The name the first time I heard the interstellar file system, is feeling very tall, moment think of countless science fiction movie scene, in fact, although IPFS called star file system, but in essence, it is a network protocol, IPFS now due to technical limit has not been applied to a wide range, has been running for two and a half years, is not a theory of technology.

IPFS, whose Chinese name is interstellar file system, was launched by Juan Benet in May 2014.Juan Benet's personal history is legendary. He graduated from Stanford university, and before he started the IPFS project, his first company was acquired by yahoo!In 2015, he created the IPFS, which received a huge investment in the YCombinator incubator competition, and set up a protocol lab.The lab team consists of 14 core developers and hundreds of code contributors from the community.

We use hypertext media transmission protocol (HTTP) every day when surfing the Internet, checking our friends' circles and playing on the Internet. The domain names of websites always start with "HTTPs://", which is enough to show the dominant position of hypertext media transmission protocol in the Internet world.

IPFS is essentially a distributed storage and transport protocol for content addressable, versioned, point-to-point hypermedia. The goal is to supplement or even replace the hypertext media transport protocol (HTTP) used in the past 20 years, hoping to build a faster, safer and freer Internet era.

If IPFS is going to disrupt HTTP, the first change will be to cloud data storage services.

There is no denying that both network disk and mobile hard disk have brought great convenience to people's access to daily data, but what cannot be ignored is that they also have natural fatal defects.For example, network disk, your data is stored in the central server of the operator, you want to pay for this storage, the operator can also delete your data at any time, or even directly arbitrarily shut down the service.It's like storing something important in a rented house, paying rent, and praying in horror that the landlord doesn't go through your stuff (but you can't avoid it, it's inevitable), or throwing it away, or even throwing you out.Say good lifetime use lifetime free?You really believe me?So even now, there are still a lot of users who don't want to store their data in the network disk anyway.Not be disrelish charge is tall (really quite expensive), however thing puts other people's home, how think not to rest assured.

IPFS will solve this problem for us. It can greatly reduce the cost of data storage and improve the speed of data download. IPFS can be used almost everywhere where data storage needs to be optimized to improve efficiency.In essence, and BitTorrent IPFS system transmission technology (commonly known as "seed") we have in common, between IPFS team they call it the Bitwap will BitTorrent technology innovation, IPFS storage service in the form of cloud storage service, your data is stored in blocks of chain, and the server source code stored in one location or multiple locations of different cloud storage, cloud storage provides distribution of the dispersed in the global storage source of multiple nodes.

Always say bye to 404

IPFS nodes essentially use computers on the network as storage devices for users.This way, there will be no downtime, your files will always be accessible, and you will never have to worry about losing your files.If one node fails, the others will always be online.

So how does IPFS guarantee data security and transmission speed?

Files in the IPFS network are given a hash value similar to our id number, which is unique and calculated from the contents of the file.

Even if there is a punctuation change in the file, the hash value calculated is completely different, like a twin with a different id number.

Therefore, there is only one unique file in the IPFS network. Naturally, the file will not be repeatedly stored or maliciously tampered with, greatly reducing the storage cost and waste of storage resources.

This unique file, as long as the query of its hash value (id number), you can find, this design, than usual we find the file, much more convenient.We usually have to jump to several websites to find the file, and even some files in the website you do not know, will miss this file.

When the file is uploaded to the IPFS network, the file is divided into many pieces, each of which is stored on a different hard disk in different parts of the country, with part of the file in each place.This hard disk is in your personal home, hard disk hundreds of gigabytes or even a few T, download files from everyone's home at the same time, the speed is much faster than the centralized storage, so it seems that IPFS is really a bit of a star feeling, the world's data storage hard disk built IPFS network star map.

When one place is hit by such force majeure as earthquake, flood, flood, etc., IPFS system will immediately start the repair function, and restore the data stored in the disaster area to other places immediately.The data stored in the IPFS system is more secure than the cloud services you currently use. According to this feature, the files you upload will be permanently stored on the Internet and no one can destroy it.Similarly, IPFS is inherently resistant to DDoS attacks.Because all access will be scattered to different nodes, even the attacker himself will be one of the nodes.

If you're storing a file that you don't want others to see, encrypt it before you save it to IPFS so that even if someone else has a hash of the file, they need a private key to view the data.

Currently, there are only four cloud storage services based on blockchain.Sia, Storj, Maidsafe and Filecoin are respectively.All four services use the same mechanism -- they provide a platform on which all computer users can connect to rent out their unused hard disk space for a fee or token.In the future of blockchain technology development, maybe your spare hard disk resources can also bring you income.