The market needs a deep understanding of IPFS

As a representative protocol for distributed storage, IPFS has received many doubts, and IPFS needs to be more deeply understood and accepted by the market.

In 2018, the public chain project broke out. The trading network represented by Ethereum and EOS attracted much attention in early 2018. After the public's attention gradually increased, projects with distributed storage as the main function began to appear, including storij and Filecoin As a representative, among these distributed storage projects, the IPFS protocol technology has attracted the most attention.

Nowadays, many projects have applied the IPFS protocol to build distributed storage networks in public chain projects, but because the technology is not yet perfect, the industry has different opinions on its technology. On December 16, 2018, at the Global Consensus Security Industry Summit, Zhou Huan, the founder of IPFS.FUND, accepted an interview with Golden Finance to discuss the status quo and application prospects of IPFS.

IPFS represents an idea

Most people know that IPFS technology is through Filecoin. In the Filecoin project, IPFS is one of the layers. In the IPFS protocol, Filecoin also adds, for example, economic systems and incentive mechanisms. Therefore, many people will also confuse IPFS with the Filecoin project.

In fact, IPFS is just a protocol method, and its function is mainly used for fast addressing in data or file query. Compared with the traditional Internet http protocol, IPFS has a point-to-point structure that is more efficient and fast. Based on the characteristics of IPFS, it is very suitable for combining with other public chains, or forming a self-contained chain to expand development based on IPFS.

In Zhou Huan's view, IPFS represents a kind of distributed storage communication thought. "The idea of ​​the IPFS protocol is not limited to distributed storage, but most projects currently use IPFS to solve storage problems. For example, Ethereum and EOS are currently exploring storage solutions based on the IPFS protocol." Zhou Huan revealed that there will be future Ethereum and EOS. A token similar to ERC20 may appear to solve economic problems in distributed storage.

The status quo and breakthroughs of IPFS

"At present, because Filecoin has not yet been launched, most of the projects are being developed based on the IPFS protocol." Zhou Huan said.

However, according to the reporter of Golden Finance and Economics, the outside world has various forms of cognition of IPFS technology. Many projects that have used the IPFS protocol mentioned that “IPFS has a slightly poorer code quality and basically cannot be used in applications.” “IPFS is difficult to use, and the experience is very good. Poor", and even some projects rewrite the code in its programming language in order to realize the technical solution of IPFS.

Zhou Huan explained this.

"Many people say that the quality of IPFS code is poor and the user experience is not good. It is determined by the current development logic of IPFS. The current version of IPFS is 0.477, and even the official version 1.0 has not been reached. The improvement process is divided into two stages. The first stage is a period of continuous addition of functions. During this period, many tentative functions have been added. The second stage is the streamlining period. The functions that are easy to use will be selected and the inconvenient functions will be deleted." Zhou Huan added, and it is now in the first stage. The beginning of the two stages. The previous poor experience is normal, but the future IPFS technology will be integrated into the scene application in a senseless state.

Zhou Huan also explained its specific lack of experience. After the continuous joining in the first stage, the operating capacity of a running IPFS node was severely limited, because its resource occupancy rate for operating equipment was too high, basically occupying 100% of the equipment. CPU processing power, and let the equipment used in the shutdown state. "Running an IPFS node now is equivalent to opening a Xunlei plus a BT plus a few extremely memory-intensive software in the computer. Naturally, the computer won't move."

At present, the code of IPFS is constantly being improved by developers, and running complex code is simplified. Zhou Huan mentioned that the current relatively complete code version is written in JS language, and nodes can be run directly on the Web side, such as the Python version, etc. It is still under development. If the code is perfect and the complex functions are deleted, the operation of the IPFS node will only occupy 5%-15% of the resources.

The technology of the IPFS protocol has been improved. In order to better implement distributed storage, IPFS still needs a lot of breakthroughs. "In the IPFS protocol, there are no issues about incentive mechanisms and storage arrangements. For example, the redundancy backup problem mentioned by Filecoin, which does not appear in IPFS technology, and for more converged applications and landing applications, it is economical. The solution of the mechanism is extremely important. The core is the question of how many tokens are used to let others store data for users." Zhou Huan explained.

At present, most of the IPFS technology is applied in distributed storage, where the storage nodes are distributed in large numbers, and there will inevitably be C-side users joining, but the same problem will be that the instability of the C-side storage nodes will cause file storage. The security cannot be guaranteed. Zhou Huan believes that as long as the nodes store data in the agreed manner, the problem can be solved. In the future, for example, the DPOS mechanism of EOS may make the IPFS network more stable.

Write at the end

Blockchain is self-organizing. Under the same rules, participants will have various differences, and IPFS will also contact various participants. "IPFS is applicable to any industry. Judging from the current industry feedback, we have a deep misunderstanding of IPFS. Early evangelists made everyone expect too much of the benefits of IPFS. At the same time, they blindly believe that they are unwilling to understand its in-depth content. Ignore the complexity of its implementation." Zhou Huan said.

Indeed, in the crazy bull market at the beginning of the year, all projects that can appear in the form of mining were regarded as profitable machines by many users. Therefore, most people paid more attention to mining machines, but they didn't know the technology carefully.

Just like the new IPFS mining machine, the high-priced IPFS mining machine has raised doubts among industry insiders. “Most people are definitely concerned about the cost of the machine. In fact, the cost of 50M dedicated line bandwidth for a year is already It’s 2W."

IPFS technology represents the future distributed storage form, which is a must for the future blockchain value storage. Beginning to understand IPFS technology in depth means understanding the future value of the blockchain.