During the 1998-2005s, driveway was one of the popular online storage company that came out. And it had all the features of the dropbox. Then due to excessive free services and no funding, they eventually got sold.
And then xdrive company took them over. And they started offering 5GB worth of storage for 10 dollar. It kind of was expensive till the google comes into the picture and they started offering the storage for low cost.
Slowly the companies coming out in the service race. Where you can see that the storage has managed to acquire users. Google, Microsoft, Amazon all of them slowly got into the race to acquire users for storage.
Hosting world was not much popular but then even those companies started battling till the point today where cloud services are taking over.
Now that people realized that their data on the cloud can get leaked so they started getting into the encrypted decentralized file storage.
This is where the DeFS coming to play. Let's talk about it.
Image Credit: Filecoin
Decentralized Storage for Cheaper Storage
You want to store your not to private content and want to do it for cheap. And you also want to encrypt the data. So the DeFS aka decentralized file storage comes into the play. This is where you have to pay less to acquire some service of the decentralized storage.
Some people would come up with a protocol like some torrent. You give some space to the world to hold their data. You make them hide the content with the encryption.And then you get paid for storage and the access to that data. Both parties are happy and both are safe and secure there.
Filecoin and Validators into the DeFS
Decentralized storage has the file storage, validators who watch over all and also the people who hold the data into the cloud online. So all the parties involved follow a protocol.And for offering such service and the validation both the service provider and validator get paid.
This is where the Filecoin comes into the play, they are going to see you get the storage, you offer service, you get paid. In short your efforts towards the space offered to the user pays off. And Filecoin being the listed coin in the marketplace has some value for you to exchange too.
So do we need such type of the service? Yes we do. Does the cloud and the service such as this going to help with the storage needs of the consumers? Yes it is. However we have to be cautious as it is open source project and people can tamper in the initial days most of the time.
What type of data you can store? Any data. You use it like dropbox or the google drive. You have all the freedom on the storage.You only pay for the amount of the data that you store and also the overall limit that you are getting. Which kind of makes you think if it's a bit cheaper than the google.
All in all, such type of the DeFS, decentralized file storage is possible to be the future among the tech people and families that want to rely on the encryption to hide their data being tampered by the big companies in the USA. So decentralized file storage is possible future.
Filecoin here is not just a protocol but also a coin that would be used for doing most of the works among the providers, validators and the consumers. So there is a use case right there. And serving a real alternative to the centralized service.