The future development trend of the Internet will transition from HTTP to IPFS

We know that IPFS is a new Internet underlying protocol. Compared with the traditional Internet, from a technical perspective, the Internet has a physical layer and a transmission protocol. This transmission protocol is composed of search engines, HTTP, servers and terminals when we go online. The transmission protocol HTTP used on the Internet now is 19 years old. The technology came out in March 1989. Here, everyone can think of a question. With the popularization of 4G5gAI intelligence, do you think a technology from the late 1980s is still applicable to today's booming Internet? The answer is definitely not applicable. Then the emergence of IPFS, a historical node, is to supplement or even replace the traditional Internet protocol HTTP that we are currently using.

IPFS and HTTP, in fact, their functions are the same. Both are the underlying transmission protocols of the Internet. The difference is that HTTP is a traditional centralized network, while IPFS is a decentralized distributed network, similar to a mesh-type distributed network, a new technology and an old technology. Today we talked about the mining project. The server that stores data in the new Internet IPFS is commonly called a mining machine.

Well, there is actually a question here, that is, why do we need this decentralized distributed storage, IPFS? First of all, our centralized Internet has indeed brought us a better life and improved many of our lifestyles, but many pain points of the Internet cannot be changed, because data storage can be said to be the foundation of the entire Internet. All the Internet information we access now is transmitted from centralized storage servers through the HTTP colon double slash protocol. If there are problems such as downtime and data corruption, we as users will not be able to open any software, or even open it and it will not display any data, or even the software will be paralyzed. This data is lost. For example, the picture above shows the Alibaba Cloud downtime incident last year, and Tencent Cloud Disk caused the loss of tens of millions of yuan worth of data for enterprise users due to its own reasons.

You can imagine that this has caused huge losses to the corresponding companies. Even top Internet companies such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent, which are among the Fortune 500, cannot avoid such incidents. This also fully illustrates one of the pain points of traditional centralized Internet: data is easily lost.

The second pain point is that security cannot be guaranteed. Personal data is easily leaked when surfing the Internet. How do we understand this as individual users? Here I would like to ask you a simple question. Do you think there are viruses on the Internet? Are there hackers? The answer is definitely yes, right? For example, the Panda Burning Incense virus that was well-known throughout the country a few years ago, right? For another example, I would like to ask you, when you have not actively told others your phone number, has anyone called you to sell you insurance? Financial management, buying a house, buying a car, buying a shop, etc., the answer must be yes, right? And I believe that all of you friends have definitely received many such calls, so I would like to ask, this person who is calling you from afar, whom you don’t know at all, this person knows your last name as soon as he opens his mouth, how did he obtain the personal information of all of our partners?

To put it more subtly, our personal information is inadvertently leaked while surfing the Internet. To put it more bluntly, our private data is sold to those dealers through some black market channels. In other words, our daily shopping information and all other private information data are stored on the centralized Internet server, such as the current face recognition fingerprint payment identity information registration mobile phone number registration, your name, home address, phone number information when shopping online, etc. They are all closely related to our personal privacy, and all real-time information is synchronized. To exaggerate on the Internet, we may have long been like transparent people with no privacy in the decentralized Internet. Well, this is the second pain point of the traditional centralized Internet, data security and privacy are at risk.

The third pain point is that traditional network data storage costs are high. It is precisely because of the high data storage costs that the Internet platform iQiyi lost 3.736 billion in one year. I believe that some of my friends are using iQiyi, which can watch TV and movies online. Such an APP is also a well-known Internet company. In 2017, its annual revenue was 17.378 billion, and it is also a billion-level Internet company. I actually want to ask everyone here. Do you think a billion-level company makes money? I believe many people’s answer is that it makes money. In fact, according to the data, it is losing money. In 2017, it lost 3.736 billion in the whole year. In the past five years, iQiyi has lost a total of 28.8 billion. Why did iQiyi lose so much?

It is because of the high storage cost that the storage cost of video platforms is very high. For every TV series and film company we watch, they will pay huge storage costs. In order to meet the needs of users of different age groups, old videos cannot be deleted and new videos must be updated. Therefore, the new and old video data must be saved at the same time. This leads to the cumulative increase of video data stored by iQiyi every year, which only increases and never decreases, and it must be stored continuously. For a simple example, this year is 2020, and 2021 is coming soon. iQiyi will still store some new TV shows and new movies released in 2021, so it also needs to store TV series and movies in 2020 and before, so the cost will only accumulate and increase.

Therefore, the cost is getting higher and higher, and the payment is getting more and more expensive. Of course, the Internet needs storage platforms, far more than these, there are many, such as Douyin, Sina, Youku, etc., which all need to store corresponding data. This storage space is huge, so in the data storage business, who will eventually take away the biggest cake? This cake is actually taken away by companies like Alibaba, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud, or Amazon Cloud, which are doing data storage, and it is at a monopoly level. Individuals cannot actually participate, and the IPFS we are going to talk about today is to solve the problem of high storage costs in the future, seize the blue ocean market of data storage business, and it is a data storage market that every individual retail investor can participate in.

You can take a look at the price list of the centralized storage service providers above. There is information about the capacity of 1T storage space. So how much storage space is a batch? Et equals 1024G. It is stored in Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud for 2,500 to 3,500 yuan. Baidu Cloud is cheaper at 2,000 to 3,000 yuan per year. The cost of storing it in IPFS is only 250 yuan per year. In terms of cost, it is 1/10 of the price of traditional centralized storage service providers. Everyone knows it. Fang Rui, the main network was launched on October 15th. It has been online for so long. The latest relevant reports show that the cost of storing a file of the same size of 1,000G on Amazon is about 48 US dollars. In IPFS, the cost of storing more than a block is only about three US dollars, which is 15 times lower than the cost of traditional networks. This is the third pain point of traditional Internet, high cost.

The fourth pain point is the slow transmission speed and low efficiency. I believe everyone understands this. When you are watching TV series online or at the end of the year, you are scrambling for Spring Festival tickets or during the peak hours of large online shopping. Web pages are constantly stuck and apps cannot be opened. Movie downloads are slow to buffer and need to be constantly refreshed. Through these experiences, you can feel that the transmission speed of traditional Internet is relatively slow. You can also take a look at the small video above, which compares the download speed of IPFS and the download speed of traditional networks. For files of the same size, IPFS only takes more than 20 seconds to download, while traditional downloads take more than 20 minutes. This speed is not just twice as fast. So by comparison, you can see that the fourth pain point of traditional Internet is the slow transmission and download speed.

The above four pain points of the traditional Internet are the reasons why we need to use the safer and more efficient IPFS, in order to supplement or even replace such drawbacks and shortcomings. So here, we must be very curious, can IPFS really solve these pain points of the traditional Internet as mentioned above? The answer is yes. Next, let us understand the advantages of IPFS from the transmission principles of IPFS and HTTP.