What is decentralized storage? Decentralized storage is the backup of all types of documents including photos, videos, music, documents, etc. on platforms built on blockchain to ensure that our information is not purchased. sold and guaranteed to be used securely. So let’s learn about the operating mechanism of projects in the Decentralized Storage segment in the article below.
To better understand Decentralized Storage, people can refer to some of the articles below:
- What is Filecoin (FIL)? Overview of Filecoin Cryptocurrency
- What is Arweave (AR)? Arweave Cryptocurrency Overview
What Is Decentralized Storage?
Current market context
At the time of writing, centralized storage tools that we often call Cloud are monopolizing the entire storage industry with powerful names like Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, Alibaba Cloud or Microsoft Azure. The common operating mechanism of these companies is to use their data centers, distributed globally, to store and manage customer data.
Some of the advantages that the Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, Alibaba Cloud platforms bring are:
- Arbitrary scalability depends on customer needs.
- Cost savings for users and organizations that want to store large amounts of documents and information without having to buy and operate a separate server.
- Cloud storage companies offer security provisions, including encryption, decentralization, and other advanced security solutions to protect customer data.
- Cloud storage companies provide easy cloud data management tools that help customers manage their data efficiently and save time.
- Cloud storage companies allow customers to access their data from anywhere in the world through the internet.
Some of the remaining disadvantages are:
- Although cloud storage companies often employ highly secure solutions, data loss and security breaches can still occur.
- Cloud storage companies face issues related to user privacy, such as using customer information for advertising purposes or to third parties.
- Cloud storage companies may experience problems or interruptions in running services that affect customers’ ability to access and use data.
The problem does not stop here, Centralized storage is having a direct impact on the crypto market when there are nearly 50% of the number of nodes on the Ethereum network, clearly a decentralized blockchain cannot have the number of nodes. located on centralized storage platforms. That is why Decentralized Storage solutions were born.
Overview of Decentralized Storage
The solution offered by Decentralized Storage platforms is that instead of users storing information on centralized platforms such as Google, Amazon, Alibaba,… they will store information on the blockchain. Decentralized storage is a form of data storage in which data is not stored centrally in a single place but is distributed and stored on many different devices or locations.
Some advantages of Decentralized Storage that is:
- Since data is stored on many different devices, there is a higher chance that your data will always be available even if some devices are broken or not working.
- User privacy, information security and decentralization are guaranteed by Blockchain technology.
- Low cost: With decentralized blockchains with hundreds of thousands of nodes, decentralized storage capacity is larger than centralized, which reduces data storage costs.
- Data integrity is always guaranteed over time.
- Data download speeds from decentralized platforms will be faster than centralized solutions.
The general operating mechanism of Decentralized Storage platforms is that data, after being uploaded to the decentralized storage system, will be divided into many small parts and sent to many different nodes. Each node stores a small portion of data.
When users want to download their data, the array will assemble small pieces to combine into an original document for the user.
Some disadvantages of the decentralized storage model include:
- A common downside to both decentralized and centralized storage is that if the internet goes down, users won’t be able to interact with their information.
- For blockchains that lack decentralization, the problem that users encounter will be similar to centralized storage, the blockchain can be attacked by 51% and user information is threatened.
- The decentralized storage industry still lacks standards in its operating mechanism.
Some outstanding projects in the decentralized storage segment
- Filecoin is a decentralized storage network that uses proof-of-replication and proof-of-spacetime consensus mechanisms to ensure data integrity and security. Whether. Filecoin is designed to provide a secure and reliable way for users to store and retrieve data, while also providing a mechanism for miners to earn rewards for providing storage resources to network.
- A Blockweave is a set of blocks that each contain data and are linked to two previous blocks: The previous block in the chain (similar to traditional blockchains like Bitcoin) and a random block from the previous history of the chain block. This random block is called the “recall block”. This ensures that nodes store up to the old blocks and not just the previous block.
Summary
Decentralized storage is an important piece of infrastructure in the crypto market.
