Novice Science Series | What is IPFS? Why is IPFS worth looking forward to?

HTTP was invented in 1991 and adopted by web browsers in 1996. It fundamentally determines how data information is transmitted on the Internet and how browsers should respond to commands and servers process requests.

Basically, it is the underlying protocol for browsing the web and the protocol backbone of the client-server model.

While HTTP provided us with the internet we know today, it is outdated and more than 20 years later, widespread problems are becoming increasingly apparent due to the massive increase in internet traffic and the resulting amplification of stress points.

● Inefficient content delivery due to one-time downloading of files from a single server.

● Expensive bandwidth costs and file duplication lead to storage bloat.

● The increasing concentration of servers and providers has led to increased Internet censorship.

● The fragile history of Internet information and the short lifespan of web pages.

● Intermittent connections, leading to continued expansion of offline and slow connection speeds.

Problems continue to mount, and in an era of technological innovation, a 20+ year old technology is becoming more in need of an upgrade. IPFS provides the distributed storage and file system that the Internet needs to realize its true potential.

In IPFS, you do not need to download files from a single server, but ask peer nodes in the network to provide the path to the file, which enables high-volume data distribution with high efficiency, historical version control, elastic network and persistent availability of content, which is protected and verified by cryptographic hashes and distributed on a peer-to-peer network.

Advantages of IPFS

The current web mainly uses the HTTP protocol, which has some inevitable problems. For example:

1. Severe reliance on the backbone network. All files are downloaded from the central server, resulting in overload of the central server and the central network. Security is not guaranteed, resulting in service interruptions.

2. Web page files may be deleted by the server, resulting in data loss and "404 error" etc.

The IPFS protocol can effectively solve these problems:

1. It eliminates centralization and allows the global network and servers to form a huge load balancing system, balancing network usage and increasing download speeds.

IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system and an open source protocol that anyone can download and use for free. Using IPFS, each node can store the data they consider important and provide services to the nearest users in the network.

2. The data can be stored permanently and will not be deleted.

IPFS is distributed storage. Even if the content is deleted on one node, it can still be accessed from other places.

Filecoin Incentives

To incentivize others to join the network and store specific data, Protocol Labs launched Filecoin.

Filecoin is the incentive layer of IPFS. Under Filecoin's incentive structure, customers pay to store data at a specific level of redundancy and availability, and miners are rewarded by continuously storing data and cryptographically proving data storage. In other words, IPFS addresses and moves content, and Filecoin is the incentive mechanism.

Through Filecoin, you can buy or sell storage space based on IPFS. Unfortunately, Filecoin is developing very slowly. Although the official sold 10% of its tokens in August 2017 and raised $252 million, there has been little progress in technology and very little movement. Its Twitter is only updated once every few months. If it weren't for the relatively normal update frequency of IPFS, investors would probably have called it a scam.

Filecoin has not yet been released and is still a long way from being launched. We don’t know what its pricing strategy is, and there is no way to discuss or predict it in advance. Although IPFS is a good project, it does not mean that Filecoin is the same.

After Filecoin comes out, if there is a problem with the incentive mechanism, resulting in high cost of use, it is estimated that developers will not use Filecoin. Because Filecoin has always been optional, developers can use legal currency, other digital currencies, resource exchange and many other methods to obtain storage space, or even build one themselves.

EOS storage is based on IPFS. It does not use Filecoin, but uses EOS as an incentive layer. In other words, Filecoin just adds another payment method, which is very natural because it is done by IPFS itself, just like Taobao naturally supports Alipay. However, that's all.

Mining theory

IPFS is reliable and has potential, but it has also attracted many charlatans who have launched the so-called IPFS mining. In fact, there is no such thing as mining in IPFS. What is involved in mining is its incentive layer Filecoin.

According to the data given when Filecoin was first raised, the total amount of Filecoin is designed to be capped at 2 billion tokens, of which 70% (1.4 billion) are reserved for miners, and the mining rule is that the block reward is halved every six years.

Filecoin and IPFS are not the same thing, they are just two related products from the same company. Currently, Filecoin has only released a library for developers to test, and the entire project is unknown.

The currency hasn't even come out yet, but the mining machine has come out. Is it reliable? You can imagine. If you invest a lot of money to buy the so-called IPFS "mining machine", it is very likely that you will get some cheap computer equipment; if it is "cloud mining", it is even worse, and you may get nothing in the end.

The IPFS era is exciting

IPFS is still in its early stages, and many modules and functions have not yet been finalized. The current IPFS is far from meeting the requirements of commercial applications. However, IPFS has great potential, and now there are many products that have been put into use. Many blockchain teams are using or planning to use this protocol, including EOS, BTM and other highly-watched blockchain projects.

With the advent of 5G, the synchronization performance required for distributed storage will also be greatly improved. In time, IPFS will surely replace traditional HTTP and make our Internet world a better place.