Let’s start by looking at the differences and pros and cons of centralized storage.

Centralized storage

Centralized storage can be simply defined as the existing cloud storage system, which is a cloud computing system with data storage and management as its core. In simple terms, cloud storage is the sharing of storage resources into a storage space that users can access from any connected device at any time and place. Dropbox, iCloud, Googe Drive and so on are centralized cloud storage, where you store your photos and so on, but you actually store your data on servers in those centers.

Centralized cloud storage has become the future development trend of storage technology. Its necessity is shown in the following aspects: On the one hand, due to the popularization of the Internet, a large amount of multimedia information creates a large amount of unstructured data; On the other hand, many companies’ business data, as well as personal photos and music, need to be available online at any time.

However, from the perspective of the personal cloud storage market, the market space is huge. Such a large number of users also put forward higher requirements for web disk service providers, only to form a leading edge in technology, to provide more personalized services, and strong financial strength of the project to eventually win in the market competition.

Disadvantages of centralized storage

Although traditional centralized storage has advantages such as convenience and speed, its own mechanism and storage mode still has many risks and hidden dangers:

1. Privacy leakage

Centralized storage Users can quickly upload audio and video files to a web disk at any time according to their preferences. In this way, mobile device space is saved and web disk content can be quickly accessed. In fact, the administrator of a web disk can directly view and delete files uploaded by users from the server platform. In view of this management mechanism, users’ privacy is prone to leakage. Companies with a large amount of data need a large amount of training data in order to keep up with the steps of the AI era. Commercial interests will drive large companies to use data stored in users’ personal cloud disks to conduct AI neural network training, so as to improve the AI competitiveness of large companies.

2. The server security is not high

Because of its special storage mode, centralized storage server has become the primary target of hackers. A large amount of user data is stored on the server, and information hijacking of large user groups is an important source of income for hackers, which means that the security of the server directly affects the security of user data. The data of many big companies are for sale on the dark web, which shows that big companies cannot guarantee the security of data completely.

3. Risk of termination of operations

In the current Internet environment, cloud storage service providers provide cloud storage services for the public, with an annual investment of more than 500 million yuan. On the other hand, the profit model of private cloud storage is not yet clear. The investment of centralized storage is huge, but the low price is the main use demand of users, which is contradictory with the purpose of the company’s operation profit, and ultimately leads to the possibility of service providers to shut down due to poor management.

Decentralized storage

Decentralized storage is the distribution of data across multiple network nodes, similar to the distributed ledger technology of blockchain. Storage providers (hosted hosts) store customer data based on the contract and periodically demonstrate their ability to continue providing storage services until the expiration of the contract.

Users can also rent out their unused computer hard disk space and get a Token as a reward, while those with tokens can rent other users’ hard disk storage space to use. Users from all over the world can organize their spare hard drive space into a decentralized network, and the spare hard drive space becomes the nodes of the decentralized network. For those who use storage services, security is Paramount, so data stored on a decentralized network will be sliced into small pieces, encrypted and distributed across many nodes. Advantages of decentralized storage

1. Reduce costs

Decentralized storage takes advantage of the sharing economy by taking advantage of users’ spare disk space and unused upload bandwidth. In this way, these resources can be fully utilized to benefit storage resource owners and reduce the construction cost of centralized storage.

2. Enhanced privacy

The stored data is divided into small pieces and encrypted before being distributed on many nodes, avoiding the risk of centralized storage. Even if a piece of data is leaked, only part of the data is leaked, but not all of the data.

3. Faster

In the process of file download, the fragmented data is reassembled and the fragmented data comes from multiple storage space providers. Therefore, multi-point download enables the speed of decentralized storage to be much faster than that of centralized storage. In addition, centralized storage will deploy only a few core rooms. Decentralised storage, with storage providers everywhere (miners), is faster, too, thanks to the proximity principle.

4. Blockchain smart contracts

With smart contracts, programs can reward resource providers by determining their own usage.

5.Token economy revitalizes storage market

Token incentive makes more users willing to contribute their idle resources, thus magnifying the storage capacity of the whole market.

Difficulties and challenges of decentralized storage

1. Stability

Decentralized storage requires data to be divided and stored on different nodes. When fewer users use it, insufficient slice backup will lead to data loss. However, centralized storage has developed for many years and provides more mature and stable services.

2.Token cheating

Due to center storage model is based on the block chain Token economy, in economic models, storage vendor (miners) by providing services to gain profits, this is the whole economic model of the foundation, mechanism of how to ensure the fair and reliable enough, would not be malicious exploits miners cheating and illegal gain, this is a great difficulty and challenge.

3. Cold startup problem

Centralized cloud storage because a company operates storage space, it can flexibly add or reduce servers based on the actual storage space usage.

However, for decentralized storage, it is difficult because there is no company to operate the storage space, and the operation of storage space mainly relies on Token incentives to motivate storage providers (miners) to provide services, which will lead to the balance between supply and demand in the sharing economy. That is, in the early days, miners may not be willing to provide services (mining) because no one is using them. To solve this problem, a good Token economic incentive model must be designed.

The key to decentralized storage is two things:

1. Give full play to the advantages of decentralized storage 2. Make up for the disadvantages of decentralized storage.

So how do you do that?

1. First and foremost quality of Service (QoS)

To do decentralized storage well, as with centralized storage, quality of service (QoS) is Paramount. On the basis of good QoS, build a DApp that can be used by users. In the process of using DApp, user experience quality (QoE) is also very important.

What specific indicators are included in QoS and QoE?

As mentioned earlier, decentralized storage has advantages, including cheap enough, fast enough, and secure enough. QoS is to quantify and optimize these indicators until they are far beyond the QoS of centralized cloud storage.

Existing decentralized storage public chain projects, with their focus on de-centralization, consensus, and rigorous mathematical proof to prevent cheating miners (especially FileCoin, which is almost 80% covered by FileCoin white paper), completely ignore the importance of QoS.

However, QoS can not be done well at the beginning, and needs to be gradually optimized in the process of project development and improved step by step. So early on we had to make sure that the project was flexible enough to scale up, because we had to constantly try to tweak the algorithm.

For a detailed explanation of these concepts, see this article:

The key performance index of storage blockchain project landing — QoS!

2. Excellent economic model

As mentioned earlier, one of the difficulties and challenges of decentralized storage is stability. When storage providers (miners) are not stable, data may be lost and the overall platform availability is low (SLA is similar to Amazon S3, which is also a QoS indicator). A good economic incentive model can stabilize storage suppliers (miners) and eliminate and punish unstable miners. As long as storage suppliers (miners) stabilize, the overall service availability (SLA) will increase accordingly.

In addition to affecting the stability of storage providers (miners), economic models also encourage the participation or participation of new storage providers (miners), thus solving the problem of balance between demand and supply in the sharing economy.

Economic models, like quality of service (QoS), can’t be done right from the start. They need to be refined step by step during the development of the project. Therefore, it is necessary to try to adjust the economic incentive strategy in the early stage, so as to ensure that the project can be flexibly upgraded.

3. It’s hard to think about cheating early on

4. Flexible and scalable architecture

Since both quality of service (QoS) and economic models require iteration, it is important to have an architecture that is flexible and scalable.

Decentralized storage is different from bitcoin, Ethereum, etc., because they all write all information onto the blockchain. In decentralized storage, only incentives and contracts need to be written to the blockchain, while actual stored files do not need to be written to the blockchain. So there’s no need to go all the way to the center.

PPIO’s chief architect believes that the proper path for decentralized storage is to start with a strong center, then a weak center, and then de-center. For specific reasons, check out the following two articles:

PPIO: Three stages of PPIO: “strong center” — “weak center” — “decenter”! PPIO: Everything in order to land, why PPIO design into three stages!

For more information about PPIO, please visit our website: PPIO