The 2015 DefCon conference started out like any other. The world’s largest hacking competition brings together contestants from around the globe to prove their skill by cracking various secure systems. One of the most popular games is a capture-the-flag game where participants try to attack and protect their own networks.
One participant made waves when they offered a hundred-dollar prize to whoever could access the user data in their server. There was a twist – the server was accessible, the firewall open, and the administrator password publicly released. No one took home the prize. Though accessing the server was easy, a secure storage technology based on cryptography and distributed storage prevented the world’s top hackers from obtaining the files.
Leading this team was YottaChain founder Donglin Wang, a cryptography distributed storage expert who was named one of China’s Top Ten Young Scientists.
Wang believes the same technology he debuted at DefCon is the key to unlock the potential of the IPFS peer-to-peer protocol, overcoming the obstacles that have so far limited it.
The problem that IPFS solves
IPFS is a powerful protocol with the potential to revolutionize the blockchain. It focuses on two main issues.
First, it provides decentralized storage. Users in China are familiar with centralized storage, as provided by Baidu network disk, 360, or Tencent. Elsewhere, Dropbox, AWS, and Google provide centralized storage. In contrast, IPFS provides decentralized storage, and has had no major issues since its launch in 2015.
The second focus is often overlooked, but arguably more valuable. IPFS has changed the way in which blockchains are mined. With the popularity of mining, many people are buying computers just for this purpose and consuming considerable amounts of power to operate them. This kind of mining causes quite a bit of waste - last year, the electricity it consumed exceeded the electricity consumption of the entire country in more than 100 countries.
IPFS innovation model
IPFS provides an innovative model: mining resources by means of contributing resources. For example, if someone has some hard disk space storage space, he can volunteer to contribute it to store other people's data. The more resources people contribute, the more they will be rewarded. This model is more healthy and sustainable than traditional mining, so can fundamentally change the trend of the entire blockchain industry.
Limitations of IPFS
Like everything, IPFS has its limitations. A key one is that files are not encrypted so only public data can be stored. IPFS is marketed as a replacement for http. In reality however, it can only store public data such as web pages, not personal or corporate data.
Data encryption is crucial for decentralized storage to be practical. When using centralized storage, data is protected by the internal security framework and does not necessarily need to be encrypted. Of course, this security is fallible as seen with Facebook's Cambridge Analytica even for example. However, decentralized storage takes advantage of storage space that is not protected by any added security. A person's data could be stored in the hard drives of colleagues, friends, neighbors, or even competitors. Therefore, personal and enterprise data must be encrypted in decentralized storage, unless it is public web data.
IPFS is not encrypted, primarily because it requires data deduplication. Otherwise, the same document could be owned by different people, wasting duplicated storage space. When storing on IPFS, only one copy of each document is deduplicated and stored, regardless of redundant coding factors for data reliability. After encryption, there is no way to tell if there are repetitions in the data, so it is impossible to deduplicate.
Data repetition rates can be quite high in centralized storage. The CTO of Qihu360, one of the biggest cloud storage service provider in China, revealed that the company’s operational data was actually five times the average repetition rate. In order to make more efficient use of available storage space, IPFS chooses to deduplicate documents instead of encrypting them. It leaves the responsibility and additional cost of encryption to the users.
Myth and Fact of IPFS
Claim 1: “IPFS can replace static web pages”
TRUE: IPFS can very effectively replace static web pages, using ipfs: instead of http:
Claim 2: “IPFS cannot store personal and corporate data”
TRUE. As mentioned earlier, IPFS can only store public data and cannot store private data unless the application does its own encryption (sacrificing storage efficiency).
Claim 3: “IPFS can replace http”
FALSE. The web is made up of both static and dynamic pages. IPFS replaces static web pages very well, but it does not replace dynamic webpages because it only has storage capacity, not computing power. Most websites use dynamic web pages, so IPFS can't really replace http.
YottaChain's innovation
The traditional IT infrastructure has three blocks: storage, computing, and networking. The blockchain itself is a self-contained network, so IPFS is equivalent to a storage plus network. Since decentralized storage requires encryption, there are now four blocks: storage, computing, networking and encryption. Based on IPFS, YottaChain creates a blockchain which combines decentralized storage, encryption, computing, and networking.
This chain completely subverts the existing architecture with an innovative model, enabling data encryption and data deduplication. In addition, it provides computing power, which can not only replace static web pages, but also replace dynamic web pages. Finally, YottaChain provides a decentralized governance structure, probably the most complete blockchain governance structure to date.
In the end, Dong and his team have developed a complete system on which to build a very rich application scenario. Very powerful infrastructure capabilities support other blockchain projects as well as traditional IT projects which can be seamlessly migrated to this blockchain. “It will prove that blockchain is truly capable of creating value,” says Dong, “and the blockchain can indeed do better than current existing IT technology.”
Media Contact
Company Name: YottaChain
Contact Person: Yvonne Li
Email: Send Email
Country: United States
Website: http://www.iprs.io
Source: www.abnewswire.com
