| Blockchain technology is a new type of distributed system construction technology.Unlike traditional distributed technologies,blockchain technology can be used to build a complete decentralized system.Decentralized system has low maintenance cost and strong system robustness,which can fully protect user's information security and provide good privacy protection and information notarization.Although various existing distributed storage systems can basically meet daily needs,there are still some scenarios which require high privacy and openness,such as anonymous information storage,anonymous information publication,secret information exchange and so on.Many characteristics of blockchain technology are very suitable to be applied to these scenarios.Therefore,the use of blockchain technology to achieve information storage system is a very interesting research direction.At present,the design at home and abroad for applying blockchain technology to information storage is still quite scarce.In the existing research of blockchain information storage technology,some designers implemented the blockchain-like information storage system of bitcoin by directly modifying the data structures such as transaction,block and blockchain in bitcoin system.While other designers integrated blockchain technology as a tool for information notary and incentive to traditional peer-to-peer file transfer systems.In both designs,the former completely neglected the growth of blockchain data caused by information storage and lacked control over the amount of data in the system.Although the latter controlled the system data size and implemented the basic functions of blockchain information storage system,but some of the problems unique to the storage of blockchain information had not been analyzed and resolved.This paper first conducted a detailed research on the workflow and design details of Bitcoin,which is the largest blockchain application.Secondly,the technical structure of the blockchain was divided,and the technical functions,design principles and existing research results of each technology were analyzed.Several useful design conclusions were made by in-depth analysis on the fork phenomenon and performance of the blockchain.In the end,this paper proposed a new reward-and-claim mechanism based on blockchain,and a new consensus algorithm for storage proof,PoSt.Combining the existing research of difficulty consensus algorithms,fork consensus algorithms,and distributed hash table networks,a quite complete information storage system based on the blockchain technology-BaRCoin was designed;afterwards,some possible improvements and research directions in the future were forecasted by combining the investigation on the existing problems in BaRCoin and current research results.The design of the BaRCoin largely solved the design blind spots and difficulties of many existing blockchain information storage systems,such as information scale control,information persistence storage verification,and high availability of storage nodes.The research results of this paper not only included the design of BaRCoin,but also included in-depth research on many aspects of blockchain technology,providing references to future research and application of blockchain technology,especially for information storage applications. |
