Arweave yellow paper

The problem the paper names

Ordinary storage deals expire. A link rots when whoever paid the invoice stops paying. Arweave's design asks a user to pay once, into an endowment, and asks miners to prove they are holding a randomly recalled piece of the global dataset.

What the design proposes

• A block includes a reference to a recall block. Mining requires access to that historical data.
• Content addressing means the identifier is a function of the bytes.
• The endowment is an economic object. Its adequacy is an assumption about future storage cost, and the paper has to be read that way.

How the mechanism is specified

• Wildfire, in the protocol's terms, is how nodes prefer peers who serve data. Replication is a social and economic outcome of that preference, not a certificate that every byte sits everywhere.
• A successful proof shows the miner could fetch the recall block. It does not show that every node holds every file.
• Permaweb applications sit on top of this dataset. They are not specified by the storage proof alone.

What this page does not treat as proven

• Pay-once storage is only as permanent as the endowment and the miner set. The paper does not repeal the cost of disks.
• The yellow paper version matters. Later updates change mechanics.
• This page does not describe token price.

Why a venture studio still reads it

When a venture says 'permanent record', Arweave is the design that at least names an endowment and a recall proof. Ask what happens if storage cost does not fall the way the endowment assumes. That question is the design review.