The potential of blockchain and collaborative cloud storage

Baozou Comment : At present, various versions of blockchain and distributed ledger technology have their own unique advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, in practical applications, it is impossible for them to take the lead alone. They must complement each other with other technologies to form a synergistic effect. Therefore, looking at the trend of modern technology, we can choose to integrate blockchain technology and cloud storage technology to highlight its advantages and obtain practical benefits.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Blockchain technology can support distributed storage of encrypted data and is the core of collaborative cloud storage.

The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is the poster child for blockchain technology, so the hype and projects surrounding blockchain are focused on payment systems and related areas, such as tax filing and invoicing.

However, as a type of technology, blockchain has a wider range of applications. At its core, it is an encryption method for transmitting data and recording transactions.

The power of blockchain lies in its heavy encryption support and the participation of a huge computer network; therefore, attacking blockchain requires great cost and technical support.

It is an enhanced distributed database and automatically verified sequential storage solution; it can record transaction information, ownership and identity in an unalterable manner, negotiate and execute contracts, and so on.

Therefore blockchain is used in many replicated databases and similar projects.

Tamper-proof data

For example, backup and storage software specialist Acronis uses blockchain to prove that data storage has not been tampered with, in effect creating a verifiable backup of the data.

Serguei Beloussov

And to make blockchain cost-effective, Acronis technology only stores hash values ​​of data blocks. Acronis CEO Serguei Beloussov said:

Blockchain can record all complete information, but the cost will be very high, and in any case, encryption and distributed hashing values ​​are sufficient to verify data blocks.

Verifiability

Blockchain is not just about storing data in a distributed encrypted format, as other solutions can do this, but the unique feature of blockchain is that it uses a sequence link, where each block contains the encrypted hash value of the previous block on the chain. In this way, blocks are interconnected into a chain to form a decentralized transaction ledger.

This ledger can be public and visible, so that the historical sequence of facts or events can be clearly understood; or it can be permissioned, as financial institutions require for privacy reasons.

Whether it is a public or private chain, this ledger can achieve coherent and consistent data storage; and its decentralized nature can prevent external attacks and malicious destroyers within the system.

Importantly, blockchain can also generate and replicate data; it is not affected even when the network connection is unstable. As for security, hackers have stolen Bitcoin so far because of the lack of security of the holder's own digital wallet, not because of defects in blockchain technology. No longer dependent on middlemen

Many observers believe that the biggest change that blockchain may bring is the disintermediation of intermediaries. At present, we rely on middlemen in many aspects, such as providing a trusted trading environment, ensuring the validity of contracts, preventing fraud, and processing financial transactions; publicly accessible and cleverly designed blockchain applications can replace most of these functions.

And it turns out that this capability can even provide data storage.

Storj Cloud Storage

Storj Labs has a community of "farmers" who collect rent in the form of the system's own cryptocurrency. Storj uses blockchain to build a decentralized cloud system, utilizing the idle disk space of these "farmers". The files stored in it are "shredded" and then encrypted and dispersed to available storage. The blockchain here highlights the characteristics of its transaction ledger, public key, and private key, and combines encrypted hash functions.

In Storj Labs' view, blockchain elegantly solves the challenges of storing files on personal computers, office computers or network storage devices (NAS). In particular, database sharding will not be disturbed by intrusion; and each database has three backups in case the remote system goes offline.

The blockchain can store various information, such as the location of each shard in the network and its encrypted hash value, which is used to prove the existence of the storage; at the same time, it verifies that the "farmer" still saves the unmodified shard. This "cloud community" also means that if your node goes offline, or other nodes fail, your contract and income will be transferred elsewhere.

Storj believes that because data is distributed and redundant, the security and speed of blockchain-based cloud storage are comparable to those of large enterprises, and the cost is halved. The main reason for this is that Storj does not need to purchase large data centers and data center racks; there is ready-made storage space available in the blockchain.

"Small Farmers"

The existing business model is easily ridiculed; individuals wholesale hardware, charge rent for hardware use, earn a small income, and become part of the "sharing economy" trend.

However, the fact is that individuals do have idle disk capacity; and there is currently no way to profit from it. It is also impossible for online middlemen such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft to aggregate and sell this idle disk space because it is not cost-effective enough; individuals do not have the resources to sell storage space, issue invoices, and chase bad debts.

Blockchain can avoid all of these obstacles. Its very nature allows it to provide a trust network that rivals the trust that legal systems, credit rating agencies, banking systems, etc. have built for middlemen and other commercial institutions. Blockchain can also enable micro-transactions and micro-payments, which are exactly what many online businesses have been trying to do for decades but have not been able to do.

Public Records

Despite Bitcoin’s reputation as a counterculture black market and darknet currency, governments and government agencies are studying blockchain-based distributed ledgers.

In line with open data principles, they see potential in this type of tamper-proof record storage, such as land titles, business licenses, and birth and death certificates.

Since blockchain can verify that documents have not been tampered with, it can also record digital signatures and provide identity verification. Together, these factors enable citizens to autonomously perform many transactions that currently rely on civil servants and lawyers.

Business blockchain

Business interest in blockchain is also high, with some companies already using specially encrypted satoshis (the smallest denomination of tokens in the bitcoin system) to store ownership ledgers.

For example, Everledger uses this method to track diamonds and combat insurance fraud. Similarly, member companies of the Hyperledger project, an open source blockchain project led by IBM, believe that permissioned blockchain-based technology can be used to track and trade ownership of various things, such as stocks, securities, cars, and houses.

What needs to be noted is that these services are no longer peer-to-peer, but middlemen that ride on the P2P blockchain, just taking advantage of the security and verifiability of the blockchain. Similarly, those permissioned ledgers are no longer truly decentralized, and network nodes must obtain permission to verify transactions. Does this make the blockchain vulnerable as people say?

Another thing to note is that after a transaction occurs, the blockchain will lengthen and expand, and each node needs a backup record of the entire chain. It is expected that the capacity of the Bitcoin database may reach 100GB by the end of 2016.

The point is that all blockchain versions are more than just secure distributed databases of sequences. They can simplify and automate many transactions, making it cheaper and more efficient for individuals and institutions to collaborate.

Just as importantly, they challenge the long-standing assumption that reliable storage must be centralized, which may be difficult for many people to accept, whether in business, finance, data storage or public services.