Gate.io AMA with Swarm
Time: May 9th, 2024, 11:00 UTC
Gate.io hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Antonio G,CMO of Swarm in the Gate.io Exchange Community.
Official Website: https://www.ethswarm.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethswarm
Follow Swarm on Twitter and Discord
Q1: Where was Swarm originated?
Swarm was created at the Ethereum Foundation in 2015. And the initial idea was presented in DEVCON0 in Berlin. In 2014, among some people like Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Jeffrey Wilke, Joe Lubin. The idea is to make storage as unstoppable as Bitcoin. As part of the World Computer vision, it includes three components: Computation (ETH), Comms (Whisper) and Storage (SWARM). Storage looks easy to do,but if you want unstoppable storage, it’s pretty pretty hard.
Q2: What does Swarm do?
Swarm is a p2p network that collectively provides data storage and communication. What it does, it creates a global hard drive that maintains data stored as long as the uploader wants. All the nodes work collectively to ensure privacy, availability and true permissionless upload and download. Also, enables ultra-private comms as it leaks no metadata. It’s probably the most decentralized storage solution out there.
Q3: How is Swarm different from Filecoin or Arweave?
Imagine that all these storage solutions are building a library of data. You may have heard the metaphor of decentralized storage aiming to be the unburnable Library of Alexandria. The biggest problem with the Library of Alexandria is that it was burned down. We do not know who did it. We do not want the permanent record of Humankind to be taken by the devil, so it is important that the library is fireproof. So for decentralized storage to be real, it needs important features like permissionless publishing, information neutrality, plausible deniability (whether it is good or bad) and many other things related to fireproofing. TLDR; Swarm is truly decentralized (not only distributed) so the entire network -not “some nodes”- ensures that the content is available and private for as long as the uploader wants. In Swarm, the nodes do not store ‘files’,making them more resilient to censorship. It is “the network”, not individual miners, who store the data.
Q4: Why did it took so long for Swarm to become ready?
Swarm was in research and development at the Ethereum Foundation for 8 years. After that, it was launched in 2021 with initial tokenomics. And it has stayed on while the two different types of incentives were developed: 1. bandwidth for unstoppable access 2. storage incentives to reward the miners.
Q5: What just happened on the 4th of May?
That was a very important milestone for the project. The tech is ready, and new tokenomics came into play. So, the $BZZ supply now is fixed at around 63 M tokens. 3x the supply of BTC. This means that Swarm 2.0 is ready with all the incentives. So now, anyone who wants to upload content that will NOT be taken down, you can buy some stamps upload the data to Swarm, and you’re unstoppable! We have this feature called “upload and disappear”, where you can upload a website, and “the community” can sustain it just by topping up. If anyone wants to try it out, I have some invitation codes.
