In 2004, the total amount of data in the world was 30EB.

In 2005, the total amount of data in the world was 50EB.

In 2006, the total amount of data in the world was 161EB

....

In 2015, the world's data grew at an astonishing rate of 7,900 EB.

Now in 2020, data growth will reach 35,000EB.

By 2025, data storage will grow to 175ZIB . If 10TIB hard drives storing this data are stacked together, they can reach the moon.

The law of explosive growth of data is called: the new Moore's Law, that is, the total amount of data in human history will double every 18 months.

Today, we are not only producers of data, but also data dependents!

Everyone will ask this question: Why is global data increasing so fast?

The increase in productivity has led to a surge in data! When we look back at history, you will find that in the past, data was basically generated manually. But when humans entered the information society, data generation became more and more automated.

When information enters agriculture, the changes in the plant growth environment: temperature, humidity, light, rain, and constant monitoring generate a large amount of data. Humans are never satisfied with "estimates" or "parts" of data. Only the overall and accurate data are the meaning of data growth.

When information enters life, data is generated everywhere in the human body, from genes to the whole body. Now, treatment plans can be given through analysis and judgment of genetic data.

But at the same time, as long as there is a little data loss, even a small gene fragment, even a day's temperature measurement, it may cause huge and irreparable losses. Data security is particularly important in this era of information explosion.

Nowadays, human activities are closely related to data. The world's 3 billion Internet users are dealing with data from morning to night. Humans who can rely more on data than today will only appear tomorrow.

In the Web2.0 era, everyone is not only a data receiver, but also a data producer. Take photos, chat, post microblogs, and small videos. Do you know? Every day, 28,800 small videos are uploaded to Youtube, enough for one person to watch day and night for 3.3 years. Every day, 50 million messages are uploaded to Twitter. Assuming that it takes 10 seconds to browse a message, this information is enough for one person to browse day and night for 16 years. Every day, 6.3 million orders are generated on Amazon...

In the future, when smart cities and Industry 4.0 are fully implemented, the word "smart" will not only bring about human dependence on data, but also the massive amount of data generated every minute and every second. The cost of storing such a large amount of data is also massive, and storage cost is equally important in this era of information explosion.

In the 1950s, data was stored and managed internally, and internal hard disks were rented out by some companies (IBM, RAMAC). At the time, RAMAC cost $640 per megabyte per month, which was expensive and limited in functionality.

But if we turn the clock back to the 1990s, the emergence of solid-state drives (SSDs) and mechanical hard drives has reduced costs while allowing more data to be stored. However, users and businesses must have their own data centers to store and host these hardware, which may cost a company millions of dollars to manage.

The real turning point for data came in 2006, when Amazon launched AWS, the world's first widely adopted on-demand cloud computing platform.

Today, cloud storage has become the backbone of the Internet, but the information island effect has become increasingly obvious. In the past 10 years, data management and pricing opacity have become industry rules, and companies that control and monopolize data storage: Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tencent occupy 70% of the cloud computing market.

Your data does not belong to you, and the value you create on the platform does not belong to you. In this era when the value of data is increasing, data ownership becomes extremely important.

In 2019, my country listed "data" as the seventh largest production factor, which is equally important as human resources, capital, and management, and the strategic position of data is highlighted.

Filecoin will solve the security, cost and ownership of data.

Filecoin's mission is to create a distributed, efficient and powerful foundation for human information. It provides a blockchain-based market that is expected to revolutionize the global storage economy, providing a new and secure way for everyone to buy and sell storage.

The Filecoin economic model states that the "Filecoin economy" is an "island economy". Trade needs to be conducted through the island's currency, FIL, and island residents who want to participate in trade need this currency to carry out production activities.

In Filecoin's data market, there are three major participants: clients, storage miners, and retrieval miners. These three form the cycle of Filecoin's economy. Clients pay storage miners for storage services and pay retrieval miners for data. Because it is an easily accessible market, the cost of data storage providers to access and find customers is greatly reduced. After the cost drops, the entire storage market is no longer an oligopoly, which promotes the development of the storage market. This is also how Filecoin solves the storage cost problem.

The Filecoin network has various storage proof systems that allow users to verify that data has been replicated and stored correctly over time. At the same time, users can also hire multiple storage miners to store the same data, reducing the risk of data corruption. This is also how Filecoin solves the storage security problem.

In the Filecoin storage network, after the future ecological applications are implemented, every piece of data will be displayed on the chain, thereby achieving the purpose of data ownership confirmation.

In addition to the vision of the project itself, there are two more important points for participating in Filecoin.

Filecoin team Protocol Labs released IPFS in 2015 and has extensive experience in building distributed storage. Although IPFS is now very mature, it still has not fulfilled its vision of subverting http.

But when Filecoin appeared, the IPFS tree finally had its own branches and leaves, which could absorb a lot of nutrients, give birth to the fruits of DAPP, and form the entire ecosystem.

Today, Orign, 3Box, Handshake, Augur, Aragon, Ethereum Foundation and more projects have joined the IPFS network architecture, so we believe that the Filecoin team is the most anticipated and promising team in distributed storage.

If you want Filecoin to flourish quickly, the incentive system of the economic model is an indispensable link. This plays an absolute role in the balanced and coordinated development of the three cores of the Filecoin network: users, retrieval miners, and storage miners, and is the key to the success of the entire project.

For storage miners, stable operation and storage capacity determine the benefits of block rewards, which means that storage miners must improve the success rate of orders to promote the success rate of the entire network and make users willing to enter the network for storage. At the same time, if you want to participate in it, the emergence of pre-collateral is a prerequisite, and it can also ensure that miners will be punished enough when they do not store user data, but this is undoubtedly disadvantageous to the entire network.

Therefore, we will find that Filecoin and storage miners are a community of interests. In order to prevent miners from entering the market with a large amount of funds at the beginning and exiting the network after obtaining larger block rewards, Filecoin itself has a decay model. Such incentives allow miners to provide customers with the best services. Under this premise, we will find that the success of the Filecoin project is inseparable from the participation of storage miners, and the needs of miners and FIL are extremely critical.

Under the new Moore's Law, data will grow explosively. However, data carries not only entertainment, games, and business, but also changes in human lifestyles. Data storage, as a key part of the underlying architecture, is also constantly evolving.

Despite this, we still face three major challenges: cost, security, and property rights confirmation. We believe that distributed storage is the future development trend, and Filecoin is the brightest star among them. As long as it involves a reasonable economic model incentive mechanism, it can change the pattern of the storage market.