2020 is a year for blockchain technology to ride the wind and waves. In this year, Layer 2 technology began to be widely practiced; the ETH2.0 stage was officially launched and the route planning was changed; Polkadot launched the relay chain; and the Filecoin mainnet launched in October. It brings a new spark to the combination of distributed storage industry and blockchain.
Distributed storage is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain industry in 2020. As a distributed information infrastructure, the blockchain distributed storage system stores files or file sets in different storage spaces, such as hard disks. , Generate a document storage confirmation certificate on the chain at the same time, and incentivize storage space providers through an incentive mechanism.
Blockchain distributed storage has advantages over traditional cloud storage in terms of data privacy, transparency, and confirmation. In addition, the data storage market itself has a high ceiling, and the track has enough imagination in the long run. Distributed storage is also a block The direction of general attention both inside and outside the chain circle has successfully captured a large amount of out-of-circle traffic. Blockchain-based distributed storage projects have won close attention. Traditional industries and capital have joined the distributed storage camp through direct investment or indirect means. In the competition.
Compared with enterprise-level storage and cloud storage, the advantages of distributed storage based on blockchain are mainly reflected in the following aspects:
(1) Higher reliability. Blockchain storage stores data on thousands of nodes. It is not the multi-copy mode of traditional distributed storage, but redundant coding, which can effectively avoid single-point failure problems. Bitcoin It has been the best proof of reliability that its distributed ledger database has not been compromised by any hacker since it has been running for 10 years.
(2) Higher availability. Even if cloud storage adopts a multi-node distributed storage method, it may still fail to provide services due to node downtime or excessive load of the central node. The blockchain only needs to guarantee a certain percentage of The number of nodes is normal, and system services are available.
(3) The cost of edge storage is lower. Blockchain allocates storage costs to edge nodes, which is relatively lower in terms of hardware requirements and costs for building an independent data storage center.
(4) Encryption privacy is higher, and the final data encryption process of centralized storage is completed within the enterprise. The data stored in the blockchain is encrypted. There is no plaintext data. The encryption process is completed by the data owner. As long as the user saves the encryption key, the data privacy cannot be stolen by a third party.
(5) Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) was proposed by Juan Benet, the founder of the Protocol Laboratory, to establish a distributed file system through the connection of different devices, and use content addressing methods to split large files into data blocks Objects to improve storage efficiency. Each file block is indexed by the hash value of the corresponding block content to establish a global Distributed Hash Table (DHT), and the hash of these scattered file blocks is organized through the Merkle DAG tree data structure Index, the index stored at the root node of the tree is used as the file addressing hash value.
IPFS provides the possibility of building a brand new web page without a centralized server. As long as the node contributes storage and computing resources to become an IPFS node, this can be achieved. Its essence is a P2P content distribution network. Because of the centralized distribution model of HTTP, there is no centralization problem, so it has always been benchmarked against HTTP as the next generation Internet protocol. However, IPFS is very challenging to achieve this goal. In a distributed environment, data storage availability largely comes from data redundancy backup, which depends on the node's active storage and backup. If the node deletes the data, the data may even be lost.
In order to solve the problem that the limited number of IPFS nodes affects network performance, the Protocol Lab launched the Filecoin project in 2017.
As the incentive layer of IPFS, Filecoin imitates Bitcoin's blockchain incentive model. The difference is that Filecoin mining abandons the energy-consuming PoW (Proofs-of-Work), but creates a new storage proof mining algorithm, namely Proof of replication based on valid storage proof ((Proofs-of-Replication, PoRp) and proof of space-time (Proofs-of-Spacetime, PoSt), based on storage mining methods to incentivize storage nodes to contribute resources on the IPFS network, provided by miners The greater the effective storage space and effective data storage capacity, the greater the probability of obtaining mining rewards in the end. Filecoin's mining model is more environmentally friendly and more efficient than that.
At present, the Filecoin blockchain is still in the stage of how miners can mine by increasing effective computing power. When the FIL currency price is stable at a considerable level, it is the kingly way to work hard to encapsulate data and increase computing power. However, as more players enter, the revenue of computing power will definitely decrease. If other cost items are included, if FIL mining continues to stay on the track, it needs to really consider providing real commercial value, then the construction of the Filecoin ecosystem It is also very critical to the success of the project.
Next, how to integrate its own positioning to develop the ecology will be an important direction for the progress of the Filecoin project.
In general, in the face of massive and highly concurrent data storage and computing needs in the future, distributed storage is one of the important development trends at the moment. The traditional distributed file storage method still has a single point of trust problem, based on the distribution of blockchains. Type storage has advantages in reliability, availability, cost and data privacy. In this respect, IPFS/Filecoin has designed a new mining mechanism by migrating the Bitcoin workload proof incentive model to the scenario of providing data storage services. Ensure the security of the blockchain storage network.
In addition, returning to the nature of business, the competitiveness of IPFS/Filecoin's future distributed storage projects must be reflected in the number of users and the construction of storage ecology.