🗄️ Filecoin Files An Update — Issue No. 14
/🗞 News
After a long period of relative silence, the Filecoin team has published an update on their progress. The update included several demos of their in-development protocol implementation written in Go, but the code itself remains closed-source for now. Link.Filecoin was one of the most high profile ICO's in 2017, and for good reason. The developers behind Filecoin are the creators of the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), an impressive decentralized file storage network. IPFS is widely used in blockchain projects for off-chain data storage, but generally is seen to lack one critical component: an incentive mechanism. Link.
The promise of Filecoin is to layer such a mechanism on top of an IPFS-like storage system. In doing so, it may provide an important new primitive for developers in the decentralized application ecosystem: cheap, reliable decentralized data storage that can be rented with a native token. The network enables this by introducing two novel new proving mechanisms for block production, referred to as Proof-of-Space-Time (PoST) and Proof-of-Replication (PoRep). Link.
Beyond the promise of providing an important new tool in our decentralized toolbelt, this novel consensus mechanism also makes Filecoin a fascinating project to watch. On the Filecoin blockchain, a miners' "hashpower" would be proportional to the disk space they make available for use on the network. If it works, this system would represent a middle-ground between Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. Unlike PoW, it doesn't require the expenditure of exorbitant amounts of energy, an externality that has, fairly or not, received increasing scrutiny as of late. At the same time, it doesn't suffer from the "nothing at stake" problem like PoS, because miners are still constrained by a scarce, real-world asset: their hard drive space. It's good to see the project is making progress. I'm rooting for them to be successful.