The real data era is a data-centric era. IPFS can realize the characteristics of identity and free circulation of data in the data age, and Filecoin as the IPFS incentive layer is expected to accelerate the integration of the data age and the business world.
The data age has been talked about for several years, but there is no clear definition of what is the data age and what are the characteristics of the data age. Before that, the era of data is coming but never coming. The real data era is a data-centric era. Data has its own characteristics and attributes, and the network serves data. With IPFS, all this is possible.
On August 14, I gave a keynote speech at the Distributed Storage Conference in Shenzhen with the theme of "Distributed Storage Helps the DT Era". It mentioned some characteristics of the data age and some technologies that can now serve the data age. Here is a bit of sorting out.
Data explosion does not mean entering the data age
The data age was brought up several years ago and then put down. It is mentioned because everyone has seen the value of data and the explosion of data volume. For big data calculations and data mining, it seems that the network is going to be data-centric. It was put down because the data-centric infrastructure has not been built, and there is no set of protocols, standards, and networks that comply with data storage, circulation, and value exchange.
Various applications have brought huge amounts of data, and the amount of data has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 40%, but this does not mean that the data era has arrived. On the contrary, we are still in the Internet era, but we are vaguely aware of the present The network technology seems to be a little unsuitable. A data-centric system has not been established. Therefore, a large number of data-related problems have arisen, such as data abuse, user data attribution unknown, App mandatory authorization, and improper use of private information and many more. There is also the poor circulation of personal data, which makes it difficult to directly realize the data. All of these are not problems solved by Internet protocols.
Data era needs data interconnection
We are still in the Internet era, referred to as IT era. The Internet literally translates to network interconnection. The characteristic of this era is that the network is the center. The bottom layer of the protocol is to realize network interconnection and free communication between time network nodes. Therefore, a set of protocols is established, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS, TLS, OSPF, BGP, etc. In the Internet, each node has a network address, and the location of each piece of content is the content under a certain path in a network node. With the support of this set of agreements, we can freely communicate online, but the premise is that you need to know where the things you visit are.
The data age should have its own characteristics. The realization of a set of protocols in the data age should target the interconnection of data, so I propose a new term: Interdata. This is a set of protocols on the Internet, with the goal of realizing data positioning, circulation and transactions. The data era can be called the Interdata era.
Three characteristics of the data age:
Each piece of data has its own identity;
the relationship between data is expressed by the data itself; the
network supports the free circulation of data.
And all of this can currently be achieved through IPFS.
Every piece of data has its own identity
One of the IPFS protocol suites is Multiformats, which is used to describe data or network. In terms of describing data, hash algorithm is used to describe data, so as to realize data identity marking. Every piece of data has its own unique identity, no matter where the data resides.
When the data has a unique identity, content addressing can be achieved. This is a great breakthrough in thinking. Unlike the Internet age, you don’t need to know where the data is, just tell the network which data I’m looking for, and you can get it.
To make an analogy, in the Internet age, if you are looking for a piece of data, you have to know which path of the specific website the data is under. Just like in the ancient communication age, you need to find someone and you need to know where he lives. Then go straight to his house to find him. However, in the data age, data itself has an independent identity mark. You can directly use this identity mark to retrieve it from the Internet. This is similar to when you are looking for someone in this era, you can directly contact you if you know the phone number or WeChat, you don't need to know where he is now. What a breakthrough this is.
The relationship between data is expressed by the data itself
There is a relationship between data, just as there is a relationship between people and things. When the data has an identity, this identity has many characteristics. One of the characteristics is the relationship with other data. Rather than say that I have a piece of data that is a paper, then the article may contain many citations or many experimental results. In the Internet era or paper era, the citation is just a mark, but it is not clear what the cited article is, and it is necessary to query based on the address. In the data age, or data in IPFS, it can be stored in the form of IPLD, which contains many relationships, which are directly linked by the identity of the data. Because path addressing is no longer needed, you can think of data as being mutually contained. This forms a large semantic network.
A bit like HTML hyperlinks, but much more powerful than HTML. Because it is self-contained, content-addressable, and self-verifying.
The network supports the free flow of data
Without path addressing, how can the user directly access the data through the content's identity tag? This is supported by the Libp2p protocol suite in IPFS.
Libp2p realizes a true peer-to-peer network. The links between users are completely equal. There is no saying that there is a server client. The links between users are free and omni-directional. One node can link hundreds of nodes to ensure reliability. Libp2p uses Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to help content addressing, so as to realize freely linking from the bottom of the network. To be simple, it can be understood that the current mobile network can know where you are at any time, so when someone finds you At that time, you can always be found directly through your number. The difference is that in a data network, there may be many copies of the same data, and any one has the same meaning. Therefore, Libp2p will extract the content for you according to the network situation.
Here, the biggest difference from the IT era is that the entire set of protocols directly serve data, and the network is only the lower service layer of this set of protocols.
Filecoin empowers the commercialization of IPFS
A set of IPFS protocols opened the door to the data age. However, due to the open source and free features of IPFS, there is no incentive for applications. To accelerate the integration of the data age and the business world, Filecoin is about to debut. Filecoin's goal is to establish a global unified and standardized data trading market.
This depends on the combination of IPFS technology and blockchain: when there is a blockchain and distributed storage, we hear the footsteps of Web3.0.