With the development of the digital economy, blockchain, as a new type of distributed database, plays a vital role in promoting the digital transformation process of related industries and promoting profound economic and social changes. Based on the huge domestic population base, the wide application of 5G and AI advanced technologies, the digital transformation and upgrading of various industries, and the generation of large-scale data volume will bring pressure to the data storage market, but also provide a broad market opportunity.
It can be said that distributed storage and computing, including IPFS, etc., based on the advantages of natural openness and compatibility, can quickly absorb, accommodate, and integrate new technologies and application development trends, attracting many companies including Microsoft, Google, Ali, and Tencent. Enterprise giants should focus on capital layout in advance. Let Wanglian Technology take you to explore the world of distributed storage and computing today.
Problems with data storage
How to define the era we live in? In the era of agricultural economy in the early stages of human beings, a typical feature was that people relied on land and labor for survival and development. With the advent of the industrial age, economic development is increasingly dependent on capital and technology. Now, with the rapid advancement of the digital economy, assuming that an enterprise can only retain one factor of production, it must be data.
This is why some people call data the "new oil" of the digital economy era. Because in the context of the digital economy era, data has become the core asset of future competition between enterprises and countries. To give a vivid example, for example, leading companies such as Tencent and Ali all have the same talents and technologies. What is the key to competition in the social field? Undoubtedly a large amount of user data.
According to IDC's forecast, by 2023, China's data volume will reach 40zb. From the perspective of market size, the global data market will exceed the 100 billion US dollar mark in 2024.
We should also note that with the popularization and use of 5G technology, enterprise data will become the mainstream of data output, and the amount of data will increase exponentially.
With such a huge amount of data and the foreseeable future data scale, how to store and use these data well? Now we connect a large number of computers and mobile terminals in series through the Internet. The transmission and access of data is realized based on the HTTP protocol. The data is stored centrally with the IP address of the computer and terminal, forming a centralized library.
There are a lot of "visible" problems here!
The first is the problem of speed. The centralized database is under huge pressure under the huge amount of visits and data transmission. When there is centralized concurrency in the network, it will "crash". For example, Weibo crashes due to popular searches. We are all used to it now.
Secondly, there are security issues. For the centralized storage of data, hackers only need to concentrate on conquering a single node to obtain all the data here.
On the other hand, as a data storage party, there is also the possibility of doing evil in theory. How to make good use of data in the future while ensuring data transmission without downtime, ensuring data security, privacy, and orderliness? This is the inevitability of our discussion of distributed data storage protocols in the era of digital economy.
Advantages of Distributed Storage and Computing
When it comes to distributed data storage and computing, the IPFS protocol is undoubtedly one of the most concerned distributed protocols in the market. According to the definition of Baidu Encyclopedia, IPFS is a network transmission protocol designed to create persistent and distributed storage and shared files. It is a content-addressable peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol, and the nodes in the IPFS network will form a distributed file system.
Some people say that the IPFS protocol exists to replace HTTP, while others think it is an important supplement to HTTP. If we summarize the advantages and characteristics of the IPFS protocol, "content addressing", "distributed", and "peer-to-peer" are its recognized potential.
First, distributed output storage. Based on a distributed network, huge data no longer need to be stored in the same database, but are stored separately in all nodes within the network. According to the fault-tolerant mechanism of the distributed network, data can be replicated in sufficient quantities and stored in databases in different regions. Therefore, even if a certain data is completely destroyed, it can be completely restored through the backup of other nodes, ensuring the data security on the distributed network.
Second, point-to-point data transmission. Based on the distributed data storage and computing network, data transmission will no longer be processed through the same database in a centralized manner, and the image is understood as "private customization" of data. For example, when a user needs to download an MP3 file, in the traditional way, this MP3 may be stored in the supplier's database, but the supplier's database obviously not only has this one MP3 file, so when everyone downloads the file they need at the same time, There will be a delay in data transmission. The point-to-point data transmission of the distributed network is that the node user directly accesses the node where the data is stored, without the need for unified processing in the middle, which greatly improves the efficiency.
In particular, some relatively large files do not need to be stored in the same node, but are cut into several parts through an encryption algorithm, and then distributed and stored on nodes around the world. When a download is initiated, the distributed network grabs all these node lists in parallel to form a complete file, so that the parallel speed is far greater than the speed of directly downloading a complete file.
The third is data retrieval based on content addressing. Data retrieval in traditional databases becomes "address addressing". For example, when a user downloads a movie, he needs to tell the computer the corresponding IP address or domain name of the movie. And "content addressing" is to perform hash mapping on this movie to obtain a unique "hash value", which is directly retrieved through the hash value when retrieving, and directly performs peer-to-peer downloading when downloading.
In general, distributed data storage and computing provide a new breakthrough for the surge of data we will face in the era of digital economy in terms of data processing speed, security, low cost and security.
On November 6 last year, the General Office of the State Administration of Radio and Television issued the "Notice of the General Office of the State Administration of Radio and Television on Printing and Distributing a Series of White Papers on the Application of Blockchain Technology", affirming the application value and technical advantages of distributed storage and computing. This is also an important reason why leading companies, including Amazon, Alibaba Cloud, and Tencent Cloud, have been investing heavily.
Infrastructure in the Digital Economy Era
"The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China and Outline of Long-term Goals for 2035 (Draft)" proposes to welcome the digital age, activate the potential of data elements, promote the construction of a network power, and accelerate the construction of a digital economy, digital society, Digital government uses digital transformation as a whole to drive changes in production methods, lifestyles and governance methods. As the first year of the "14th Five-Year Plan", the national level has clearly defined the direction for the development of digital China.
As a new type of distributed database, blockchain is still in its early stages of development. With the rapid advancement and iteration of distributed storage and computing technology, it will surely become one of the important infrastructures in the digital economy era in the future. From another perspective, in a sense, the development of distributed data storage and computing also determines the degree of innovation and application of blockchain technology.
For example, the protection of copyright by blockchain technology, the confirmation of digital artworks, etc., have brought us a lot of room for imagination in the development of distributed databases. For example, traditional digital copyrights, digital artworks, etc. need to be authenticated by blockchain technology for uniqueness and ownership, and efficient circulation based on the blockchain network. At present, including the well-known overseas Ethereum network, it still faces problems such as expensive handling fees and throughput in the storage of pictures and videos.
Summarize
Summarize
With the in-depth development of digital industrialization and industrial digitization, the digital economy will surely promote quality changes, efficiency changes, and power changes, and inject new momentum into high-quality development. The development of blockchain technology will continue to give birth to new industries, new formats, and new models, and promote new development with new kinetic energy. Wanglian Technology believes that in the era of digital economy, distributed storage technology is an extension of blockchain technology. Only by making a good layout in the new technology field can enterprises build a new arena and form a first-mover dominant advantage.
