>What's the difference?

> 🥫 Data storage is like canned food

> 🍱 Data availability is an all-you-can-eat buffet

>Data storage is a solution to the problem of needing to save data so that you can retrieve it later.

> This is like canning food. You jar it up and store it away so that it is preserved to be eaten later.

> Data availability is a solution to the problem of needing to make data available for anyone on the internet to download.

> This is like an all-you-can-eat buffet. You want to put all the food out for anyone to come and eat as much as they want.

> Data availability protocols like

> @CelestiaOrg

> make it efficient to verify that data is available to download with data availability sampling.

> This is like checking that all the dishes in the buffet are available to eat by sampling a bite from each dish

> A data storage solution isn't suitable for this purpose because you'd have to eat the entirety of each dish in order to verify that it's available.

> Most people can't each that much... just like most nodes couldn't handle that much data.

> But food at a buffet spoils quickly because it's left out, so the food might not be edible later.

> Likewise, data availability layers don't guarantee the data will always be there to download, just for a limited time.

> (Note: one full storage node fixes this.)

> Meanwhile canning food does give you a guarantee that the food will be edible later.

> And likewise storage solutions guarantee that data will be there to download at some point in the future.

> To summarize:

> Canning food is not the same as serving it at a buffet. Storing data is not the same as making it available.

> @CelestiaOrg is a data availability buffet.

> Protocols like @ArweaveEco and @Filecoin on the other hand are data canning factories.