Why is Swarm, endorsed by Vitalik Buterin, worth looking forward to?

Swarm has a unique incentive system built around three important components: Swap, Swear, and Swindle. Its operating mechanism is as follows:

The exchange system records bandwidth usage and provides compensation to nodes for serving content. The dynamic nature of the system means that popular content will automatically be more widely distributed and more quickly accessible. Micropayments are handled by custom checkbook smart contracts, and a full payment system is being actively integrated into the system.

Swarm is a point-to-point content transmission system. Its nodes and data blocks have their own IDs. If you need to obtain your own information, you need an address. This is the way of point-to-point information transmission. The address is stored in the key space. There is always a node that is closest to the address. At this time, the request can be sent to the node, but in order to ensure the validity and timeliness of the system content, it is impossible to pay for each database. This will take a long time. Several payments at the same time may even cause the blockchain to swell.

Therefore, Swarm introduces the checkbook smart contract, which can transfer Swarm off-chain and then redeem the final check. Comparing the checkbook and the payment channel, the payment channel is the Raiden Network, while the checkbook has relatively less obstacles, because in this checkbook, everyone can use this checkbook, and in the payment channel, everyone must enter the network. However, the disadvantage of the checkbook is that there may be repetitions, so that payment cannot be guaranteed, and combining Swarm and Swap can solve this problem.

Under the existing incentive system, content can be delivered through nodes, and Swarm CDN will automatically scale. Data with high popularity and high browsing volume will be saved by each node, but fees need to be paid. If the content is not very popular, it will be deleted over time.

This article focuses on the incentive system of Swarm, which is similar to Filecoin. The biggest difference between the two is the technical details and incentive mechanism. Filecoin does not punish storage, while Swarm punishes storage. The former has no storage penalty mechanism, which leads to the proliferation of spam content. Some Filecoin miners even deliberately create spam content in order to increase their income. The latter improves file availability and security through storage penalties.