Filecoin is online, is this really the end?

The following article is from the vernacular blockchain, author Wuhuoqiujiaozhu

After 10 years of blockchain development, we have initially achieved "decentralization" in several categories.

Bitcoin has achieved the decentralization of currency;
Ethereum, which realizes the decentralization of computing;

However, there is another large category, decentralized storage.

A number of projects have been going on for several years, but have not made much waves.

There are quite a few mainnets online, but almost no one is using them. Everyone's eyes are on the leader of storage projects - IPFS/Filecoin. It seems that when it goes online, the blockchain version of decentralized storage will really begin.

There's nothing I can do about it, he's just too famous.

However, the launch date was supposed to be 2018, but it was delayed for two years. Fortunately, it finally entered the testnet stage at the end of last year, which gave many people hope. Now, it is only more than three months away from the official announcement of the mainnet launch.

Today, at this dawn, let us look at IPFS, or Filecoin, from a different perspective.

01
Is decentralized storage necessary?

In every "blockchain" category, the first question to be asked is - does this thing need to be decentralized?

Many old investors still vaguely remember the craziness of the coin issuance boom in 2017 and 2018. At that time, the project developers were like using a hammer to find nails, waving the "blockchain" sword around, and trying to decentralize everything they saw.

You can find one or even several corresponding blockchain projects for any centralized Internet application you can think of, such as Facebook, WeChat, taxis, food delivery, Github, Airbnb, etc. And retail investors at the time just bought into this, desperately looking for quotas everywhere, "Come to me, I'll give you money!" They waved their hands at a seemingly superior project owner with the money in their hands.

We all know the ending. When the tide receded, a large number of naked swimmers revealed their true colors, and the craze of "decentralizing everything" finally died down.

So the question is, is decentralized storage really necessary?

This is really a question that depends on one's own opinion.

Apart from the fact that no one is debating the decentralization of Bitcoin and Ethereum, there is still controversy over whether tools such as oracles that serve Ethereum should be decentralized.

For example, some people think that the oracle problem in the real world is easy to solve. For example, if you want to know the result of a game, you can go to the ESPN official website (America's online television network) to check it out. Would you not trust ESPN's score? No, everyone believes it. ESPN also has enough motivation to do things honestly. There is no need for all kinds of oracles. Even if it is serving Ethereum, why use Link? Can't you just connect to ESPN through the API?

But some people also say, what if ESPN fails to publish it successfully or correctly to the blockchain? The probability of single point failure and error is always high, including operational errors of ESPN staff, hacker attacks, etc. Isn’t it better to choose oracles with multiple information sources and use ESPN as one of them?

Decentralized storage also faces a similar "dilemma".

On the one hand, centralized storage currently has the best efficiency and cost. In terms of cost, the number of copies of Amazon S3 is definitely much lower than decentralized storage such as Filecoin. Generally speaking, the cost is either lower than or equal to decentralized storage. In terms of reliability, S3 is already 99.999999999%. Basically, except for a world war or the sudden disappearance of the entire Amazon company, there are not many scenarios where you need to worry about the data stored on S3.

What about data transfer?

Another major advantage of decentralized storage is transmission. If 10,000 users in Shanghai download the same movie from a server in Beijing, the same repeated data will have to be transmitted from Beijing to Shanghai 10,000 times, causing great pressure on the backbone network transmission and poor user experience. BT became popular under this situation. For a movie, everyone automatically looks for nearby sources, takes a little from here and a little from there, and puts them together to make a movie.

The download speed is fast and it saves a lot of bandwidth on the backbone network.

This is indeed a great advantage of decentralized storage, however... the emergence of CDN makes this advantage less obvious. As for CDN, it is impossible to elaborate on it here due to space constraints. In short, you can think of it as a semi-centralized service, which is used by Google, Youtube, Youku, etc.

A popular movie will have servers in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, so users in different regions will automatically find the server closest to them to download it, which also saves backbone network bandwidth and provides a high fault tolerance mechanism.

Of course, the cost of CDN's data center and bandwidth is not cheap, and the centralized nature still exists. However, with the advent of CDN, CDN + copyright has basically killed things like BT downloads.

So what are the advantages of decentralized storage?

You may think it is the classic decentralization rhetoric, such as centralization saves and stores these data in large data islands, they can be easily sold, tampered with, extracted or abused in other forms, such as the Facebook incident, data ownership should belong to individuals Blah Blah…

However, I think the only real advantage is that in theory, it is possible to implement a file system that never disappears. This alone makes it unique.

On a larger scale, decentralized storage provides a solid foundation for the next stage of "information freedom" for mankind.

02
Advantages of IPFS/Filecoin over competing products

The concept of Ethereum global computer was proposed in 2014. Six years have passed, and the progress has been slow and somewhat disappointing.

However, compared to decentralized storage, the development of the underlying smart contract platform is much better. At least we have dozens of competitive public chains such as EOS, sharding, side chains, cross-chain and other advanced technologies, and thousands of projects that are used by people or not... Oh, by the way! We also have DeFi!

The situation is much worse for decentralized storage. For example, Siacoin and Storj were founded in 2015 and 2017 respectively. Maidsafe was founded even earlier, in 2006. Yes, it was founded earlier than Bitcoin...

However, until now, after so many years, is there one that can actually work, or is there really a lot of people using it?

The answer is no.

Looking back at the public chain, or the smart contract platform, do you think it is not so bad? Otherwise, why do we say that happiness comes from comparison...

Therefore, as the last and almost the only hope for decentralized storage, IPFS+Filecoin carries the "God will give great responsibilities to this person" of the entire track.

So what makes IPFS, or Filecoin, better than other storage services?

1. It has a bigger vision

The decentralized storage of other companies is more of a decentralized blockchain version of the current centralized cloud storage.

IPFS is targeting something more basic, and wants to fundamentally change the current Internet data distribution mechanism. It targets not only storage, but also data location itself. For current Internet data, it competes with HTTP, the cornerstone protocol of the contemporary Internet. And its technology source itself is not a sourceless source, but the DHT hash addressing technology used by the BT download that was popular all over the world back then.

2. It’s more famous and rich

In 2017, Filecoin raised $257 million in a short period of time, becoming an overnight sensation and breaking the ICO record at the time.

The capital behind it is all from top institutions in the industry - Sequoia, Winklevoss Brothers Fund, Y Combinator, DCG, USV...

It may be the only futures project in the industry that has not yet been launched, but 8 exchanges have launched it.

3. Its consensus mechanism is more complex and more secure

Filecoin’s white paper came out in 2014, but it has only reached the testnet stage now, which shows its technical complexity.

In order to prevent Sybil attacks, exogenous attacks and generation attacks, Proofs-of-Replication was designed.

In order to ensure that miners abide by the rules and effectively store user data, Proofs-of-Spacetime was designed.

At the same time, the entire protocol stack is also very complex:

4. It has been supported by many ecosystems in and outside the industry

At the recent ETH Denver summit, 24 of the 52 projects submitted to ETH Denver were built using IPFS;

The underlying storage system of EOS uses IPFS;

Brave browser supports IPFS, Opera for Android supports IPFS by default, and both Firefox and Chrome support IPFS as built-in plug-ins;

Last year, Cloudflare and IPFS announced a partnership (CloudFlare is one of the world’s largest CDN and DNS service providers);

This year Netflix and IPFS announced a partnership;

A few days ago, Vitalik announced that Ethereum’s official website, ethereum.org, is now on the IPFS network;

And many more...

03
Where is the development going? Is there anything I should pay attention to?

This may be the question you are most concerned about. After all, it has been delayed for nearly two years. Can it be expected to be launched this year?

This year's general roadmap is as follows:

Testnet Phase 1 (December 2019-January 2020)

Testnet Phase 2 (May 11 to May 17, 2020)

Mainnet launch (July-August 20) (delayed in the near future)

Current status of the testnet:

Currently, two test versions, Testnet/2 and Testnet/3, are running simultaneously. The Testnet/2 phase is nearing its end, and the Testnet/3 phase has been launched and is gradually stabilizing.

At the same time, Filecoin officially released a proposal for "5PB-level miner testing" on GitHub, inviting miners from all over the world to participate in the second phase of testing of the Filecoin test network.

Is there hope that it can be achieved according to the roadmap?

Personally, I feel that major delays are unlikely. After all, we have reached the testnet stage and it’s just the final touch.

Will it be able to go live on the mainnet in July or August? I think it’s a little uncertain, but if it takes a month and a half, I won’t be surprised.

The reason is very simple. It has been delayed for two years. If you look at last year's roadmap, the time was several months earlier than now. So I am not surprised at all that the roadmap in a few months will be delayed by two months. At the AMA held last month, the team leader said, "The time published on the Gantt chart is the team's best estimate. We are very confident about this time and there should not be any further delays."

Well, you see, a “best estimate” is, generally speaking, unlikely to be completed on time…

But in the AMA, the old irons must know:

Is it possible for home computers to participate in mining, or is it only possible in the future? — The answer is, don’t even think about it!

This is actually the most controversial one. Some people think that when home computers can be used for mining, and there is no need to buy professional mining machines, the Filecoin project can truly become a great project and truly "decentralized". Some people think that professional matters should be left to professional people and professional equipment. It is very similar to the dispute over ASIC mining machines and large blocks in Bitcoin.

Do you think Filecoin should allow home computers to participate in mining and block generation? Please leave your comments in the comment section.

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