Business breakthrough of Filecoin

Editors Note: This article comes fromWebX Labs Daily (ID: gh_3bc595acebaf), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

WebX Labs Daily (ID: gh_3bc595acebaf)

, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

Last night, Filecoin reached a height of 148888 according to the established speed, and completed the official launch of the main network, marking the first step in the grand vision of the blockchain on the distributed storage track that we were expecting. This has once again aroused the outside worlds imagination of its commercialization. Who would need Filecoins distributed storage?

What exactly does Filecoin bring to distributed storage?

First we need to understand why we need distributed storage.

In fact, the use of distributed storage is forced. Because with the rapid development of the Internet, more and more applications, more and more users, and geometric growth of data, the storage of massive data puts great pressure on local storage. Traditional centralized storage (such as NAS or SAN) ) cannot well meet the needs of large-scale data storage in terms of capacity and performance, and the difficulty and cost of later expansion are very high. Therefore, other means must be used to disperse the pressure on the storage system, and distributed storage and distributed file systems have emerged. Distributed storage mostly uses ordinary hardware devices as infrastructure, so the storage cost per unit capacity is also greatly reduced. In addition, distributed storage also has different degrees of advantages in terms of performance, maintainability, and disaster recovery.

Due to the popularity of the two IPs Filecoin/IPFS, we more or less know the concept of distributed storage. Many people think that this is the first initiative of IPFS or Filecoin. Many times people will use this to diss those centralized Storage service providers, but in fact distributed storage is relatively mature as a storage solution, which means that Amazon Cloud and Alibaba Cloud, which we often compare with Filecoin, also use distributed storage when deploying storage servers. storage technology.

The development curve of the storage industry

So is there any difference between Filecoin and Amazon Cloud using distributed storage technology? Essentially there is no difference. Filecoin, Amazon, and Ali are all companies that sell storage resources. The biggest difference is that even if Amazon Cloud adopts a distributed solution, its storage server equipment is centralized to build centralized management, data management is centralized, and the operation of the entire network is also centralized. No matter how decentralized its storage method is Even if IPFS is used, it cannot avoid the data security problems that existed in the previous centralized storage. Then we can say that Filecoin is essentially an enterprise or business model that is different from the current traditional Internet model.

The incentive design of Filecoins economic model is essentially a commercial experiment of the storage industry under the concept of Web 3.0. Through incentives, the construction, management and operation of the entire storage system are decentralized. A free market has been established downstream, once the entire mechanism is operational. There is no third-party central organization to interfere in the transaction between the supply and demand sides, so is this approach feasible? We now finally have a case to test, evaluate and refer to.

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Who would need distributed storage like Filecoin?

The development of new technology is not about whoever defeats whoever, but whoever solves the existing social problems, consumers will choose whoever crosses the height of 148888, we still return to the real question, where is the buyers market for Filecoin (Filecoin is not omnipotent, or face brutal business competition)?

How big is the whole market? IDC predicted in the Data Age 2025 report that from 2018 to 2025, global data will grow rapidly from 33ZB to 175ZB. In 2019, the output value of the cloud storage industry exceeded US$46 billion, while the output value of CDN services (content distribution network) also exceeded US$12 billion. The cake itself is big enough.

Then there is the demand of the buyers market. What is the most important indicator of storage? It may not be performance, security occupies a higher priority. For any system, data loss is a catastrophe. In the Web 3.0 world, data is a part of sovereignty, and storage security is even more important. Then theres cost, whether its an individual or a business, and finally theres speed.

The above requirements match the current situation of Filecoin (we dont think about what height Filecoin will reach in the future for the time being). There may be these people who need distributed storage services like Filecoin.

a. Small and medium-sized enterprises with large cold data storage needs

Cold data is the data that is hardly used at ordinary times but you need to save and accumulate for a long time to generate value. These data will not have any value to the business of the enterprise in the short term, but they cannot be discarded. If the traditional storage service provider company needs to perform multiple backups to hedge the risk of data loss, this will incur a lot of additional costs. The demand here is permanent and safe, which is in line with the current selling point of Filecoin. Why SMEs? Suppliers like Filecoin, which are just starting up and have certain legal risks, cannot pass the approval of their procurement department at all. In addition, the cost of Filecoins solution is also lower.

In the previous Filecoin Slingshot competition, nodes were required to deposit real and valuable data to obtain rewards, and we will find these interesting data sets.

1. Optical fiber data (50-100 TB): This is a sensor-based network and data analysis system that uses data generated by previously laid optical fiber cables to monitor temperature, pressure, vibration, sound and other information around optical fibers in cities around the world . The data can be used by researchers, municipal managers and supervisors of transportation facilities to assist in urban planning and construction.

2. Virtual reality data (50TB): These data come from a virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) system, which collects raw video from professional cameras, then processes and stores the data. These data originally served the real estate and municipal engineering industries.

3. Astronomical and Meteorological Data (200TB): An astronomical and weather database, including charts, analysis and photos. The data is generated, collected and stored by Yunnan University in Kunming, China.

Then theres data like the detailed 3-D map of the universe created by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), including deep-color images of a third of the sky, and the spectra of more than 3 million celestial objects. And COVID-19 data research data and museum data and so on.

b. Illegal content

This need is preceded by the BitTorrent protocol 20 years ago, which was designed for peer-to-peer file sharing. BitTorrent users download various video, music and text files to local storage, which can then be shared as torrents with other users. Later we can see the result, the network is full of indescribable, pirated and illegal content.

Previously, eMule, The Pirate Bay, and a domestic broadcasting software that used distributed storage used distributed storage technology to allow users to obtain almost any desired content nearby, regardless of speed or clarity. Traditional centralized storage HTTP technology, mainly Whats more, the official does not need to rent too many servers to store these contents, greatly reducing their operating costs. But the end is also very clear, all were banned.

Such developments and risks will also happen to Filecoin. From a technical point of view, the distributed network reduces the attack surface of censorship. Compared with the HTTP protocol, IPFS realizes the permanent storage of information, which cannot be tampered with and deleted, and resource sharing. The IPFS Chinese community IPFS.GUIDE is flooded with all kinds of pirated movies, and the number of users is pitifully small.

c. All blockchain projects or Dapps that advertise decentralization

This is a big demand point, because the main programs and network data of many blockchain projects are stored on centralized servers. After the emergence of Filecoin, the data of these projects and Dapps can be stored in the distributed network. This is more secure and more decentralized.

d. Individuals or start-ups with small high-frequency storage needs

In addition, as a semi-free matching market, Filecoin itself is fully competitive rather than monopolistic. This is beneficial to users. According to the market price set by Filecoin developers, the market will also determine the price based on storage space, market order status, etc. After the storage service purchaser places a data storage order through the Filecoin exchange, the storage host provides a quotation to the purchaser, and the service provider bids and wins the matching order at the lowest price.

Apart from earning money, where else do miners need Filecoins distributed storage? This demand point is very strange, but in fact it exists. They really need a name to make themselves justified. This is due to the current embarrassing situation of the miners. The biggest question that the outside world has about mining before is that you consume a lot of energy, but in the end it seems that there is no real labor value. The regulatory attitude towards mines is ambiguous and unclear, and mines are always in a state of dissociative anxiety. Well now at least the Filecoin mine can say that we are storing valuable data.

U1S1, the challenges Filecoin is facing in the storage market are still very huge. Amazon S3 is the giant of file storage on the internet. The first is very cheap: $0.023 per GB of storage and 0.04 cents per 10,000 read requests. The second speed is very fast. The third is very reliable. Although downtime is often mentioned in the community, it is not known what kind of problems Filecoin will have after experiencing the same large-scale data storage, and their operation and maintenance do not know how to compare Filecoin node service providers. How many orders of magnitude higher. And its developer environment supporting facilities are also very complete. In other words, if Filecoin is almost the same as a whole, it will only become a substitute when individual points completely surpass it.

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What about the future potential of Filecoin?

Automatic growth system: Once Filecoin can run stably, the system can continue to grow automatically driven by interests. The more nodes involved, the more powerful the system will be.