The total amount of global data has increased in the past 10 years of information explosion.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University’s School of Networking, said in his best-selling book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, published in 2012 that the growth rate of the amount of information stored by humans is four times faster than the growth rate of the world economy. This multiple has already been broken. Before the outbreak of COVID-19, the world economic growth rate in 2019 was 2.9%, and the average annual compound growth rate of the world’s total data in the past 10 years was about 50%.
IDC predicts that the global data volume will reach 175 ZB in 2025.
What does this number mean? Taking the time dimension as an example, if the data is a high-definition video, it will take 6.5 billion years to play; if the data is downloaded in America, it will take 1.8 billion years to download at the current average network speed in America of 25Mb/s.
The explosion of data is beyond imagination, one is because the explosion of technology is beyond imagination, and the other is because the development of technology has opened up various recording and storage needs of human beings.
The development of technologies such as 5G, big data, and the IoT has caused a data blowout. In the 5G era, the 5G network is 10 times faster than the 4G network, which will increase the corresponding data storage capacity by 10 times. This is the data blowout brought about by the technological explosion.
In terms of demand growth, no one would have thought that we could handle almost everything with a mobile phone terminal thirty years ago. Now people can take photos and videos to record their lives anytime and anywhere. In the past, the family tree used to record people’s life in words, but now some people have proposed making a digital family tree, that is, adding photos and videos to make a digital family tree. Subsequent generations will see not just words, but a rich biographical record with a sense of color and movement. This is a large expansion of demand brought about by the development of technology.
Information storage is a need for the inheritance of human civilization. After experiencing storage methods such as paper and film, most of the current data is stored in digital form. For such huge digital storage, one solves the problem of where it exists, and the other solves the problem of security.
In 2017, Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX), one of the three major credit reporting companies in the United States, was attacked, which caused the credit information of nearly half of Americans (about 143 million) to be leaked. This attack has become one of the most serious security breach incidents in history, but it has also alerted people that various natural and man-made disasters may cause data damage or leakage for the security risks brought by centralized storage.
The reason why decentralized storage based on blockchain will become increasingly popular is its decentralization, non-tamperability, and smart contracts, which greatly enhance the security of data. Blockchain storage shatters the data and stores it in many idle devices. Data corruption of a few devices does not affect the integrity of the overall data, so it is very difficult for a hacker to attack unless it can reach a consensus with 51% of the storage nodes, which has been proved to be almost impossible.
Global blockchain research company Gartner predicts that the commercial value of blockchain will reach nearly 200 billion US dollars, a large part of which will be used for data storage by 2025. Storage involves all institutions, organizations and individuals around the world, and it is a market with extensive demand and rapid growth.
The demand is exploding, but what is missing in the current storage market is that traditional cloud storage only guarantees large scale, but not security and privacy. However, some emerging blockchain cloud storage only guarantees security, but not large scale.
MEMO decentralized cloud storage protocol upgrades and integrates existing technologies. It abandons the disadvantages of traditional cloud storage and some emerging blockchain decentralized storage, absorbs their strengths, abandons their shortening, and finally develops such a data storage platform. This platform adopts a layered architecture and advanced cloud storage concepts on the basis of decentralized blockchain and can meet the ZB-level storage requirements under the premise of ensuring safety, reliability, and privacy.
MEMO is also a platform where everyone can participate with a low threshold. In the MEMO decentralized cloud storage protocol, each user can find a role that suits him — he can be a User who stores data, a Provider of storage space, or a Keeper of management coordinator. The three parties’ mutual cooperation, interaction, and restriction constitute a self-running system ecology.
Therefore, it can be seen that the way of data storage in the 175 ZB era is to find a data storage platform with security, reliability, privacy, large-scale carrying capacity, and a low threshold.
