@Walrus 🦭/acc What’s the non-obvious downside of WALRUS becoming successful?
The following is the uncomfortable truth most WALRUS bulls evade:
Clearly, should WALRUS indeed succeed, perhaps its greatest disadvantage, in terms of price volatility, turns out to be one of "capture" or "behavior" in truth. Let’s look at FileCoin, shall we? Once it grew, providers began to care more about rewards than real usage. Faking data, circular transactions, overstated usage: it "worked," but trust broke down. Is WALRUS doomed to suffer the same fate?
If WALRUS becomes a new decentralized storage for communities, for memes, or for social coordination, then usage will be based on incentive, not need. People won’t store things because they need to; people will store things within WALRUS because WALRUS pays. This is where a utility morphs into a subsidy.
Arweave: costly, slower growth, but data is curated. Fees on Ethereum L1, while annoying, act as noise reduction. With WALRUS, too cheap, too gamified, equals spam by design.
Because success, by definition, brings scale, which brings optimization, which kills meaning, WALRUS's actual threat isn’t failure, it's becoming busy, bloated, and meaningless while still showing good numbers on a chart.
Relevant Sources & Visuals
Storage Incentives Misuse in Filecoin (Protocol Labs - Research Blog)
Arweave permanence economics
