> But discrediting the technical part of a project because of the marketing part of the project can be short-sighted.
Fundamentally, I disagree. "Too good to be true" marketing is a great sign you're being scammed. I wouldn't trust a used car salesman who's throwing in free "undercarriage protection" and other junk after "talking to his manager". Why should I trust a website that's doing the same?
What's more, because Arweave like all crypto projects probably depends on users continuing to buy and mine tokens to function, unrealistic marketing contributes to boom-and-bust dynamics that might put my data at risk if enough people give up on the project/token. Whatever the underlying technology, this is enough of a reason to stay away. When Luna collapsed, a lot of people lost all their money. If the Arweave token collapses, users might also lose their "permanent" data.
Incidentally, this prompted me to look at the Arweave "yellow paper", and I found this gem:
> While the Arweave’s mechanism design is generally engineered to promote adaptivity to new circumstances, the core Arweave team does not expect that the network as it is currently formulated will continue to produce blocks in true perpetuity. This does not, however, mean that we expect that the information stored inside the weave will be lost after the final block is mined. It is our expectation that when eventually a permanent information storage system more suited to the challenges of the time emerges, the Arweave’s data will be ‘subsumed’ into this network. After the mining of the final block, the financial incentive mechanisms for data preservation will subside and give way to social incentives for data preservation. This effect will likely be compounded by the exceptionally low cost of storing the data from the network, due to its decreasing relative cost over time.
So data is stored "forever", assuming someone comes along and archives all the data at some point in the future for free.