What Is Filecoin
Launched in August 2017 with an initial coin offering (ICO) that raised $200 million dollars in 30 minutes, Filecoin is an open-source decentralized file storage blockchain. It uses FIL as the native cryptocurrency to settle payments and record transactions.
The main way Filecoin brings value to internet users is by allowing them to rent unused hard drive space on their computers to anonymous peers on a decentralized network, with strong encryption securing a blockchain that powers it.
In short, peer to peer (P2p) storage is powered, managed, and secured by blockchain. Think of it as Amazon Web Services (AWS) but as a cryptocurrency.
The Filecoin blockchain is designed to work as an incentive layer for the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized storage network.
Filecoin price is affected by the global macro strategic health of its fundamentals as a decentralized business or decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and by its supply/demand economics.
Filecoin Founders
Filecoin was founded by Protocol Labs, the creators of the IPFS P2P network protocol, as a utility token to work in tandem with IPFS as a decentralized, immutable, public ledger-keeping payment protocol.
IPFS helps and incentivizes users on a decentralized network to collaborate and store data, much the way BitTorrent has for decentralized file-sharers since 2001. And the Filecoin network supports and enables that peer to peer storage network to do so in a more decentralized and distributed way, much like BitTorrent Token (BTT) has since 2019.
Juan Benet founded Protocol Labs in May 2014 after creating IPFS, then launched Filecoin as a symbiotic blockchain layer of the network in 2017.
Benet studied computer science at Stanford University. He took the open-source development lab to startup accelerator, Y Combinator in 2014, to get support for both the decentralized file sharing protocol and Filecoin as a blockchain-based utility token to support it.
How Does FIL Work
FIL is used to incentivize users of the IPFS file sharing network to rent unused storage on their devices. To do so, it operates as the decentralized, blockchain-powered payments processing and account keeping server for this peer to peer cloud storage network.
Filecoin's primary goal is to facilitate, support, and incentivize the storage of computer data in a distributed network. A decentralized file storage protocol for a distributed network of participating computers to collaborate offers certain advantages over centralized cloud storage services like AWS or Cloudflare.
Filecoin is used by storage miners to provide storage to clients in exchange for a payment in Filecoin. They can also ear the ability to place blocks and earn block rewards. They profit from any increases in the Filecoin price. Retrieval miners provide retrieval service to users and are rewarded for maintaining throughput capacity for the network.
Filecoin Security
Filecoin security is built on what its creators' bill as state-of-the-art cryptographic proofs of storage. These are designed for nodes on the network to be able to verify that a storage mining node has a certain amount of available storage space ready in a state to securely and correctly store requested files for a certain period of time.
That element of time value in the storage of digital files was an insight that got built into the Proof of Spacetime (PoSt) protocol that maintains the Filecoin blockchain.
Security is one of the project's highest concerns, with the explicit mission to develop a network that can store humanity's files, any of them.
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