Star Media Live Interview | Mirror Network MW: Blockchain + Distributed Storage

It has been more than ten years since the birth of cryptocurrency, and this industry has experienced too many joys and sorrows; from the second half of 2019 to the present, affected by the sluggish market and multiple factors of the epidemic, including blockchain companies and even some traditional companies, have laid off employees, cut salaries or even closed down to reduce operating costs or stop losing money.

However, we noticed that the industry's cryptocurrency storage platform, MW Mirror Network, has recently been behaving "weirdly". The original operating team not only did not reduce its operations like most companies, but instead "went against the current". Such "unsociable" operations have sparked heated discussions in the industry.

On June 12, Star Media CEO Yoki specially invited Lao Feng, co-founder of MW Mirror Network and early Bitcoin entrepreneur, to talk to everyone about "Mirror Network MW: Blockchain + Distributed Storage".

The event also received support from many industry media including Mars Finance, Evangelical Finance, Evergreen Finance, Yideng Community, Miyou Finance, Lieyun Finance, Yichuang Times, Interstellar World, and Evangelical Finance.

The following is a transcript of the live interview, edited by Star Media:

CEO of Star Media: Hello, welcome to the Star Club live broadcast room. Since the Bitcoin halving, the popularity of distributed storage networks has gradually emerged from the cryptocurrency market. Today our theme is related to storage mining and IPFS protocol projects. We are honored to invite Lao Feng, the co-founder of the mirror network MW, to give us a brief introduction before our ama officially starts!

MW Mirror Network Co-founder—Lao Feng: Hello everyone, I am Lao Feng. I started my business in the Bitcoin circle in 2012. I was an early believer in Bitcoin. I stayed silent for two years and returned to the circle with the help of a group of friends. During this period, I did a lot of research on distributed storage, including IPFS, so the project I chose to start this time is also about the field of distributed storage. I believe that blockchain + distributed storage is the only industry that can combine mining with practicality. While humans consume a lot of resources, they can also build a commercial storage network that is beneficial to society. Mirror Network MW is a mature project that has applied IPFS technology to actual storage, and has created a feasible solution for the blockchain industry.

[Star Media First Question]

The 2020 National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference have ended. Many proposals and bills put forward by the representatives of the two sessions involve the blockchain industry. Could you please tell us about the future plans of the national level for the blockchain industry?

Mr. Feng: Well, our country’s strategic planning is very forward-looking. After the official announcement of “blockchain” in October last year, it gave us industry practitioners a reassurance. Blockchain technology has been identified as a major innovation area for future development. Including the proposal of “new infrastructure” in March this year, it has pointed out a clear direction for the development of blockchain technology.

The blockchain industry has become a national strategy, and together with 5G, cloud computing, and big data, it has become an important part of the new infrastructure. At present, the new generation of information technology represented by blockchain, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things has greatly promoted the development of my country's informatization. As a systematic integrated innovation of distributed accounting, consensus mechanism, point-to-point transmission, encryption algorithm, smart contract and other technologies, blockchain has also attracted great attention and widespread concern in the global science and technology and investment fields in recent years.

[Star Media Second Question]

It is expected that the IPFS mainnet will be launched this year. Distributed storage has become a hot topic in the industry. Where does this trend come from?

Mr. Feng: First of all, the Bitcoin halving has been completed. As the popularity of Bitcoin decreases, the cryptocurrency industry needs new forces to promote it. IPFS has been on the market for five years. With the iteration and update of technology, it has now been used in some commercial scenarios. It is an excellent booster. A slight correction here, IPFS and FIL are two projects. IPFS is the underlying transmission protocol, and FIL is a decentralized storage project. They are just done by the same team.

Why is distributed storage a hot topic? I would like to share another set of data with you. According to the "Data Age 2025" report released by IDC, the annual data generated in the world will increase from 33ZB in 2018 to 175ZB in 2025, which is equivalent to 491EB of data generated every day (converted to the TB unit we are familiar with, it is 491EBX1024TX1024T=514.8 millionT). I believe this number will make everyone feel incredible. The demand for storage space in the future is unpredictable.

With the advent of the 5G, AI, and artificial intelligence era, the data generated by humans will show explosive growth. Faced with the rise of blockchain technology and the huge amount of data brought by new technologies, we have created a perfect solution, which solves a series of problems currently faced by data storage among major oligarchs: high prices, inability to store data permanently, abuse of data, etc., and solves the quantification problem of data storage in the new era. The use of blockchain + distributed storage effectively solves the contradiction between data privacy and storage prices.

[Star Media Third Question]

What is the connection between the mirror network MW and IPFS? Please give us a formal introduction to the mirror network~

Mr. Feng: In fact, Mirror World Network is a long-awaited blockchain + distributed storage project. The project has been deeply cultivated for 3 years and has nearly 1 million lines of core code. It has absorbed domestic and foreign technical experience such as IPFS, Alibaba Cloud OSS, Stoij, etc., and used peer-to-peer P2P network, DHT distributed hash table, data encryption sharding, IPFS network protocol, multi-chain incentive mechanism block exchange and other technologies to build an easy-to-use and available distributed storage network.

The MW network can do the following:

1. Establish an open distributed blockchain storage network to form a multi-chain ecosystem with various existing networks and public chains to complete data and value transmission.

2. Organize the idle storage resources within the enterprise and individuals into a distributed storage network. Various public chains, storage networks, and personal nodes can be deployed and operated.

3. Build a global distributed cloud storage that is compatible with IPFS, public cloud storage, and private cloud storage.

Secondly, we also need to talk about our collective chain architecture. In the public chain part, the mirror network MW is an open blockchain + distributed storage system. We will also build a consortium chain in China and build a distributed data center DDC to provide users with cheap, secure, and highly private private storage services. We can also conduct a certain degree of supervision and auditing for enterprises and governments in certain specific fields or scenarios.

Finally, we can also provide data backup, verification, and query services for data on other public chains (open source chains).

[Star Media Fourth Question]

What is a distributed data center (DDC)? What are its advantages over traditional data centers?

Mr. Feng: The combination of blockchain + distributed storage file system + data center architecture is a solution that can upgrade or replace centralized data centers, traditional IDCs and commercial services. Currently, the distributed data center (DDC) initiated by the mirror network MW has been officially recognized.

Distributed Data Center (DDC), according to the definition of distributed storage, is to use the network to connect thousands of storage servers to form a virtual super storage server to solve super-large-scale problems that cannot be solved by a single storage server. In addition to forming a single storage server into a virtual super storage server, the distributed data center DDC also networks multiple data centers to form a multi-center service network.

Blockchain provides a strong guarantee for the operation of distributed data centers. The operating data of each data center and node storage server are recorded on the chain through the blockchain ledger, realizing functions such as proof of work, data distribution adjustment, data archiving, and multi-role management.

[Star Media Fifth Question]

Please give some examples to illustrate the relative advantages of using mirror network MW to build a distributed data center DDC.

Mr. Feng: At present, social and economic development has transformed into technological innovation. Mirror Network MW has seized the opportunity in the new infrastructure track and used blockchain technology to build a distributed data center DDC. Faced with the huge demand for data storage in the 5G/6G era, it fully integrates the massive resources of the storage market and invests in storage equipment to activate idle storage resources and have a complete set of solutions.

Take 96,000T data storage scale as an example:

Traditional IDC room: single data center, storage equipment costing more than 30 million, relatively simple user services, and many idle resources

Distributed Data Center (DDC): multiple data centers, node clustering, almost zero-cost storage devices, flexible business deployment, strong scalability, asset-light operation, and investment in billion-level data centers

Distributed data center DDC uses personal storage resources, public chain storage resources, and operator storage resources to form distributed city node commercial storage applications and create large-scale cold data storage.

Now, the distributed data center DDC under Mirror Network MW has implemented data node networking test operation in many places such as Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Tianjin, Hefei, etc., saving up to 70% of storage costs for governments and enterprises, and promoting and accelerating the society's move towards the 5G and AI era.

[Star Media Sixth Question]

What are the future plans for the mirror network MW?

Mr. Feng: In the more than one month since the launch of the mirror network MW, the number of global nodes has exceeded 3,500, covering 30 cities in 6 countries including Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia, and China. These are real data from the network.

In the future, we will deploy nodes in many countries around the world and build multiple large-scale distributed data centers to lay a strong foundation for data applications. At the same time, we also hope that global storage, open source public chains, and companies and individuals with storage resources can join the mirror network to provide a solid infrastructure for future storage methods.

[Star Media Question 7]

IPFS is very popular this year. Do you think distributed storage will be the catalyst for the next bull market? How do you view the arrival of the next bull market?

Mr. Feng: Let me analyze it from another perspective. Bitcoin has already been halved. In fact, you can notice that the spot trading volume has been getting lower and lower. As the popularity of Bitcoin decreases, the cryptocurrency industry needs new forces to promote it.

IPFS has been available for five years. With the iteration and update of technology, it has now been used in some commercial scenarios, including international manufacturers have been testing and using it. I think distributed storage is an excellent booster for the entire market at this point in time! Bitcoin is payment, and distributed storage is application. With the advent of the 5G/6G era, the amount of data generated by humans will be an unpredictable capacity demand, and the problem of centralized storage must be solved. The latter has greater imagination space. This is also the reason why there have been tens of billions of investment scales in the market in the past two years. Of course, there are also good and bad ones, so be careful to distinguish.

One more thing to add is that this is the third round of bull-bear transition that I have experienced. Each transition has a booster (3M and exchanges in 2013, ICO in 2017). No matter from which perspective, IPFS has this absolute potential. The next bull market depends on IPFS and distributed storage.