocks in the network, and each miner stores 60 blocks on average, so the replication rate is 60%. Copy rate also choose one miner, he has a certain probability of randomly selected blocks. Conversely, a certain block and a certain miner are randomly selected, and the probability that the miner does not have this block is 1-copy rate. When there are N miner nodes in the network, the probability that all miners do not have a certain block is (1-copy rate)^N. The probability of a missing block is (1-copy rate)^N * total number of blocks.

Assuming that the Avi network has 200 miner nodes, the replication rate is 50%, and the total number of blocks is 200,000, then the probability of a missing block is 6.223*10^-61, which is a very small probability event that can be ignored. Avy current network node miners about 330, the printing ratio is 97%, has a plurality of blocks 510 000 [8], the probability of missing the presence of a block is much lower than even the foregoing results, the order of comparable to the probability of collision of the private key. Moreover, the assumption of the above calculation is that miners store block history randomly. Considering that miners store scarce blocks first, the possibility of losing blocks is lower.

Avi agreement is only one market, users only need to pay storage fees, follow-up data access is free of charge. This is possible because the Avi protocol uses a mechanism design similar to BT [9], all nodes in the network are equal (no distinction between miner nodes and user nodes), and all nodes respond to requests from other nodes as quickly as possible . Like BT, the more upstream contribution, the faster the downstream speed. Selfish nodes will be demoted by other nodes and gradually excluded by the network.

To fully understand the design of the Avi protocol, the best way is to read the Yellow Book . Although the Yellow Paper is longer and contains many formulas, don’t worry, you can understand it if you have a foundation in middle school mathematics.

Compared with Filecoin, Avi Network has two major advantages. First, the cost is low. Although the Filecoin mainnet has not yet been launched, I will make a prediction in advance: one year after the Filecoin mainnet is launched (the economic model enters a stable state), the price of making hundreds of copies of 1MB files on the Avi network for permanent storage will be lower than before The price of 5 copies stored on the Filecoin/IPFS network for 5 years, and the data access of the Avi network is permanently free. Second, incentives Avi protocol of the data storage and access are more reliable. By concisely and ingeniously solved the biggest problem of decentralized storage, without the need for US$200 million in fundraising and three years of development, the Avi mainnet has been online for more than two years.

Avi is not Filecoin / IPFS accompany runners, but most want to make large-scale decentralized data storage a reality encryption protocol.

Comparison of Avi and Ethereum

Avi rarely be compared with Ethernet Square, after all, Web3.0 protocol stack, they are at different levels, it appears to be a complementary relationship. But if you study the Avi agreement in depth, you will discover more possibilities.

Ethernet Square (and other smart public contracts chain) to support decentralized application DApp born. DApps are Internet applications that are executed fairly and transparently and cannot be controlled by an individual or a few people. From the perspective of software architecture, network applications (including Internet applications and DApps) can be divided into three layers: performance, business logic, and persistence (data). We might as well analyze the development bottleneck of DApp and the application potential of the Avi protocol from these three layers.

So far, DApp the presentation layer and still stay in the same centralized Web application state, that is deployed by the developer in the cloud server, and then downloaded to the user client performs. Therefore, developers and cloud service providers still have the right to stop and review DApp of network outages, server downtime, DNS hijacking attacks and other failures and still threatens the security and availability of DApp. In addition, the IT infrastructure cost of DApps will increase with the growth of the number of users, so developers must adopt certain monetization methods to maintain the operation of DApps. Monetization means either Web2.0 style, namely the sale of flow; features either with encryption protocol, namely through issuing certificates. Once monetization fails, developers may give up running DApps, and users can only look for alternatives. And even if there are alternatives, they still face the same problem. DApps that can be kept running often encounter the problem of ” forced upgrade “, that is, the new version may not be more popular with users than the old version, but users cannot prevent it from upgrading or continue to use the old version.

In summary, the presentation layer to the center of the application is still centralized, it can still be an individual or a few people control.

Avi application layer protocol is called Eternal Network (permaweb), the main (not the only) application architecture is no server (Serverless) style. The development of serverless DApp is similar to the front-end development of traditional Web. Developers use HTML, Javascript and CSS to develop the presentation layer of DApp. The difference is that the deployment of the presentation layer is not uploaded to the cloud server, but stored in a packed Avi network, saving costs low, and is a paid service forever. Users still use the original way to access DApp, Avi DNS and TLS are compatible with ordinary browsers, and users do not need to install and learn to use new clients. No matter how the DApp users grow, it will no longer incur expenses for developers.

Because Avi is a decentralized network, whether developers or Avi miners can not stop or review the user DApp. Developers can develop a new version of DApp, but the new version cannot overwrite the old version. The user has the right to choose which version to use. Visible Avi achieve a decentralized DApp presentation layer, so that more and more DApp the presentation layer to transplant Avi, including: Synthetix Exchange, Tokenlon, KyberSwap, UniSwap, Oasis App, Curve.fi etc. [10 ].

It should be noted that the concept of using decentralized storage to achieve the decentralization of the DApp presentation layer is not the creation of the Avi protocol. As early as 2014, Dr. Gavin Wood listed ” static content publishing ” as one of the four basic components of Web3.0 in his paper describing the network form of Web3.0 [11]. The practical result of this thinking is the Swarm project [12]. Both Swarm and IPFS had high hopes to solve the decentralization problem of the DApp presentation layer. However, due to various reasons, this wish has not yet been realized. It was not until the emergence of the Avi Agreement that the decentralization of the DApp presentation layer had a practical solution.

Fong intelligent Ethernet chain to achieve a fair contract DApp business logic layer and data layer to the center, but we all know there is scalability bottlenecks. Scalability and price are two-sided issues. Scalability limitations stem from the scarcity of computing and storage resources. In a decentralized network, the result of competition for scarce resources is high prices. As the price easier to quantify, we selected for analysis from the price point of view.

Look at the data layer. It takes 20,000 gas to store 256-bit integer data in Ethereum [13], and 625 million gas to store 1MB of data. Press the gas price 20gwei (DeFi boom coincided with the time of this writing, the price of gas up to 100gwei often more), ETH unit price of $ 400, spend 1MB of data stored on the Ethernet Square chain up to $ 5,000, is obviously difficult to afford the high price. Most DApps with data storage requirements adopt a hybrid storage solution, that is, the hash of high-value data such as encrypted assets and attachments is stored on the chain, and the detailed data and multimedia data are stored off the chain. If downlink data storage centralized, such as relational databases or NoSQL database, DApp is still part of the center, it will still be individual or small number of people (cloud service vendors and developers) control. Therefore, many DApps prefer to choose decentralized storage, such as IPFS.

In this link, Avi provides a completely decentralized, low-cost, high-reliability permanent data storage, thus becoming the right assistant of Ethereum. You do not have to sacrifice to the center, currently Avi 1MB data storage only 0.1 cents. You read it right, it is one-five millionth of Ethereum. At current prices, the cost of storing 1MB of data in Alibaba Cloud for 100 years is 2.6 cents. And only supports intra-city redundant replication, and the network overhead for data synchronization and data access is charged separately. And Avi network is the world’s five continents hundreds of nodes redundant replication, data synchronization and access all free of charge. You did not read right, to the center of Avignon network has less than the center of the cloud storage prices. No wonder Solana [14], SKALE [15 ], Prometeus [16] , etc. Layer 1, Layer 2, DApp protocol selection Avy as a data storage layer. There are also NFT projects such as InfiNFT, Mintbase.io and Machi X that use Avi to store NFT media resources, metadata and codes [17].

Intelligent contract is DApp business logic. Similar to the data layer, the bottleneck of smart contracts is scalability/computing cost issues. According to Vitalik Buterin ‘s estimation, the calculation and storage cost of Ethereum is about 1 million times that of Amazon’s cloud service[18]. The previous estimate of the DApp data layer cost can also confirm this estimate. Male chain computing and storage is expensive root cause its fully redundant architecture, i.e., all of the EU data are each stored in a full node, all calculations are performed in each node a whole. Thinks chain expansion has public representative, stratified and fragmented are three more in-depth discussion, see my book ” Polkadot analytical framework .”

Avi’s Smartweave smart contract [19] takes a completely different approach. Smartweave smart contract is a program developed by Javascript, stored on the Avi network, so it is immutable. Submitted to the network for storage at the same time as the contract code is the creation state of the contract. And Ethernet Square (and other public chain) smart contract different, Smartweave nodes are not executed by the miners, but downloaded to a computer to perform the contract caller. The execution process starts from the creation state of the contract, executes all transactions in the contract history in a certain order, and finally executes the transaction of the contract caller. After completion, the caller of the contract submits the input of his own transaction and the state of the contract after execution to the Avi Network for permanent storage. Repeat the above process for subsequent contract calls.

That is, for a sum of intelligent contracts, Avi only one network node – the caller’s own nodes to perform (Note Avi network node does not distinguish between full and light client). Because the caller node to perform (and to verify) the history of all transactions on the contract, so he need not trust or rely on any node, you can get credible results (that is, smart new state contracts). Therefore, we can put each Smartweave contracts are seen as two-story chain Avi performs intelligent full amount of the contract is two-story chain synchronization and verification. This design allows scalability DApp business logic / computation cost problems solved. Smart contracts can almost unrestrictedly contain any complex calculations, and only need to pay a very low marginal cost, because usually the caller’s computing equipment has been purchased or long-term leased.

Some friends may ask: As the number of transactions increases, isn’t the execution of smart contracts getting slower and slower? It is true, but there are ways to think of it. For example, name the results of state contracts by the caller, to form a snapshot of the state contract. If the caller is trustworthy (for example, if the caller is a smart contract developer), subsequent callers can specify the state snapshot as the initial state, and only need to execute the transaction after the snapshot. The state snapshot does not necessarily lead to the expansion of the trust set. After all, the premise of the reliability of the smart contract already includes the trust in the initial state.

Of course, Smartweave is still under development and the current version is V0.3 . The above content should be regarded as a discussion of the potential of Smartweave. To achieve commercial use, Smartweave also need to solve many problems, such as composable.

From my understanding of the operating mechanism of Smartweave, there are no special technical barriers to achieving composability. However, I always think that the composability of Ethereum smart contracts is ” too powerful ” that it is difficult to limit the exponential growth of the contract system complexity. I look forward to more surprising innovations from the Smartweave team and make good use of the double-edged sword of composability.

To sum up, Avi protocol support DApp truly comprehensive decentralization, and the field for many years to solve the problems of the public chain of computing and storage scalability / cost. In this sense, Avi should be classified as the “Web3.0 full-stack protocol ” advocated by Blockstack [20], not just decentralized storage.

Comparison of Avi and Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the pioneer of cryptographic protocols and the king of cryptocurrencies. There has always been a topic of debate in the industry: Is it possible for Bitcoin to be replaced? Even Bitcoin royalist, also admitted that after 10 years of development, Bitcoin no longer the most technologically advanced encryption currency. But they believe that the super-sovereign store of value currency is the biggest use case for cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin protocol has the longest running time, the highest reputation, and the best security. And technical barriers to competition are not encrypted currency liquidity. Liquidity has a network effect, which is a mechanism by which the utility of a product or service increases as users grow. Bitcoin protocol has established liquidity, this advantage will only continue to increase as the popularity of encryption currency. Therefore, Bitcoin’s king status is unshakable.

Could the advantage of liquidity network effect be broken? Answering this question requires a quantitative study of network effects. I believe many people will immediately think of Metcalfe’s Law, that is proportional to the value of the network and the number of users squared. Metcalfe’s Law is the first quantitative model of network effects, but recent studies show that there is no value for network growth by Metcalfe’s Law, at least to a large number of users, the network value growth curve inevitable Becomes flat [21].

Studies have shown [22] that the network effect of some Internet services is n*log(n), and some are S-curves . The S-curve is an exponential growth in which the value of the network increases with users. It is an exponential growth that slows first and then grows faster. After reaching saturation, the growth rate slows down. The important inference of the S-curve is that the stronger the stronger is true, but it is not the winner takes all. If the network effect of all Internet platforms are in line with Metcalfe’s Law, then in each of the segments of the Internet industry, will form a single oligopolistic situation. But the reality is that there is more than one platform, regardless of long-standing in the world or China’s Internet industry, most of the field segments.

So what is the network effect mobility curve (formula) growth? Assuming a certain crypto asset, the average daily transaction volume of each participant accounts for one ten thousandth of the total market value of the asset. The average daily turnover rate of 10,000 investors is 100%, and the turnover rate of 20,000 investors is 200%. That is, 10,000 investors are added, and the turnover rate has doubled. If investors increase from 100,000 to 110,000, the turnover rate increases from 1,000% to 1,100%, which is only a tenth increase. So the more investors, the smaller the contribution of new investors to the liquidity ratio, the number of participants in its network effect and the relationship was log (n) of.

The above quantitative models and pictures of liquidity network effects are all from the research of Multicoin Capital [23]. The conclusions of this research are very important. For example, exchanges compete for liquidity. After the top exchanges reach a certain scale, the value growth brought by liquidity network effects will slow down, giving latecomers a chance to catch up. If it is a network effect where liquidity is n*log(n) or even n-square, Binance, Kucoin, and MXC will not break out of the siege, and there will be no tens of thousands of exchanges. log (n) illustrate the relationship between the number, the stronger the greater the mobility is, there is no guarantee Hengqiang.

There is another factor that makes Bitcoin’s liquidity advantage easier to break, which I call ” liquidity conduction .” The newborn is able to use encryption currency has established global trading network, which share liquidity with existing encryption currency. For example, when an Ethernet Square born, including exchange and payment platform and other infrastructure, including industry has developed six years, they are easily integrated ETH. As long as ETH forms a highly liquid trading pair with Bitcoin, it is indirectly liquid with the main legal currency. Therefore, Ethereum no longer needs to go through a long market introduction and infrastructure construction stage, and it has become a highly liquid encryption currency.

In the state of free competition, the comparison between the currency is monetary. Currency includes scarcity, interchangeability, verifiability (difficult to forge, easy to identify), accessibility, divisibility, and the cost of preservation, carrying, and transfer. All cryptocurrencies are direct descendants of Bitcoin, and they all inherit the strong currency of Bitcoin. Before Ethereum, the theme of cryptocurrency innovation was ” Better Bitcoin, ” which is to create a more monetary cryptocurrency. For example litecoin, reaching the World coins, stars currency transfers faster, lower transaction fees. ZCash, Monroe coins privacy better, more secure interchangeability, but they are not a threat to the status of Bitcoin. Because quantitative improvements are not enough to challenge the advantages of network effects, qualitative innovation is necessary to achieve ” paradigm shift .” For example, Microsoft did not invent a better mainframe to defeat IBM, nor did Apple defeat Microsoft with a better PC. Revolutionary innovators are old overlord of the implementation of dimensionality reduction combat, only to become the new king.

The industry generally agree that Ethernet Square is 2.0 block chain representatives, because Ethernet Square is a new level of innovation by introducing EVM, so that money has a powerful encryption programmability. Generational innovation is not something you can do that I can do better, but what I can do that you can’t.

Intelligent Ethernet Square contract enables decentralized asset issuance, fund raising and asset transactions, on a wave of ICO, ETH is treated as the main currency and a store of value and requirement for ETH skyrocketing, also contributed to its market value up to 60% of BTC. Of course, ICO serious information asymmetry, inevitably produce widespread adverse selection and moral hazard problems, the bubble burst is the inevitable result. Highly programmable cryptocurrencies have endless room for innovation, and the rise of DeFi will be a new round of challenges for Bitcoin by Ethereum . Unfortunately, the value capture mechanism of ETH is not sound. If EIP1559 was implemented in the early years, ETH should have entered a deflationary stage, and the DeFi boom is likely to push its market value beyond BTC.

There are two major investment themes in the crypto asset market: sound currency and Web3.0. Sound money is decentralized, encrypted super-sovereign currency to Bitcoin represented. Web3.0 is the application of the block chain technology, reconstruction of the social relations of production, on behalf of the project is an Ethernet Square. I believe that sound money and Web3.0 two major investment themes can have both, that is decentralized, highly programmable block chain platform, both to support the Web3.0, its native encryption assets along with the nature of sound money, it is You can have both fish and bear paws and become the king of cryptocurrency in the future. The new king should have the following properties: highly decentralized (implying super-sovereignty), wide range of uses, low externalities of consensus protocols, good scarcity, highly programmable, and compliant.

In view of the scalability issues of Ethereum 1.0, even ascending to the throne is difficult to last. Which project is the representative of Blockchain 3.0? Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Cosmos and Avi Protocol are all strong competitors. Avi encryption protocol also has become the king of potential currency:

• The degree of decentralization is high , and the network will not be controlled by individuals, institutions or governments;
• Widely used , as a Web3.0 full-stack protocol, it is an ideal platform for all kinds of decentralized application innovation;
• PoA consensus will not be a lot of extra power consumption, discussed in detail in the next chapter;
• The AR, the original token of the Avi Agreement, has a low issuance rate and a good scarcity. For detailed discussion, see the next chapter;
• Highly programmable , smart contract Turing complete. Both DApp and smart contract adopt mature web technologies such as Javascript, which is conducive to the formation of a wide and diverse developer community;
• Avi is very similar to Ethereum, conducting ICO before the mainnet launch. After the mainnet went live, functional tokens were distributed. ETH Ethernet function is to be paid Square computing and storage costs; AR function is to pay storage costs Avi network. As time goes by, AR is used by more and more people, and currency holdings are becoming more and more dispersed, which conforms to the legal definition of bulk (virtual) commodities.

Detailed explanation of Avi economic model

Economic model encryption protocol is how to coordinate the service provider (the miners), the relationship between the interests of the service user (user) and holding cash at hand. Miners provide computing, bandwidth, and storage resources for the encryption protocol network to ensure that the protocol is safe and available, and users must pay the miners to use the protocol. Miners earnings divided into two parts: First, the user direct transaction costs paid; the second is a new agreement to distribute certificates to the miners through casting, that additional incentives. The additional issuance reward is a seigniorage tax shared by all token holders according to the number of tokens held. In almost all cryptographic protocol economic models, the main income of miners is additional issuance rewards (seigniorage). For example, although Bitcoin has been halved after three additional reward, the additional reward miners still accounted for 95% of total revenue, accounting for only 5% transaction fee. This is actually a mechanism by which token holders subsidize the user’s use of the agreement.

In all encryption protocol I have studied the economic model, the economic model Avi agreement is to hold out the most friendly person. In the genesis block, 55 million ARs are generated by the agreement, and then ARs will be issued in each block. The calculation formula for the additional issuance is as follows:

among them:

Bringing in the constant, the formula is simplified to:

The Avi protocol averages a block of 2 minutes. After the genesis block, each block will issue about 29 additional ARs. The amount of additional issuance is halved every year, with a total of 11 million additional ARs being issued. In other words, Avi main Internet line each year after June 2018, will dig out the remaining half of the AR, the first year of 5.5 million AR dug, dug 275 the second year, third year dig 137.5 Ten thousand… (Avi’s mainnet was launched in June 2018, and there is a two-month lag in rewards for block production).

At the time of writing this article, Avi network is facing a second halved (estimated to be around 2020 No. 10 September). One year after the second halving (that is, the third year), the issuance rate is 137.5/(5500+550+275) = 2.17%. By the fourth year, the issuance rate of AR will be lower than that of Bitcoin during the same period.

Another scarcity indicator may be more convincing, the rate to be mined = unmined/total. At present, there are only about 1.98 million unmined ARs, and the unmined rate is 3% . As a comparison, there are currently about 2.55 million BTCs that have not been mined, and the rate to be mined is 12%. It can be seen that the amount of additional issuance of AR is small, and the rate of additional issuance decays quickly, which has the typical characteristics of high scarcity of sound currencies.

But the reader’s attention, according to figures provided by Avi team, AR current liquidity of about 38 million, which means that there are about 26 million non-tradable state in AR.我不清楚这部分通证的所有权构成和解锁计划，只能推测其属于早期投资者、团队和基金会。如果有人了解这方面的情况，请告知作者，不胜感激。

阿维经济模型的原则可以大致概括为：用户为 存储服务 支付足够的费用；矿工的 收益超过成本 ，维持基本的大致固定的利润率；持币者获得AR 通证增值的几乎全部收益。按照AR 此前长期盘整的币价4 美元计算，今年阿维矿工从增发获得收益为550 万美元 ，这些收益将由全球数百个矿工节点分享。与此相比，比特币矿工每天获得的增发收益高达1000 万美元以上，每年超过36 亿美元。

阿维PoW （作为PoA 访问证明的一部分） 采用RandomX 算法 [24] 。RandomX 是一种CPU 友好的算法，需要大量内存执行，专用硬件的优势很小。继阿维协议之后，门罗币于2019 年11 月将PoW 算法升级为RandomX [25] ，作为对ASIC 挖矿 的最新（也许是最后） 的抵抗。鉴于阿维挖矿不是单纯的算力竞争，而且挖矿的总体收益有限，阿维很可能不会形成专门的挖矿产业链，而是保持全球几百个挖矿节点（有些节点会成为矿池） 和 较高的复制率水平 ，网络电力消耗不高。主流挖矿硬件很可能不是ASIC 矿机，而是普通商用计算机。

当然，不排除在AR 热度提高后，有人会推销阿维矿机。那时候你应该了解，购买阿维矿机几乎不可能带来像样的回报。长远看来，阿维可能成为Web3.0 去中心化CDN 网络 ，届时面向企业的CDN 服务才是阿维矿工的核心商业模式。

阿维与加密资产投资

从2013 年初开始投资比特币，从此后的7 年多时间里，我听许多人谈起过，如何得知比特币、对比特币的第一印象、如何与巨额财富擦肩而过等等。有个一直困扰我的问题是： 是什么决定了我们当时对比特币的看法？大多数人浑不在意，部分人认定比特币是披着高科技外衣的资金盘，少数人出于各种不同的心理投资比特币或者开始挖矿，其中又有极少数坚持下来，被比特币改变了命运。

这 极少数的人 常被当作预见了未来的天才。但是要知道任何一项新奇的事务，都有一群早期参与者，但在无数的新奇事务中，对社会产生广泛影响的寥寥无几。与其把早期参与比特币而一跃成为大佬的人视为天才，倒不如说他们是幸运儿。但问题是，这样的鸿运是否以大致相等的概率随机地降临到每个人头上？以我这些年对这个问题的思考，可能也不尽然。

对大多数人来说，加密资产市场 最多算是赌场 。在牛市中赚取的几倍或更高的收益，很容易就在熊市里悉数交还给市场，甚至还要赔上本金。根本原因在于，加密协议的失败率非常高。直接的证据是，五年前还位列市值榜前十的加密货币[26] ，到今天 大部分已经归零 或者接近归零。

加密协议不是解决一切问题的 万能良方 。现在市场上数以千计的加密协议，试图建立各种无信任的互联网平台。但是在五到十年之后，会有相当大一部分加密协议的出发点被证明是错的，也就是加密协议不适用于这些领域。而在那些适用的领域，由于加密协议具有网络效应、没有地域限制能够服务全球用户，在同一领域内获得成功的加密协议数量应该是屈指可数。因此在五到十年的时间里，现有市场上的数千种加密资产，绝大多数都会归零或者接近归零。

理性的投资者为什么甘愿冒着归零风险投资加密资产？在2014 年中，比特币正处于上一轮熊市的低谷，美国司法官办公室分四次公开拍卖10 万枚比特币。硅谷著名的风险投资家、德丰杰投资的掌门人Tim Draper拍下来其中的大部分。拍卖结束后，Tim Draper 接受媒体采访解释了他买入比特币的逻辑。他说比特币很有可能会归零，但也有一定概率涨上百倍，所以是一项很好的投资。假定在他买入开始的五年以后，比特币80% 概率归零，20% 的概率涨了100 倍。那么这项投资的期望收益率是 每年82% ，显然高于长期国债的无风险收益率。

我看到了拍卖的新闻，也听到了Tim Draper 对他投资逻辑的解读。我认同他的逻辑，所以又用一笔能亏得起的资金，加仓了比特币。事实证明，这个投资逻辑是成立的。

在加密资产市场大获成功的人都是乐观的、关注大问题的 长期主义者 。所谓大问题就是影响互联网乃至人类社会发展的基本问题。在2011 年、2013 年甚至2015 年，你都可以列出比特币将会失败的上百条理由，这些理由也都站得住脚。但是如果你关注以下几个大问题（或者其中之一） ——互联网需要原生的、 不依赖特定机构 的价值传输； 互联网平台和金融中介 已经攫取了全社会经济活动的大部分利润； 央行 不断增发货币推动经济发展已经无以为继等等——就会认识到比特币出现的跨时代意义。而且，一个乐观主义者，要相信比特币虽然有上百个理由失败，但也可能有获得成功。至于说到长期主义，与 关注大问题 本就是一体两面。如果有人获得几倍利润就清仓了比特币，很难相信他真的关注大问题。

永久保存人类的知识和历史 当然是大问题，而且很可能它的重要性对人类无出其右。毕竟现代人就智力和体能而言，跟几万年前的智人祖先没什么不同。我们过着与先人截然不同的生活，唯一的原因就是我们继承并利用了人类在数万年的历史中 沉淀的知识和经验 。

对于托勒密王朝的统治者来说， 亚历山大图书馆 也许只是国家富饶的点缀。但是对于后世人，亚历山大图书馆远比托勒密王朝要重要得多。虽然凯撒被历史学家蒙森称为：罗马帝国唯一的创造性天才。但是凯撒的千秋功业，也弥补不了 烧毁亚历山大图书馆的过失 。今天的科技是否已经发展到了临界点，世界可以不再依赖个人、机构或者国家，无论他们如何强大，来永久地保存全人类的知识和历史？如果在这一代人实现这个旷古未有的伟大成就，能参与其中的我们将是何其幸运！

所以阿维并不是Filecoin/IPFS 的替代品或者竞争对手。Filecoin/IPFS 的目标是颠覆中心化云服务厂商对存储市场的垄断，这当然是互联网行业的重要问题，但是与阿维的目标相比，还远远算不上是「 大问题 」。当我读完阿维黄皮书，一瞬间仿佛时空穿梭回到初识比特币的时候。这一次，奇迹还会上演吗？

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