The Filecoin mainnet is finally going live.
After numerous bounces, Filecoin officially announced that the mainnet will be launched on October 15.
Since then, the industry has lost another unsolved mystery in terms of time. The previous unsolved mysteries include: when will Polkadot go online (solved) and when will the development of Cosmos IBC be completed (99% progress, soon Yes, it’s almost a bit), when will Filecoin go online (just solved), when will the Bitcoin ETF pass (still waiting), when will the Dfinity shirt be released (still waiting, the airdrop has arrived)…
In June, when we wrote down the major air outlets for half a year, we briefly introduced several representative projects of storage air outlets, including Filecoin, AR, Sia, Storj and so on. In this article, with the launch of Filecoin, we will look at the respective positioning of these projects in the storage track from another functional perspective and perspective, and the specific differences.
Filecoin-the most ambitious “out of circle” project
Regarding Filecoin, there is too much information on the Internet. Everyone says that bad content is no longer burdensome here. Just talk about the positioning of Filecoin and the timing of its recent launch.
Filecoin is positioned as a leading-level decentralized cloud storage project, the incentive layer of the IPFS protocol. (Or “official incentive layer”, other projects can also be the incentive layer of IPFS, such as AR)
Because IPFS targets the HTTP protocol in the Web2 era, FIlecoin, as the “official incentive layer”, naturally has the most ambitious vision. It is positioned as the storage infrastructure in the Web3 era . At present, it has a huge volume, abundant funds, and a complete ecosystem. This track belongs to the undoubted leader.
It is said that there are currently at least 200-300 Filecoin mining machine sellers in China. It is estimated that the total sales of Filecoin mining machine market in the past few years are expected to exceed 20 billion yuan. This is still the case that the main network is not online, but how many of them really can Digging, you don’t know, this piece is said to be very deep .
The timing of Filecoin’s recent launch is actually very clever, or even appropriate, because it is the day when liquid mining is popular.
Readers familiar with Filecoin know that Filecoin’s mining mechanism is like this- miners participating in storage mining must lock a certain amount of FIL as collateral when performing mining work.
There are two main reasons for designing this mechanism:
1. Reduce miners who behave misconduct or slow;
2. Increase the cost of launching a 51% attack.
But this also made the initial startup of Filecoin a very awkward thing. Where did the initial initial mortgage come from? Did the chicken or the egg come first? Although the recent “Space Race” issued part of the FIL as a reward and partially solved this problem, everyone is still very worried. Because miners need a large amount of mortgages in the early stage, they are investing almost in the first half of the year. Looking at the book’s profit, it was either mortgaged or locked. This in turn will cause the scarcity of the currency, the price of the currency soars, everyone wants to hold the currency HODL, resulting in insufficient market circulation.
The recent DeFi liquidity mining can just solve this problem . Because mining has begun to be accepted by people, everyone’s coins are unwilling to lie in their wallets and sleep motionless. They all go out to do liquidity mining. As long as there is incentive, liquidity is not a problem.
Therefore, in the foreseeable next few months, there must be DeFi related to Fil tokens, especially the emergence of liquid mining or systems, including DEX that can trade FIL, borrowing related to Fil, FIL liquidity proof LP Token mining projects and so on…In short, around Filcoin, a DeFi system can be quickly built to provide FIL liquidity for the entire market.
Storj-a cheaper AWS S3
Storj may be the one that stores the most data among several projects at present, almost 20PB.
This is related to his project positioning-it is to be a decentralized Amazon S3, which does the same thing as you, but cheaper than you.
In addition to the most current data, Storj also has a few data that are particularly eye-catching.
One is the number of full nodes, there are 8000+, the degree of decentralization is very high.
The second is the low price. When the service standard of Amazon S3 is almost the same, the price is only half of Amazon’s.
The third is extensive cooperation outside the circle, and actively cooperate with open source software. For example, MongoDB integrates Storj, and FIlezilla also supports Storj.
The fourth is that there are some interesting things in the circle. Some time ago, the data of the ETC full node was collected, and the data of the NEM full node has been collected these days-you may ask what is the point of this? I told You, it reduces the time for a new full node synchronization in ETC from 12 hours to 30 minutes, which is equivalent to doing a CDN for full node synchronization.
You think, if someday the full node data of ETH and BTC are also collected. (You are now running a new BTC full node. It may take a month to synchronize the block data. If Storj handles the data, the synchronization may be completed in a few days or even a few hours)
Unlike Filecoin, which can only be played in a professional computer room, Storj uses the idle hard disk and bandwidth resources of ordinary home nodes to form a huge decentralized “cloud disk”, which combines these idle resources into one that can be external Commercial products that provide storage services. The service is simple and pure-storage and bandwidth, cheaper and faster…
If you can’t remember all of the above, just remember that Storj is the Uber in cloud storage .
AR-the only seedling stored on the chain
You may be curious, aren’t these storage projects all blockchain projects, why say AR is the only seedling of on-chain storage?
That’s because, Filecoin, Storj, these data are actually stored off-chain.
In other words, although these projects use the blockchain, what is stored on the chain is only the metadata of the off-chain data, which is basically used for retrieval and verification. The actual data is off- chain .
AR is different. AR data is directly stored on the blockchain , which also leads to:
1. Once the data is uploaded, it cannot be changed;
2. As long as the AR main network is still there, the data will be “permanently” saved.
This is why AR is known for its “eternal existence”, and the secret of eternal existence is just winding.
But when most people first saw the introduction of AR or the white paper, they still felt unreliable. How could the user pay once and store it permanently?
This can be achieved mainly by two points. One is that due to technological progress , the actual cost of storage is declining at a rate of 30% every year. In the foreseeable future, this situation can continue for a long time. The second is that users pay fees in advance. In the fee model , the fee is not paid to the miners in a lump sum, but the storage fee is managed by the system. After that, the system slowly releases it to the miners according to the mathematical algorithm, which is equivalent to paying the storage fee in advance for the next 200 years.
Because of this special “permanent” design, AR has become the most popular storage project in the circle. Many well-known blockchain projects have cooperated with AR to use it as the storage layer, Uniswap, Makerdao, Compound, SNX, Kyber , YFI, Skale, Solana… is simply a storage layer tailored for DeFi (including NFT). Do you think, if you pay a fee and store it for you permanently, you don’t need to worry about data loss, tampering, deletion, etc…
For outsiders, censorship-resistant encyclopedias, “permanent” historical libraries, and time-stamped legal evidence, etc., are also very suitable scenarios for AR projects such as “forever on the chain”.
In terms of paradigm, AR is a very subversive paradigm—data is stored, one-time payment, free for life, it looks simple and rude, but not instinctive.
However, if you think about it, the earliest e-mail addresses were only 1M and 2M. Some people who saw this track and made large-capacity paid personal mail almost all failed.
Why? Now Google Mail has 1 G, it’s free, and it claims to never delete mail.
So some people say that in the near future, the default storage option is forever!
Dfinity-only memory without hard disk storage
You must be wondering, Dfinity? Isn’t this a decentralized computing project? The airdrop that has been delayed for 2 years has finally been sent out, and the end of the mainnet is almost the end of the year. Why is it related to storage?
Dfinity is a very different blockchain project, in other words, it cannot be regarded as a pure blockchain project.
In the entire Web3 landscape, Dfinity focuses on the big front end .
Similar to Filecoin, Dfinity’s nodes are not something ordinary people can run. It requires a professional machine + a professional computer room, preferably at the level of a data center.
Looking at Dfinity’s node machines, friends familiar with IT will surely exclaim, what about hard drives? Why is there so much memory? ! Feel it yourself.
That’s right, all Dfinity uses memory . Although memory is much more expensive than hard drives, compared to the complexity and redundancy of storage, the cost savings completely cover the hardware cost of memory by simplifying the entire technology stack. .
Friends who know IT may ask again, if memory is not power-off, the data is gone, how can it be stored? Dfinity uses RAM+NVRAM (non-volatile memory) , data will not be lost when power is off, and NVRAM is only used to store memory mirroring, as a continuous thermal system, the real “storage” function is hardly used.
The reason why Dfinity is included in the storage section is precisely because Dfinity completely abandoned storage and used a brand-new technical architecture, promising to become the big front end of the entire Web3 world. At the previous Dfinity conference, the team showed the “decentralized Douyin” open source software CanCan, which only used less than 1,000 lines of code.
Does this make you think that Uniswap has built a Dex comparable to Coinbase’s trading volume with 500 lines of code? The subversion brought about by this new technological paradigm is often just so amazing.
Recently, the developers of Dfinity have built a series of new things, including online video streaming, audio production software, social finance… It looks like the dream of ETH “world computer” back then, Dfinity hopes to realize it. The way to achieve it, “remove storage”, is an extremely important part of its new technical architecture.
