In 2017, Filecoin conducted public crowdfunding and raised more than 257 million US dollars in a very short period! It has attracted great attention from investors all over the world. At the same time, it broke records, created the miracle of the global ICO, and deservedly became a star project just like Ethereum in 2014!
Thanks to its infrastructure – IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), Filecoin can gain such a high level of attention. IPFS is a new hypermedia text transfer protocol, which can be considered a website that supports distributed storage.
On the opposite of IPFS is the centralized storage website starting with HTTP. What is the difference between IPFS and the centralized storage websites we usually use such as AWS and Alibaba Cloud?
Let’s think about it, is the data we store in the flash drive or online storage absolutely safe? The answer is negative! It will be lost, or even blocked, right? For example, the former Kingsoft online disk and 360 online disks have been closed, a lot of files need to be transferred, and a large amount of time and energy is wasted. In addition, the space of free online disks is very limited. If you want to increase the storage capacity, you must pay for it, and the security is also unknown.
The IPFS network uses the decentralized shard encryption storage technology to store files, which divides one file into multiple segments and stores them on each node of the network. These nodes are the PCs we use. When you download or open a file, the IPFS network will automatically restore the file for you.
In this way, it prevents your data from being hacked by any other people or organizations so that no one can take control of your data. Our stored data will not be tampered with or deleted at will! In addition, it is quite fast using the IPFS network for file storage and file download and completely eliminates the lags and 404 errors of the traditional HTTP protocol.
At present, IPFS can realize the transition from HTTP to IPFS through an HTTP gateway, and now some browsers have allowed access to IPFS. It is believed that users will soon be able to switch to IPFS in a near future to complete the storage and distribution on the Web network.