IPFS helps the arrival of the DT era

On August 14, I gave a keynote speech titled "Distributed Storage Helps the Arrival of the DT Era" at the Distributed Storage Conference in Shenzhen. I mentioned some characteristics of the data era and some technologies that can serve the data era. I will summarize them here.

The data era was brought up several years ago, but then was put aside. It was brought up because people saw the value of data and the explosion of data volume, and conducted big data computing and data mining, and it seemed that the network would be data-centric. It was put aside because the data-centric infrastructure had not been built, and there was no set of protocols, standards, and networks that met the requirements for data storage, circulation, and value exchange.

Various applications have brought a huge amount of data, and the amount of data is growing at an annual growth rate of 40%, but this does not mean that the data age has arrived. On the contrary, we are still in the Internet age. We just vaguely feel that today's Internet technology seems to be somewhat unsuitable. A data-centric system has not yet been established, so a large number of data-related problems have emerged, such as; data abuse, unclear user data ownership, App forced authorization, improper use of privacy information, etc. In addition, the flow of personal data is not smooth, and it is difficult to directly realize data. All of these are not problems solved by Internet protocols.

We are still in the Internet era, referred to as the IT era. Internet literally means network interconnection. The characteristics of this era are network-centric. The underlying protocol is to achieve network interconnection and free communication between network nodes. Therefore, a whole set of protocols has been established, including TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS, TLS, OSPF, BGP, etc. In the Internet, each node has a network address, and each piece of content is located under a certain path in a network node. With the support of this set of protocols, we can communicate freely online, but the premise is that you need to know where the things you are accessing are.

The data age should have its own characteristics. The implementation of a set of protocols in the data age should be aimed at data interconnection. Therefore, I propose a new word: Interdata . This is a set of protocols on the Internet, the goal is to achieve data location, circulation and transaction. The data age can be called the Interdata era .

Three characteristics of the data age:

1. Each piece of data has its own identity;

2. The relationship between data is expressed by the data itself;

3. The Internet supports the free flow of data.

All of this can currently be achieved through IPFS.

When data has a unique identity, content addressing can be achieved. This is a great breakthrough in thinking. Unlike the Internet era, you don’t need to know where the data is. You just need to tell the network which data you want to find, and you can get it.

To use an analogy, in the Internet age, if you want to find a piece of data, you must know which specific URL and path the data is under, just like in the ancient communication era, if you want to find someone, you must know where he lives and then go directly to his house to find him. However, in the data age, the data itself has an independent identity mark, and you can directly use this identity mark to search the network. This is similar to the fact that in this era, if you want to find someone, you can contact him directly by knowing his phone number or WeChat, and you don’t need to know where he is now. What a breakthrough.

It is similar to an HTML hyperlink, but much more powerful than HTML because it is self-contained, content-addressed, and self-validating.

Libp2p implements a true peer-to-peer network. The links between users are completely equal. There is no server-client relationship. The links between users are free and all-round. One node can link hundreds or thousands of nodes to ensure reliability. Libp2p uses a distributed hash table (DHT) to help content addressing, thereby achieving free links from the bottom layer of the network. To put it simply, you can always know where you are in the current mobile network, so when someone looks for you, they can always find you directly through your number. The difference is that in a data network, there may be many copies of the same data, and any copy has the same meaning. Therefore, Libp2p will choose a suitable place for you according to the network conditions to extract the content for you.

The biggest difference here from the IT era is that the entire set of protocols directly serves the data, and the network is just a service layer under this set of protocols.

The entire set of IPFS protocols has opened the door to the data age. However, due to the open source and free nature of IPFS, there is no incentive for its application. In order to accelerate the integration of the data age with the business world, Filecoin is about to come on the scene. Filecoin's goal is to establish a global unified and standardized data trading market.

This depends on the combination of IPFS technology and blockchain:

With blockchain and distributed storage, we can hear the footsteps of Web3.0.