I feel that I do not have the ownership of the articles that I created on Mirror. Because Mirror is simply a centralized service and it stores my created articles into Arweave(AR) on behalf of me, even without my signature. In this experience, I do not need to have an AR wallet and I do not sense the transaction latency of AR blockchain. It gives me the smoothness of centralized system usage, but I lose the decentralization, a central part of Web3.0 spirit. Without the ownership of my own article, I lose the value associated with it at the same time. I have seen other Web3.0 platforms sharing the same problem.

Arweave and Filecoin have provided permanent data storage in a decentralized way. Those are places where users can store their data without worries about some evil central manipulations. However, the current user experience is still very bad. First of all, no matter how large data the users want to upload to the system, the transactions may need tens of minutes to complete and get finality. This largely limits the scope of application types that are suitable to be built on such systems. Some applications have to resort to Layer2 solution to work around this issue, e.g., everPay on Arweave. Secondly, it is hard for such systems to smoothly integrate into the token ecosystems of existing Layer1 blockchains. For example, both Filecoin and Arweave have their own wallet and account address schemes. This introduces barriers for users who are only familiar with Metamask wallet and Ethereum account address. And furthermore, since the ledger system in Arweave does not support (EVM compatible) smart contract, it forces the developers to rebuild the wheel of token systems on top of the Arweave’s storage infrastructure through some mechanism called Smartweave. Such efforts include RedStone, Verto, and everPay. However, comparing the already flourishing token ecosystems in existing blockchains like Ethereum, BSC, Solana, etc., it is questionable for the meaning of rebuilding such things on a storage infrastructure which is designed to handle large amount of non-financial data.

Data is valueless unless people have the power to extract the valuable information from them. In the traditional Web2.0 era, huge amount of data is stored and processed in clusters managed by centralized company entities. The volume of the data is so large that they have to be stored in tens of thousands of servers. Therefore, the data have to be processed in a distributed way where computation is also divided into millions of small tasks and dispatched to servers that are close to the data needed. These small computation tasks exchange the intermediate results to produce the final result of the entire process job. This is often called dataflow computation which is the key to extract value from large scale of data. The Web2.0 giants, e.g., Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc., have spent years to develop large scale dataflow computation engines to help them bring huge values from their data to the companies.