What is 'Filecoin' aiming at 'storage decentralization' that succeeded in raising a huge amount of money at ICO?
Cloud storage is a great way to share work materials with others and sync your photos to all your devices. However, with the development of cloud storage, it is also true that a centralized structure where user data is collected in a specific company has been created.
Filecoin: Why it's a big deal
https://blog.coinlist.co/filecoin-why-its-a-big-deal/
Deep Dive Into Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems
https://blog.coinlist.co/deep-dive-into-filecoin/
To illustrate Filecoin's innovation, CoinList traces the history of storage to the world's first magnetic disk storage device, RAMAC , introduced by IBM in 1956. Initially, RAMAC was offered as a lease, and its monthly cost was $640 per MB (about 68,000 yen). Given that the monthly cost of Google Drive at the time of article creation is $10 per 1 TB (1 million MB) (about 1100 yen), you can see how expensive the storage at that time was.
In the 1990s, SSDs that are now widely used appeared, but the structure itself of 'keeping storage at hand' was unchanged. What changed this structure is the cloud service represented by Amazon's AWS that appeared in 2006. Cloud services abstract the hardware, eliminating the need to physically keep the data at your fingertips. However, there is a new problem that data is concentrated in a specific company that provides cloud services.
Filecoin is a service launched by a company called Protocol Labs to put an end to such centralized storage. In 2017, the ICO successfully raised $257 million (about ¥28.3 billion). Filecoin is based on a new P2P protocol called 'IPFS' that replaces HTTP. IPFS divides data into units called 'IPFS objects' and links each object to distribute data storage locations. The technical details of IPFS are detailed in the following articles:
What is the magnificent distributed system 'IPFS' that breaks away from central sovereign HTTP and creates a new Internet world? -GIGAZINE
Filecoin is composed of three elements: 'client,' 'reward service,' and 'storage miner.' Storage miners can receive the token 'FIL' issued by Filecoin as a reward for 'mining new storage' and 'cumulative value of computing power provided to the network'. When the client's data is saved to the storage miner, it is necessary to 'collateralize' the data with a FIL that the miner can receive in the future, and when the data is destroyed, the FIL that is the security is lost. With such motivation, the reliability between the miner and the client is maintained.
Unlike cloud services, Filecoin doesn't have an administrator who can prove that data is properly stored for a period of time. In order to prove the validity of the data without an administrator, Filecoin has introduced two certificates called 'Proof of Replication (PoRep)' and 'Proof of Spacetime (PoSt)'. PoRep proves that the miner has properly copied the client's data to physical storage, and is issued only once by the miner at the timing of copying. PoSt proves that PoRep is valid for a certain period of time, and miners repeatedly issue certificates and renew their validity period. By issuing these two certificates by the miner, the user who is a client can confirm that his data is properly stored and how long it is valid.
CoinList argues that pricing is uncertain for oligopoly storage services. With Filecoin, anyone can rent out the surplus storage, so there is no worry that the supply will be controlled by a specific organization, and the price is reasonably determined by the supply and demand principle. It is said to have the same structure as AirBnb, which lowers entry barriers to the market and promotes price competition by providing a market base that allows anyone to rent an unused home.
'We believe Filecoin represents the next stage in data management, and we're proud to support Filecoin from its inception,' CoinList commented.
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in Software, Web Service, Posted by darkhorse_log