Advantages and market potential of decentralized storage
Talk about the blockchain, let you understand the blockchain better. Hello everyone, welcome to Lao Dao's program. This time Lao Dao will do a series of themed sharing, which is the introduction of the distributed storage project IPFS/Filecoin and its investment value analysis.
Then enter the topic, this is the second lecture: the advantages and market potential of decentralized storage
1. The Root Cause of Centralized Storage Problems
In the previous course, we introduced various problems encountered in the application of the most advanced cloud storage technology. The most obvious problems include the following points: the inability to guarantee copyright, the inability to protect personal privacy, the inability to guarantee data security, and the risk of service providers stopping operations at any time.
In addition to copyright, these issues are all related to centralized operations:
1) Since the service providers that provide cloud storage are all centralized institutions, it is inevitable that privacy leakage and data loss will be caused by personnel operation errors and internal organization problems.
2) Since the operation of the organization involves commercial interests and requires funds to be maintained, once the commercial interests cannot be guaranteed or the operating funds cannot continue, the cloud storage services provided by the service provider may be forced to terminate.
Therefore, inspired by Bitcoin, when people see that decentralized blockchain technology can remove centralized institutions in the financial field and form a self-organizing system that can operate without relying on external forces, they naturally think whether it is possible to use regional Blockchain technology also removes centralized institutions in the storage field, forming a broader, more efficient and safer decentralized storage system.
2. The introduction background and crushing advantages of the decentralized storage solution
As soon as this idea was put forward, it immediately attracted attention from inside and outside the industry. There are three main reasons for this:
One is that the existing landing scenarios in the application scenarios of the blockchain are too sensitive. Regardless of whether it is the earliest Bitcoin that landed or the ICO that appeared later, they are all in the financial field, and have aroused the vigilance and attention of financial regulatory agencies in various countries, triggering the intervention and intervention of regulatory agencies. Therefore, the development in this field will be subject to various constraints, and people are also cautious about exploring this field, fearing that they will step on the red line of supervision.
1) Digital currency
1) Digital currency
Speaking of "digital currency", we all know that the most famous cases are Bitcoin and Ethereum. The current market capitalization and consensus of these two coins are ranked first and second. However, the vast majority of holders of these two coins only use them as value storage and investment tools, and rarely use them in real life.
Although there are a large number of domestic and foreign online shopping malls or physical stores (many of which are well-known international companies such as Microsoft) that support consumers to use these two currencies for payment and consumption, compared with legal currencies, they are not as good in terms of transaction volume and transaction frequency. They are still too far behind to be widely used, and they have not brought much additional commercial benefits to the merchants themselves.
2) Smart contract
Speaking of "smart contracts", the first thing we think of is Ethereum. It is the originator of smart contracts and the most widely used smart contract platform in the blockchain world.
In the 2016-2017 IOC frenzy, Ethereum proved the power of smart contracts to the world, allowing everyone to imagine an efficient, fair and just virtual world managed and operated by smart contracts, which is an experience that humans have never had before . It is under such a vision that a number of projects focusing on smart contracts have sprung up.
Although the price of Ethereum has also plummeted with the decline of ICO, people's expectations for smart contracts are still very high, and exploration in this field is still moving forward.
However, due to various reasons, so far people have found that the areas where smart contracts can effectively function are still very limited. Although people have made many attempts in many fields, as far as the current technical level is concerned, there are still too many technical reasons. Smart contracts cannot yet be applied in real life and business on a large scale. The smart contract platform also cannot bring much direct commercial benefit to merchants.
The third is that after several years of practice, many application scenarios that have been explored have proved that it will take a long time for them to be implemented, or the real usage scenarios are not clear to us, and may even be false requirements in the end. For example, Namecoin, which used to be a smash hit project, used decentralized technology to solve the problem of Internet domain names. But after years of practice it has not been recognized by the market.
As soon as the concept of decentralized storage was put forward, it received positive responses from the industry, because according to the application concept of decentralized storage technology, decentralized storage using blockchain technology can ensure that our data has enough data by algorithm. Backup, and decentralized encrypted storage in several nodes of the system, it has the following unique advantages:
1) Even if the data of a certain node is damaged, we can still find the data in other backup nodes, thus ensuring data security.
2) Since the data is encrypted and cut and stored, even if the data is leaked, it is difficult for the person who gets the data to decrypt and see the information, and even if the information is seen, it is only a small part of it, and the complete information cannot be obtained, which guarantees privacy and security.
3) Since the blockchain system has an incentive mechanism, it can ensure that the system will run automatically without stopping, so the system will not stop operating or stop services.
As soon as this concept was put forward, it aroused enthusiastic response from the industry. In the industry's view, decentralized storage is currently the most down-to-earth blockchain technology that is most likely to be the first to achieve large-scale commercial use. Once a technology is commercialized on a large scale, on the one hand, it will greatly improve the efficiency of the existing business model and solve the shortcomings of the existing centralized storage technology, and on the other hand, it will directly bring considerable economic benefits.
3 Overall scale and potential of the decentralized storage market
So what is the market size of decentralized storage? There are two aspects here: one is the market size of the existing centralized storage, and the other is the incremental size of the future storage market.
According to the estimates of the international market research organization Markets and Markets, the global cloud storage market reached US$30.7 billion in 2017, and will reach US$88.91 billion by 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 23.7%.
Don Tait, a senior blockchain analyst at FUNATOZ, a British blockchain investment company, has a more optimistic forecast: he predicts that by 2020, the cloud storage market may exceed $131.7 billion.
No matter what kind of data, we can see the huge scale and development potential of the entire storage market. Although these data reflect the overall storage market size and potential, considering the crushing advantages of decentralized storage solutions based on blockchain technology over centralized storage solutions, we are optimistic that decentralized storage It is very likely that the solution will compete with or even surpass the centralized storage solution in the future.
Four Decentralized storage track competition
To sum up, whether it is based on a technical perspective or based on commercial interests, decentralized storage is a highly optimistic blockchain application field from all walks of life. It is against this background that venture capital and entrepreneurial teams rushed into this field one after another, opening up a situation in which the crowd competed in the field of decentralized storage, leading a large number of projects to stand out.
