Filecoin Discover Project Introduction

We generate more than 2.5 billion gigabytes of data every day, including 294 billion emails, 500 million tweets and 64 billion WhatsApp messages, but also climate science reports, disease tracking maps, connected car coordinates and more.

The Filecoin team considers this information to be a “valuable dataset.”

We also believe that this data will form the basis for future scientific research and discovery data - it cannot be easily lost if we are to build a better tomorrow.

The Filecoin team has been working to store and preserve these valuable datasets. We hope that researchers will continue to work on solving global climate change problems so that PB-level data from cities around the world can be collected. We hope that scientists can easily search each other's datasets and research literature to develop vaccines against global diseases.

We also want automotive engineers to have access to all publicly available autonomous driving reports. Starting next year, the Filecoin team will sponsor PB-scale open source data storage to make access to these important datasets more universal.

The best way to decentralize this massive amount of data is to ensure that it is properly stored and preserved. No single hard drive can hold so much data on its own. Relying on large data centers controlled by large technology platforms increases the risk of losing and corrupting verified data.

Today, we’re excited to launch Filecoin Discover.

The project aims to help Filecoin become the most important source of datasets for all of humanity, and that others can access the data to expand our human knowledge base to foster new inspiration and ideas.

The Filecoin Discover project incentivizes early miners of all sizes to store valuable data to earn Filecoin rewards. At launch, we have collected an initial set of open source data, but in the coming months, we will continue to add more projects and datasets to the data catalog.

As Manoush Zomorodi, former host of the WNYC podcast Note to Self, puts it: “Think of a lot of people working with computers. Blockchain requires you to have a collective spirit.”

The more nodes that mine and store data on the Filecoin network, the more powerful the nodes' storage computing power will be.

Therefore, the Discover project is our way of encouraging more miners to join the network in the early stages. We built the Discover project as a way to quickly expand the Filecoin network.

The Filecoin Discover store is a growing catalog of petabytes of public data covering literature, science, art, and history. Miners who wish to join the Filecoin network can visit the site, select the datasets they want to store, and receive hard drives with verified data for a certain cost. In exchange for storing this verified data, miners will receive additional Filecoin rewards in addition to the regular block rewards for storing data.

The dataset includes:

Given the amount of data in each contract and the total amount of data we intend to store, the most cost-effective way to share this data with miners is via physical hard drives.

Our intention is to launch this program in a financially sustainable manner, so we have priced these materials at cost (including offering discounts for bulk orders through optimized shipping options).

Miners who choose to participate in this project will receive a complete package, including a hard drive pre-installed with verified data, as well as installation and maintenance instructions. We have limited supply of these datasets, but we will do our best to complete the procurement and distribution work.

For more details, please refer to the FAQ section of the Filecoin Discover store. In addition, the Filecoin team will set up a Slack channel for miners to ask questions before participating in this project.

As of now, the Filecoin Discover store is accepting pre-orders for our existing materials. Pre-orders will begin shipping in late May to early June, but this is subject to change - join our Slack channel for more details! All orders are fully refundable if a refund request is received before the order ships.

After the mainnet launch, we will release a web application for users to view all data stored by the project as well as detailed information on the assets of the demand miners.

We are actively looking for more data resources to be part of the project. If you have a suggestion for a dataset to be added to the network, please let us know by filling out this form and nominating the organization you would like us to sponsor.

Thank you very much for your participation! ❤

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