Sam Williams Condemns Irys Over Alleged Anti-social Forking, As Irys Decries Censorship
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Author: Adeola @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Reviewer: Henry @ Contributor of PermaDAO
There appears to be trouble brewing in the Arweave ecosystem between the Protocol and Irys, one of its top projects, over allegations of anti-social forking that the former says is motivated by greed. The in-fighting is causing stakeholders in the ecosystem to pitch tents.
The situation was made public when Arweave protocol’s founder, Sam Williams made a barrage of a post on X accusing Irys of planning to fork Arweave motivated by greed and not pure intentions.
A fork happens whenever a community makes a change to the blockchain’s protocol, or basic set of rules. When this happens, the chain splits — producing a second blockchain that shares all of its history with the original, but is headed off in a new direction.
Williams noted that although permanent storage needs forks as they are required for governance and to make protocols resilient, there were ways to do it in a pro-social and anti-social way.
“Forks need to be done in the right way: preserving and building on the state, not destroying it. When forks are done in this way, they allow the network to improve itself and route around problems over time, keeping the dataset safe. When forks are not done this way, they will not be able to achieve information permanence – as all of the data would be periodically dropped,” Williams said.
Arweave adopts an evolutionary forking system that allows anyone to fork it at anytime; when the fork happens, it should maintain and carry on the network’s dataset and token supply; the fork can also mint any number of new tokens to compensate its builders.
Williams explained further that the evolutionary forking system allows forks to compete and improve the protocol in a pro-social way, which ensures the dataset is safe; generates a new market and rewards innovators.
“It’s a win-win for everyone,” Williams said.
Williams post suggests that he has no problems with Irys attempting to fork Arweave, but his squawk is with the manner the fork would be done and Irys’s alleged vulgar comments against the Arweave ecosystem.
According to Williams, Irys’s fork will dump the dataset and restart token supply.
“Despite the existence of the framework for evolving Arweave, however, they plan not to maintain the dataset and to start the token supply from scratch,” Williams stated.
“When asked why, they stated that they didn’t want to have to support the existing data and ‘give tokens to a bunch of (expletives)’. We are having a hard time finding reasons for this other than greed.”
Williams, however warned that the manner Irys was pursuing the fork hampers the latter’s projects because “if the dataset and token supply are consistently reset, no fork can ever succeed at the long-term mission.”
The fracas is, however not preventing the Arweave ecosystem from offering to assist Irys in its venture on the condition that it forks the blockweave according to the laid down procedure.
Williams announced some punitive steps as a response to Irys’s move. He said Irys’s membership of a trusted group of bundlers who are allowed to “optimistically” show their content on ar-io gateways and other associated gateways in the Arweave ecosystem before their content settles on-chain will be disabled.
“The effect of this is that content uploaded through Irys will experience a significant delay before the data is available to view (~20 minutes to an hour),” Williams said blaming lose of trust.
The founder urged users of Irys as an upload platform to Arweave to migrate and take advantage of a subsidized bundling service. He also advised users to adopt ar.io network and everVision’s bundling services or to host their own bundlers. Williams also urged users of Arweave to contact him for assistance on how to migrate.
Irys Shoots Back, Alleges Censorship, Hypocrisy
Following William’s exposè, Irys shoots back accusing the founder of censorship. Irys said that it was hypcritical for William’s who built Arweave to resist tyrants, to act like one.
“For someone committed to building technology to protect humanity from tyrants, it’s so disappointing to see him behaving like one and attempting to deplatform Irys from Arweave, which is intended to be open-source and permissionless software,” Irys said.
Irys denied taking the choice away from users about where their data is stored.
“Creating unconstrained access to permanent data for its users is at the core of what Irys does. We remain committed to censorship-resistant, open-source, and permissionless technology,” Irys said.
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