Filecoin is a dramatic improvement over content delivery networks (CDN) by providing a scalable data storage and retrieval solution.
CDN utilizes the servers closest to each user to deliver music, pictures, videos, applications, and other files to users in a fast and reliable way, it delivers high-performance, scalable, and low-cost network content to users. While it currently serves most of the world’s public internet, there are areas where internet speeds are still too slow to load the contents. Likewise, CDN is convenient for users, but the hosts have to bear high costs. The cost of hosting data on CDN can be eighty times the cost of CDN providers storing data and presenting it to the user.
Filecoin can make up for such deficiencies. It greatly improves the CDN, providing a scalable data storage and retrieval solution. Technically speaking, a CDN is a series of complex and interconnected servers. They are built and maintained by large corporations for global data distribution. Filecoin improved on this model, and its servers are nodes that are owned and operated by individuals. This brings the following benefits:
The first and most obvious advantage is that data on Filecoin is content-addressable. Files stored on the network are associated with CID on IPFS, which means the retrieval is not based on the location of servers.
Another advantage is that, in a distributed network, no single company can own the data on the Filecoin blockchain, which means that the data stored in Filecoin is immutable and can be permanently stored in the network. Also, the data stored on Filecoin in a distributed manner is permissionless, and any can start up a node to obtain the data, avoiding the problem of data loss due to server problems in the centralized database.
All in all, Filecoin and its users are able to provide better options for content distribution, benefiting users all over the world. If the capabilities of content addressing and persistent storage of the Filecoin network are fully utilized, more diverse usage scenarios are bound to be discovered.