Long story: What is FIlecoin?

Preface

The Internet is currently in the midst of a revolution:

Centralized proprietary services are being replaced by decentralized open services;

Trusted participation is replaced by verifiable computation;

Fragile location addressing is replaced by resilient content addressing;

Inefficient monolithic services are replaced by peer-to-peer algorithmic markets;

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain networks have proven the effectiveness of decentralized transaction ledgers. These public ledgers handle complex smart contract applications and trade tens of billions of dollars worth of crypto assets.

The participants in these systems formed a decentralized network with no central authority or trusted parties that provided useful payment services, the first example of a broad Internet open service.

What is Filecoin?

IPFS has proven the effectiveness of content addressing through the decentralized web, which provides billions of files on a global peer-to-peer network.

It liberates data from silos, survives network partitions, works offline, routes through censorship, and produces persistent digital information.

Filecoin is an incentive layer blockchain project developed by the US Protocol Lab based on the IPFS system. It is a decentralized storage network that turns cloud storage into an algorithmic market. This market runs on a blockchain with a local protocol token (also called Filecoin). Its blockchain runs on a new proof mechanism called "Proof of Spacetime", and its blocks are mined by miners who store data.

IPFS is a network protocol, and FileCoin is a decentralized storage project based on IPFS. We can understand the FileCoin project as an incentive system running in the IPFS network. FIL is the token issued by the Filecoin project based on the Filecoin public chain. The full name is: FileCoin, and the symbol is: FIL;

What is Mining?

Here is a brief explanation of mining: Simply put, you participate in a network and make a certain contribution to get rewards. This reward will be awarded to you in the form of tokens, which can be exchanged on exchanges or other channels, or used to purchase goods and services (such as decentralized Taobao OpenBazaar, where you can purchase physical goods through virtual tokens). Therefore, there is "transaction value" and room for appreciation. Filecoin currently provides three mining methods:

1

Storage mining: Provide storage space to help customers who need to store content to keep content fragmented. You will receive storage fees;

2

Search mining: providing search services and bandwidth, and quickly providing the content required by customers will earn search fees;

3

Packaging and mining: After I package the blocks, the network will give me a reward for each confirmed block.

Miners in the blockchain can earn Filecoin by providing storage to clients, and conversely, clients can hire miners to store or distribute data by spending Filecoin.

Like Bitcoin, Filecoin miners compete to mine blocks for huge rewards, but Filecoin's mining efficiency is proportional to storage activity, which directly provides useful services to customers (unlike Bitcoin mining, which is only for maintaining blockchain consensus).

This creates a strong incentive for miners to aggregate as much storage as possible and rent it out to clients. The Filecoin protocol weaves these aggregated resources into a self-healing storage network that anyone in the world can rely on. The network achieves robustness by replicating and distributing content, while automatically detecting and repairing replica failures.

Customers can choose replication parameters to protect against different threat models. The protocol's cloud storage network also provides security because the content is encrypted end-to-end on the client, and the storage provider does not have access to the decryption keys.

The relationship between IPFS and Filecoin

The more the IPFS network is used, the greater the demand for Filecoin; the more Filecoin miners there are, the greater the support for the IPFS network. Therefore, IPFS and Filecoin have formed a symbiotic relationship. Their relationship is somewhat similar to the relationship between blockchain and Bitcoin. Filecoin was born to support the development of IPFS, and IPFS also needs Filecoin to enrich its ecology. The more IPFS is used, the greater the demand for Filecoin; the more Filecoin miners there are, the greater the support for IPFS.

Filecoin can provide a large number of nodes for IPFS worldwide. At the same time, Filecoin itself also has a huge distributed storage space, which solves the storage problem of IPFS. Therefore, IPFS has more advantages compared with HTTP.

Finally, to summarize, IPFS is a content-addressed, versioned, peer-to-peer hypermedia transmission protocol, and is an underlying Internet technology; Filecoin is a blockchain project based on a distributed storage network under the IPFS protocol, and is currently the only incentive layer of the IPFS protocol. After the Filecoin mainnet is launched, the incentives for users and applications on the IPFS network will be based on Filecoin transactions. So the mining we are talking about refers to mining Filecoin. I hope you can first understand the relationship between IPFS and Filecoin.

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IPFS Starry Sky Ecosystem 1475

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