Text | Edited by Nancy | Produced by Bi Tongtong | PANews
Text | Edited by Nancy | Produced by Bi Tongtong | PANews
Compared with the dilemma of "turtle speed" in the previous two years, this year's Filecoin has made substantial progress. The public roadmap shows that Filecoin has entered the final stage of the second phase of the testnet, which means that it has now entered the countdown to the mainnet launch.
200+ report submissions, 25PB storage, 1350 cumulative OSS contributions... Various data show that the enthusiasm for participation in Filecoin is increasing day by day. The reward of up to 4 million FIL and the additional reward of 100,000 FIL for the top 20 have intensified the competition among various companies and further stimulated the vigorous development of the entire market.
Will Filecoin/IPFS be an exception? You know, innovation will never be "safe in the bag."
secondary title
A glance at the ecological panorama of decentralized storage
With the rapid development of the global information industry, data has exploded. According to the IDC report, by 2020, the annual data volume will reach 44ZB (trillion gigabytes), with a compound annual growth rate of 141% within 5 years. Centralized storage began to be difficult to meet the data storage and access needs of different corners.
At the same time, the situation of privacy data leakage is becoming increasingly severe. According to Juniper Research, a well-known data market research organization, by 2019, the rapid digitization of consumer life and business records will increase the global cost of data breaches to 2.1 trillion US dollars, which is almost four times the estimated cost of data breaches in 2015 .
It is obvious that high maintenance costs, low security, privacy leaks and other issues have made the reliability of centralized storage, which was once popular due to its high efficiency and high commercial availability, have developed to the ceiling stage.
Therefore, the emergence and development of decentralized storage is an inevitable process of technological development. In the current Internet environment, decentralized storage has the advantages of reducing costs, enhancing security, and revitalizing the market. It can fundamentally solve traditional storage problems such as data leakage and service restrictions. At present, many decentralized storage projects with different positioning and technical competitiveness have emerged in the global market, and are in full swing. Among them, the popular Filecoin stole the limelight even more, like a splash in the desert, attracting people from all walks of life to scramble for the first place.
But as a long-term business track, decentralized storage requires different projects to explore in different directions. So far, many projects have made breakthroughs in technology, and their business models have gradually become clear. It can be said that this year is a key year for decentralized storage.
To this end, PANews takes Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Arweave, PPIO and Lambda as examples, trying to build a more complete industry cognitive map for everyone.
PANews noticed that among the above five projects, Sia is one of the earlier projects, which can make cloud storage safer, faster and lower cost. It is understood that Sia encrypts and distributes files through a distributed network, allowing users to manage their data privacy through private keys. This distributed storage solution greatly increases the scalability and privacy of data and reduces transaction costs. It should be known that the current mainstream centralized cloud storage providers are much higher than this figure. For example, Apple needs 22 USD/T per month. However, since Sia adopts the PoW consensus mechanism, it not only consumes a lot of computing power and electricity, but also has the problem of double-spending attacks.
However, at present, Sia has been updated in 3 versions, and each upgrade will bring new technological breakthroughs. Perhaps Storj will represent another landing solution.
Storj is a smart contract platform for financial applications, through data segmentation and distributed storage, so it has high security and low cost. In theory, the more nodes there are, the stronger the security will be. In addition, Storj is more private, and what is amazing is that it has been implemented in just half a year after its launch. However, since Storj does not have its own chain, it can only rely on the Ethereum network to pay Gas fees, so once it is congested, it will be very difficult to implement business and the user experience will be poor.
Arweave fulfills the market demand to a certain extent, which makes Arweave, which focuses on the concept of "one-time payment, permanent storage, and never loses changes", favored by top institutions such as a16z. Through the storage solution of the permanent network, the project uses the immutable characteristics of the blockchain to directly write the content into the block for storage, so as to realize the so-called permanent storage function. At present, Arweave's products have been developed and are compatible with IPFS. Developers who build on IPFS can seamlessly transition to Arweave. With the advent of the Filecoin mainnet, it may give it a strong sense of presence under the upsurge of going online. However, Arweave's high cost, small number of nodes, and narrow practical application scenarios make its prospects questionable.
Similar to Filecoin, PPIO also uses two more rigorous algorithms, PoRep (replication proof) and PoSt (time-space proof). Filecoin is the proposer of this hybrid consensus mechanism. In Filecoin's white paper, the process of these two proof algorithms accounts for more than 70% of the full text. However, PPIO also created its own PoD (Proof of Download), which is mainly used to prove multi-point data download. Regrettably, PANews learned that PPIO has transformed into cloud computing.
Regardless of the total amount of financing or valuation, Filecoin comes out on top. In the eyes of the outside world, Filecoin has the opportunity to become a giant value capturer. "The field where Filecoin is located is the 'blockchain land house'. The data 'life' on the blockchain needs to have a place to settle down, which requires the support of these 'land and houses', that is to say, the data represented by Filecoin Distributed storage belongs to the infrastructure of the blockchain and is the carrier of the "data life" of the blockchain." Blue Fox once pointed out.
At present, the Filecoin project has a huge volume, abundant funds, and a complete ecosystem. Once implemented, it will quickly make up for the shortcomings of the centralized storage market. However, its mining hardware requirements are high, and the operation and maintenance capabilities of the hardware are higher, which cannot guarantee the participation of ordinary users.
On the whole, although decentralized storage has bounced tickets many times, it already has a development foundation for many years, and the technology is becoming more and more mature. With the deepening of research and development of projects such as Filecoin and Storj, decentralized storage will usher in the era of large-scale commercial use.
secondary title
Technology jumps to value, how can high valuation be supported?
High valuations have become synonymous with Filecoin.
This year, the soaring price is enough to see the popularity of Filecoin. Based on the current FIL futures price of US$17.1, the valuation of Filecoin with a constant total of 2 billion pieces can reach US$34.2 billion, ranking fifth in the total market value of digital currencies. For Filecoin, which has not yet landed, is it really worthy of such a high valuation?
As a distributed data storage network, Filecoin is both the storage layer and the incentive layer of IPFS, and IPFS is the application of the entire system. Therefore, IPFS directly determines whether Filecoin has a sufficient business foundation.
Throughout the entire market, many Internet giants have entered the IPFS track one after another. For example, as early as 2019, Microsoft's Azure Marketplace released the IPFS (beta) product, which can create a permission network of IPFS nodes to form a decentralized storage network; and in February this year, the world's first video The platform Netflix has jointly developed a set of tools, aiming to use IPFS peer-to-peer technical solutions to save its video resources; in March this year, Google, the world's largest browser, announced that its Google browser has built-in IPFS components; in June this year, Cangzhou Daily said , with a total investment of over 400 million yuan, the Cangzhou Huawei cloud server cluster (established by the Cangzhou Municipal Government and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. in cooperation) introduced IPFS. In addition to the above-mentioned enterprises, large companies such as JD.com, Firefox, Opera, and Brave have all deployed IPFS.
For Filecoin, this is a good thing and a test. First of all, compared with mature traditional storage solutions, Filecoin's technology is still relatively "immature", which is one of the reasons why it keeps delaying the launch of the mainnet. In this regard, many bears also believe that the availability and economy of Filecoin's so-called distributed storage are not enough to support its current value.
Secondly, features such as "privacy" and "non-tamperable modification" are double-edged swords. This is not only the advantage of decentralized storage projects, but also the biggest potential factor restricting development. For example, the aforementioned removal requests for content such as child pornography. Although officials say it will develop a powerful set of tools to help users control the types of data they are willing to store and serve from their machines, it is clear that there is no fundamental solution. Although we often say "technology is not guilty", this is not a "gold medal for avoiding death", and fast broadcasting is a precedent. Therefore, as Filecoin grows stronger, it will have to face policy risks.
Finally, Filecoin is facing competition from traditional giants, such as JD Wireless. It is understood that Jingdong Wireless Treasure is a router with NAS functions, and has a P2P-based technology monetization system. Users can use idle storage and bandwidth resources to distribute and cache some valuable files and data on Wireless Treasure, and realize some valuable products. This is somewhat similar to the Wankeyun game launched by Xunlei in 2017. They all get rewards by contributing their idle bandwidth and storage resources. However, IPFS is more about solving the problem of content redundancy through the protocol level, while Wankeyun pays more attention to file sharing. However, when JD Wireless Bao combines IPFS technology, the total storage cost is very low, but the data value is very high. For Filecoin, JD.com, which has its own advantages, is already a potential competitor. And as more and more traditional giants launch such products, how should Filecoin respond?
The launch of the calibration period means that we have entered the final stage of the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, and it also means that the three-year wait from financing to the launch of the mainnet is coming to an end. Although the launch window of the Filecoin mainnet has been postponed again to August 31-September 21, the purpose of the big miner test competition, which will be officially launched on August 3, is to focus on testing the network and allow miners to test their equipment and mining machines. We can understand that after repeated verification, Filecoin is about to use the best parts and the best condition to let the ship of the main network ride the wind and waves and sail steadily.
However, technologies without landing applications and commercial value are just castles in the air after all. After the mainnet goes live, can Filecoin, which has high hopes, meet public expectations? In the process of technology jumping to value, how many cold winters will Filecoin experience? All this we never knew.
