Top Pick Articles from Chinese Community

The Problems of Centralised Storage, and Elastos’ Decentralised Storage Solution

If you would like to read the CR Herald’s Chinese version, you can do so here: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/GKgK6FecBfUFzGT61nfS_Q

Due to increasing corporate data breaches that have occured in recent years (e.g. Equifax and Facebook), problems of centralised storage have garnered increasing public attention. Critical problems of the current systems are: failing to protect copyright, loss of personal privacy, data security issues, and the risk of service providers halting operations or limiting use as they wish.

With the advent of Bitcoin and as people realize that decentralised blockchain technology can remove centralised institutions and intermediaries from the financial industry, form self-governing systems, they naturally wonder if the same technology can be applied to the digital storage industry.

Decentralised storage is critical in Web 3.0, the new web that advocates data value and data security and privacy. Data security and privacy refers to data redundancy and backups, as well as protection, while data value corresponds to value transfer via file sharing.

In a decentralised system with multiple nodes storing encrypted data, even if the data in certain nodes are corrupt, you can still find the same data in other backup nodes, thus ensuring data security. Not only is the data encrypted, but as the encrypted data is sharded and split amongst nodes, no one person will be able to access your data or even know what you are storing, thus ensuring complete privacy and security.

There are well-known projects that focus on decentralised storage solutions such as IPFS + Filecoin. However, the current maturity of this solution is largely insufficient and inefficient. The decentralised, unstructured data storage system like IPFS does not support real-world business cases, cannot guarantee reliable data storage, and cannot provide sufficient data processing needs. Therefore, a suitable data storage solution is one that can effectively avoid strong dependence on centralised storage and can also support smooth and speedy application.

Elastos Hive is Elastos’ decentralized and public file storage system that provides storage capabilities for dApps. It effectively combines and takes full advantage of the current decentralised storage systems with the maturity of centralized storage systems in terms of better speed and efficiency. Users and developers can choose centralised storage or decentralised storage according to their needs, no longer restricted to only centralised services.

Elastos Hive combines with Elastos DID, which provides every user with a unique DID and the corresponding private key, public keys, and DID ELA addresses. With DID, users can self-identify and self-verify on any transaction or data related to them. This truly realises self-data sovereignty which enables the direct peer-to-peer exchange of digital assets such as movies, music, books in a trusted and secured manner. All data is encrypted with Elastos DID to ensure the security of the data on the blockchain.

Some of the core services provided by Elastos Hive include Hive nodes which run Hive node software and provide vault services to users, as well as Hive vaults that provides DID-based access control and allows data migration between different Hive nodes. Hive also provides continuous data synchronisation from the user’s vault to a user-specified private storage solution such as personal cloud disk, IPRS, and home server supported by Elastos.

CRC Candidate Interview: Alex Shipp

If you would like to read the CR Herald’s complete Chinese version, you can do so here: Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/UhXkcK_xJ5-ROx-p_bK14Q

Alex Shipp, a CR interim council member who is also running for the CRC council elections is an Elastos Foundation writer (co-author of “Era of Quantum Wealth”) and the Quantum Wealth supernode owner. For the purpose of this summary, we will focus on Alex’s views on CRC as well as his campaign manifestos and propositions for the CR. If you would like to find out more about his personal background, how he got involved into blockchain and Elastos, please check out the following interview article from CR Press: https://cyberrepublic.press/interviewalexshipp/



Alex’s campaign manifestos aims to make significant progress in achieving the following three goals: strategic marketing methods which includes targeting high-impact individuals and organisations that can contribute to the development of Elastos ecosystem; devising an impactful tokenomic modifications as proposed in his article “Elastos Ecosystem Tokenomics: Revisited”; breaking the barriers between East and West communities, and finding synergy and symbiotic relationship to form a united Elastos community.

Alex believes that his extensive network and experience in Elastos ecosystem give him a competitive advantage to be elected into the CR council. He has been working with team leaders from Elastos Foundation including Clarence Liu, Donnie Bullers, Zach Warsavage and maintaining good friendship with other team leaders including Li Heng, Yu Shunan, Benjamin Pieter, Niu Jingyu and Cheng Hao. He has also spent a long time with: Chen Rong, especially during his one-week team building tour in QingHai China; Sunny Han Feng at several Elastos events in Tokyo, Seoul and Xiamen; Su Yipeng, Rebecca Zhu, and Zhang Huan in Shanghai and online meeting, discussing key ecosystem issues for Elastos.

With regards to how Alex is going to communicate with community members if he is elected as a CR council member, he believes that Twitter is a valuable tool for communication and he encourages anyone to reach him @AlexShippELA. As for expressing views on more complex issues, he will continue to use Medium to publish academic articles to keep the community informed with latest updates. Nevertheless, he prefers AMAs and the CR Blog over one-to-one direct messaging as it is more organised and time-saving. For CR council members who wish to see more community participation, Alex recommends joining conversations and giving comments on Elastos Telegram and WeChat. He believes that such communication allows greater transparency and increased efficiency, where every community member can see direct responses from the council members and there is no need to repeat the same statements or issues multiple times

Alex’s biggest expectation for CR is that all council members should explore opportunities for synergy and collaboration between Chinese and Western communities. In his previous interview with CR Press, he has already discussed in detail the challenges that we face as a global community in terms of language barriers, fragmented internet infrastructure, and cultural differences.

He has visited two Elastos offices in China several times and can say that every Chinese community member that he met hoped that Elastos project would become successful. In his opinion, the most important thing is to strive to understand each other’s perspectives, backgrounds, life experience and cultures, rather than building business relationships. Otherwise, it will be impossible to bridge the cultural division that currently separates Chinese and Western communities.

The messages that Alex would like to convey to the Elastos community is that each of us has recognised the catalytic potential of blockchain technology and its application in Elastos ecosystem. More importantly, he encourages us to get out of our comfort zone by becoming part of the ecosystem. If we see a “problem” in this ecosystem, reconstruct it, and then it is an “opportunity”. Everyone can make suggestions, position themself effectively, organise a team, express opinions, conduct business, and provide unique or value-added services in the ecosystem. All in all, identify the issues faced by the Elastos ecosystem and think about how everyone can make contributions by using their skill sets.