This article was originally written by IPFS Force Zone Distance has disappeared, either innovate or die. ——Thomas Peters, American management guru With the development of the Internet, the development process of the Web has been marked as an era label of the Internet, just as Web 1.0: information and human communication have become a thing of the past; Web 2.0: human interaction is now; Web 3.0: everyone innovates, is the future. 1. Web qualitative change era process The Web has different product focuses at different stages. Let’s use the products of the Web era to illustrate: Web 1.0: An era of scarcity of original content. Web 1.0 is presented in the form of early products such as eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and Google. The degree of user consumption depends on the content accumulation of the platform, that is, the exchange of people and information. In Web 1.0, there are few content creators and information is relatively scarce, so it can only achieve the purpose of information transmission. Most users are just consumers of content and need to store relatively little information. History of Web Development, Source: Records of Knowledge and Action, 2020-04 Web 2.0: User data is growing in massive amounts. The Web 2.0 era is a new era of the Internet, and its presentation carriers are Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, TikTok, blogs, etc. The characteristic of Web 2.0 is that people can communicate and share freely, allowing content data to accumulate in a snowball-like manner. Web 3.0 does not have a complete concept or a universal product. To quote Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, " 3.0 will go deeper and become a real public carrier... The boundaries between professionals, semi-professionals and consumers are becoming increasingly blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications ." Its characteristics can be summarized as: cross-platform, cross-professional, innovative forms of interaction between people. Its emergence may make users no longer fixed on a certain oligopoly product or professional skills, the concept of enterprise will gradually become blurred, and the value of individuals will be highlighted through "innovation." So, let's look back at the Web era. No matter which Internet era it is, data storage is indispensable, and the storage system is the carrier of all content. So how has storage in the Web era developed? 2. Current state of Web 2.0 storage: increasingly exposed drawbacks Storage technology is growing rapidly. Initially, there were three storage forms: disks, tapes, and optical disks. With the rapid development of hardware and technology, the storage industry has also rapidly iterated in accordance with Moore's Law. Currently, storage in the Web 2.0 era has developed to the stage of flash memory, cloud storage, and enterprise-level storage servers, which has greatly improved storage efficiency while reducing storage costs. The ever-increasing amount of data urgently requires the development of storage technology. The network characteristics of Web 2.0 enable everyone to share and produce content, driving the exponential growth of data. However, due to the imperfect storage methods at this stage, user information leaks are often seen: the personal information of 20 million people in Taiwan was leaked on the dark web; more than 200 million user information of China Telecom was sold; more than 87 million Facebook information was leaked; 150 million UnderArmour users' diet, exercise data, bank card numbers and other information were leaked. In general, the current status of data storage has the following three main problems: Frequent cloud storage configuration errors. Global encryption expert McAfee claims that "99% of cloud and IaaS misconfigurations are within the control of the end user and remain unnoticed." Even some of the most common/well-known cloud database implementations did not take security or risk as a standard from the beginning, and most of the accident responsibilities were attributed to users through contracts. The product only serves the purpose of storage, and insufficient attention to security leads to frequent errors. Github information leak news, source: bleepingcomputer.com, 2020-05 Code repository vulnerabilities are gradually being exposed. In 2016, the information of millions of GitHub users was suspected to have been leaked from GeekedIn's MongoDB. In 2020, hackers claimed to have stolen more than 500GB of data from Microsoft's private GitHub repository. The intrusion of code repositories is difficult to detect in anomaly detection systems, and once it occurs, it may be too late. Open source software that is vulnerable to hacking. Developers often underestimate the risks during the development process. Using open source software can save time and money, but it also faces the risk of insufficient system security. Once a security vulnerability is exploited, both users and companies will suffer losses. These vulnerabilities undoubtedly add a lot of workload to current work: monitoring external attack surfaces and exposure risks; keeping software updated, implementing patch management and automatic patch updates; maintaining the latest and complete inventory of public clouds, containers, code repositories, file sharing services, etc. All of the above problems are mainly attributed to the underlying storage problems. Due to the imperfection of centralized storage, vulnerabilities in upper-layer applications and development frequently occur. So how will Web 3.0 solve the storage problem? 3. The decentralized storage direction of Web 3.0 In the expectation of Web 3.0, many concepts will be blurred, and storage is no exception. IPFS is a Web 3.0 storage protocol that aims to create a network transmission protocol for persistent and distributed storage and sharing of files. The goal of IPFS is to supplement or even replace the Hypertext Media Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used in the past 20 years, hoping to build a faster, safer, and freer Internet era. Solution: From a cost perspective, the cost of distributed storage attacks is very high. From a security perspective, HTTP is extremely vulnerable to DDoS attacks, but IPFS can avoid single point failures, making it difficult for hackers to attack and files not easily leaked; it does not rely on a backbone network, and a single node being affected by a disaster does not affect the entire network, and there are also backups to save files. So what are the application directions of IPFS storage? IPFS is combined with blockchain. Currently, most public chain data is stored based on centralized storage, and only the storage method is recorded on the chain. If decentralized applications want to develop into truly decentralized and large-scale applications, they can use the storage solution of the IPFS protocol. Combination of IPFS and blockchain, Source: Protocol Labs, 2020 IPFS can also provide distributed caching solutions for traditional applications. Storage projects built on the IPFS protocol can provide distributed caching projects for traditional applications, and store the associated data with retrieval value into the IPFS network, which is uniquely identified by the IPFS network and distributed on each neighboring node. IPFS itself is a network framework, and is naturally a CDN. IPFS is a distributed Web, a point-to-point hypermedia protocol, and a bottom-level framework; CDN is a content distribution network, and CDN can only distribute content based on the existing network. IPFS itself can connect to idle resources for content distribution network, and can be defined as a "new type" CDN. The above are some of the underlying combinations of IPFS, which are relatively macro. In the vast sea of IPFS stars, every star that lands can leverage a large field. The decentralized blockchain protocol of Web 3.0 will enable individuals to connect to the Internet, enabling individuals to have time and data compensation, thus surpassing the current exploitative and unfair network and replacing giant centralized repositories. In the next article, we will elaborate on some of the application scenarios of IPFS and how to leverage new business models. Statement: This article is an original article from IPFS Force District. The copyright belongs to IPFS Force District. It may not be reproduced without authorization. Violators will be held accountable according to law.
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