Reasons to choose decentralized storage and Filecoin (Part 1)

In the process of welcoming the Web3 era, people have been doing their best to build the application layer, such as more Dapps, DAOs, DeFi, etc. But no matter how the network develops, data storage infrastructure will be the most important infrastructure.

Before this, tech giants had almost all the say, which brought concerns about centralization. Once these data are in the hands of tech giants, they will be neither safe nor transparent . In addition, they can be easily tampered with.

Decentralized storage came into being. With its continuous development in recent years, we have found that it not only solves the above problems, but also brings more new possibilities to the Internet.

Compared with centralized storage

Why choose decentralized Filecoin?

At present, Filecoin's decentralized storage has the following main features:

1The data will have multiple backups for emergency recovery . So even if an accident occurs and the data is damaged or lost, we can have backups for recovery.

2 Using IPLD format to store data saves 30~50% of space compared to ordinary zip files . The Merkle tree will remove some duplicates to save storage space and cost. In general, using IPLD file format will be more cost-effective and take up less space.

3. Data uniqueness . Due to the characteristics of content addressing, CID is generated from the content itself, so the hash value must correspond to the content it refers to. It can help users to better and faster determine the uniqueness of the content and better maintain information security.

4 Filecoin’s incentive model can significantly reduce costs , which will be a practical advantage for enterprises.

In addition, Filecoin is special because it proposes a very complete solution and a good incentive model for the storage transaction market . Whether it is proof of replication or proof of space and time, it provides a paradigm and also includes storage technologies such as zero-knowledge proof.

Although it is not yet mature or cost-effective, it has taken some issues into consideration and is expected to provide a solution that is lower in cost than the current centralized storage. This market-oriented solution enables users to make full use of idle resources on a global scale.

We believe that one day Filecoin will surpass Amazon and solve the problem of data transmission, and it will go far beyond that - in the future, Filecoin's CID combined with FVM is likely to produce a "trading market" where users can retain control of their health data, and frictionless decentralized transactions can generate greater value .

Compared with other decentralized storage

Why choose Filecoin?

In this article on Interstellar Cloud Storage, we have introduced the differences between Filecoin and Arweave. The former has a larger storage capacity (according to the latest data, 3 of the hard drives produced worldwide are used for Filecoin storage) and a lower storage price (only 0.38% of AWS S3) . In addition, due to community support, Filecoin is also very friendly to developers and supports various developer-assisted projects.

* As long as you have a Github account, you can get 32GB of verified data storage space for early testing. If your project helps promote the development of the Filecoin ecosystem, you can also get a small grant of around $5,000 to start your project.

In addition, Filecoin has many aspects that stand out from other decentralized storage projects.

1 Filecoin is not so much a storage platform as it is a data processing plant, a database, and the world's largest zero-knowledge proof network . Based on many previous cases, we can see that Filecoin is mainly positioned in enterprise-level storage. It has a high degree of flexibility in the enterprise-level storage market. In contrast, Arwave focuses more on small-scale storage such as NFT.

2 The Filecoin ecosystem has already generated considerable dividends, so there is no need to worry about expensive upfront storage costs. Some storage facilities are provided free of charge, such as NFT.storage and web3.storage, and the focus of these efforts is to establish good connections with Web3 applications.

3 Arwave doesn’t care much about pricing. But Filecoin is a trading market featuring storage transactions. Only by combining token economics with transaction marketing can we ensure that data storage is always cost-effective.

4 In addition to providing storage, the scalability of the Filecoin ecosystem will be much higher than other underlying players. Especially after the launch of FVM, some special tools for data storage and retrieval may appear to better manage data, ensure data security, and develop new applications, while other storage projects do not have this capability.