Filecoin launch time and mining demonstration

The most exciting thing in the Filecoin project right now is building the first protocol implementation: go-Filecoin. We’ve been working on this for several months, and we’re very excited to see:

(1) Implemented blockchain data structure (structured as IPLD )

(2) Nodes can establish secure connections between each other (LibP2P)

(3) Messages and blocks can be propagated on LibP2P pubsub

(5) Nodes can verify blocks and reach consensus on the heaviest chain

(6) Messages (transactions) can call and execute participants (actors, smart contracts, virtual machines)

(7) The memory of the actor is limited and isolated on the state tree (vm)

(8) Accounts, payments and tokens can basically operate

(9) The main features of the storage market have been implemented (request, bidding, transaction, storage file)

(10) Clients can hire miners, store files, and retrieve them later (!)

(11) Participants such as payment channels can also function , but are not yet perfect

You can take a closer look at the completion status of various parts of Go-Filecoin in this working document.

Demo 1: Go-Filecoin and testnet simulation

Demo 2: Network visualization and block explorer

Demo 3: Basic Storage Market

Currently (Filecoin) is still private code. We have been developing (Filecoin's code) in a private manner. This is not our typical way of working - almost all of our work is completely public from the first commit (such as IPFS, LibP2P, IPLD, etc.). Regarding the decision not to make Filecoin's code public, we made a difficult choice, mainly to avoid distractions and to be able to move quickly.

• Avoid distractions: Open, public code bases lead to a large number of issues, pull requests, and other interactions, all of which require a lot of developer time. For a high-profile project, these distractions can be very frequent and consume a lot of our team's time.

• Act quickly: In the early stages, a project like Go-Filecoin needs to experiment with interfaces and approaches, try different things, and adjust quickly. This is difficult for a large-scale project with a lot of attention - users tend to observe the code as it is written, ask questions, and may even start developing applications against it.

Code Openness and Community Forums Coming Soon! We have passed the critical period of keeping the code files confidential, and in the upcoming period, public (Filecoin) code will bring more benefits. Therefore, we plan to release the code in the coming months. It will be an exciting time to get involved! At that time, everyone interested can come to learn about Filecoin, help build parts of the files, and start developing on top of it.

• Similar to IPFS and libp2p: We expect the Filecoin project to operate in a similar way to IPFS and libp2p

• Licensing and OSS: We will most likely use the MIT license to license our Filecoin project, and we may also use other open source licenses.

• Discussion Forum: We intend to open discussion forums to users, miners, and clients (possibly using Discourse, like IPFS and Zcash)

• Organizing the community: We hope to foster a collaborative and resilient culture as we build infrastructure for the distributed web. Our discussion forums will be where questions can be asked, and our code will be where they can be asked. In addition, we are building a scalable and easy-to-participate organization to collaborate:

• Working Group: We use working groups (similar to IPFS), which is a scalable way to organize people and responsibilities. Interested participants will be able to join or create new working groups.

• OKRs: We use Objectives and Key Results ( OKRs ) for scalable planning and progress measurement. Protocol Labs has been pioneering this in open source with IPFS, LibP2P, and more. We’ve found this to be a great approach that strikes a good balance between group autonomy and cross-group coordination .

• Community Management: We will be ready to begin meeting the needs of a large and vibrant community.

Over the past year, we have largely withdrawn from the public eye to focus on code development; we have only given a few public talks and visited a few research groups. Our activities will also be limited until the mainnet is officially launched.

Public lectures (some with video links)

• 2018-01: Filecoin: protocol overview, the important results, and new open problems (Juan Benet, BPASE 2018)

• 2018-01: Proof of Replication using Depth Robust Graphs (Ben Fisch, BPASE 2018)

• 2018-03: Filecoin: a robust foundation for human knowledge (Juan Benet, Blockstack Berlin 2018)

• 2018-04: Filecoin and the Rise of Open Services (Juan Benet, MIT Bitcoin Club 2018)

• 2018-06: Good SNARKs are here needed (Nicola Greco, Zcon0)

• 2018-07: Filecoin as a user of libp2p (Juan Benet, libp2p dev meetings)

• Want us to speak at your conference? Let us know

• University, research group and community activities (in chronological order)

• Security Lab @ Stanford CS

• Decentralized Information Group @ MIT CSAIL ( visit )

• Cryptoeconomics Lab @ MIT Sloan

• Digital Currency Initiative @ MIT Media Lab

• FilecoinClub Beijing Community Meetup

• CS294-144 @ UC Berkeley

• University College London (UCL)

• Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB)

• Harvard Business School (HBS)

• IMDEA Software Institute

• Center for Blockchain Research @ Stanford CS

• Filecoin Demo @ Decentralized Web Summit 2018

• Want us to visit your lab and give a talk?   Please let us know

Filecoin is based on and highly dependent on libp2p, which is also one of the projects led by Protocol Labs; therefore, here we also explain the updates related to Filecoin in this project:

A modular, peer-to-peer networking library.

Separation from IPFS: libp2p is also a component of IPFS, and we have discussed the issue of binding libp2p to IPFS. In the future, we will discuss libp2p separately to show the role it brings to Filecoin and other blockchain projects.

Browser Support: libp2p has strong browser support and can work entirely on the browser or through protocols such as WebSockets and WebRTC. This will make the Filecoin network and its data accessible to browsers without trusting third parties from the beginning - this is critical for many decentralized applications and blockchain applications.

Other transmission methods: libp2p recently added support for the Quic and Tor transport protocols, which means Filecoin will be able to leverage these protocols. Quic can quickly establish encrypted connections, which is critical for latency-sensitive protocols like retrieval markets. Tor improves the anonymity and confidentiality of network traffic - this means that Filecoin users using Tor transport can store and retrieve files with greater security and confidentiality. These are important features for different user groups.

Rust implementation: libp2p has implementations in GO, JavaScript , and Rust. This means it is much easier to write Filecoin implementations in these languages. Rust has been very successful in programming on mobile, embedded devices, and other languages ​​through C bindings. Protocol Labs launched the GO and JavaScript implementations, and Parity launched the Rust implementation.

Polkadot chooses libp2p: Polkadot recently adopted libp2p in its network stack. This is a big moment for libp2p as it means another very important blockchain and the entire blockchain ecosystem will share this stack. The Polkadot team recently moved their PoC-2 here and mentioned it here. It also gives other supporters the ability to use libp2p in conjunction with other blockchains such as Ethereum.

Application of libp2p in blockchain apps: Everyone including OpenBazaar , Livepeer , Keep Network , Paratii are using IPFS!

A content-addressed hypermedia transfer protocol.

IPFS has strong browser support and can work entirely in the browser through js-ipfs and ipfs-companion. This will make it easier to write web applications that use Filecoin.

Browser support for IPFS: IPFS protocol handlers (such as ipfs://) have been added to Brave and FireFox browsers. These supports from mainstream companies will make decentralized technologies more likely to be accessible to mainstream users.

Frequent update releases: go-ipfs has released three versions: v0.4.15 , v0.4.16 , v0.4.17 ; and js-ipfs has released 19 versions, including v0.28.0 , v0.29.0 , v0.30.0 , v0.31.0 . You can check out these links for a full summary of new features and changelogs.

IPFS star projects:

DTube - decentralized video platform

JanusVR viewer for Decentraland (content from ipfs)

Textile Photos - a digital wallet for your photos, end-to-end encrypted

Paratii - distributed curation protocol and streaming engine

Peergos - end-to-end encrypted, p2p file storage and sharing

More

Community talks, articles and tutorials:

Article : Textile: Adding the next million peers to IPFS

Article : Decentralized code distribution for the future of open source

Article: Akasha: Mending the Gap

Lecture: Real serverless with CRDTs and IPFS (scalarconf)

Lecture: IPFS Lightning Talks at DWeb Summit

Tutorial : Building an interplanetary Đ App from scratch

Tutorial : IPFS Cluster Peer Installer for EC2

Tutorial : Code a simple P2P blockchain in Go

Tutorial : From Zero to Interplanetary Hero (browser-based Đ Apps with IPFS)

We are making some adjustments to our blog and updates. In the last update, we planned to release at least one update per quarter. We are sad to not meet this goal - we know this is frustrating for some in the community. As a result, this update is going to be more extensive than usual, and we are making the following improvements:

(1) We will change the update model to continuous small updates, which means our update cycle will no longer be based on quarterly units;

(2) We will no longer require that our updates be “ representative of the entire project ” , thereby avoiding significant delays in review. Instead, we intend for our working groups and team members to begin publishing their own updates in a more decentralized manner, via blogs.

(3) We plan to publish some small articles about individual aspects of Filecoin. This will allow us to write in depth about exciting features or components of the Filecoin network.

(4) We plan to expand the circle of authors, which will showcase the many great contributions and developments our new team members are making.

Note to miners: We have noticed that many companies are producing and selling "Filecoin miners" or "FileCoin mining hardware ". Please note: we have not yet released official specifications for Filecoin mining hardware, so these systems may be suboptimal or overly complex. Once we have clear requirements for the optimal structure for Mainnet Launch, we will release specific specifications for system requirements as well as trade-offs and hardware recommendations for miners to consider. We recommend not purchasing specific hardware for Filecoin until these specifications are released.

What’s holding us back from publishing the hardware requirements for mining? Our goal is the broadest possible compatibility and minimal system requirements. We want existing storage systems to be able to approach optimal Filecoin mining with minimal (ideally zero) tuning. Recent improvements to core components like Proof of Replication (which currently requires SNARKs) have significantly reduced the management resources of these systems while improving their tradeoffs, and we may have more improvements coming in the near term.

Investor Attention: During and after the Filecoin token sale, we received reports of people claiming to be selling Filecoin SAFTs or tokens in an attempt to defraud investors. Similarly, we have seen unscrupulous exchanges claiming to list Filecoin and Filecoin derivatives. Please remember that Filecoin tokens will not be traded live until the network launches, and all trading restrictions and other terms of SAFTs still apply. Therefore, any exchange or seller that lists or offers Filecoin, IPFS tokens, or related derivatives may be a fraud. Once the Filecoin network and tokens are officially live, we will announce it on our official blog. Until then, we strongly recommend that investors stay away from any exchange or entity claiming to be buying, selling, or trading Filecoin tokens or derivatives.

Legal Disclaimer: This update lists our current plans for the project. As things continue to develop, the actual future may and will likely be different. You should not rely on this article for any predictions.

Thank you so much!

Thank you for your support now and in the future! And thank you in advance for your recommendations, comments, and suggestions. Your help speeds up our progress.