What is Filecoin?
Filecoin is a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital storage marketplace using blockchain technology. It’s built on top of Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) and allows users to rent unused hard disk space and earn FIL tokens in return.
What is Filecoin offering?
Filecoin offers storage at hypercompetitive prices which is determined by a open market of independent storage providers. With the right infrastructure, anyone can buy and sell storage on the Filecoin network while setting their own prices and making their own contracts. In terms of security if a file is lost the user is refunded automatically by the network, If something goes wrong, the Filecoin protocol determines what happens without human intervention
What are the advantages of using Filecoin?
Filecoin promises a number of advantages over centralized data storage solutions. They include:
💰 Cost — By creating a larger free market for data storage, this should drive the price down.
📈 Scale — Bringing millions of computers around the world together will create a huge storage network.
🌍 Economy — Instead of building new storage computers, Filecoin makes use of existing resources.
🔒 Safety — While Dropbox and iCloud have been hacked, a decentralized network means there is no single point of attack, making it harder to compromise.
Did you know?
In 2012, Dropbox was hacked and 68 million user passwords were leaked on the Internet.
Disadvantages of Filecoin?
Some potential issues with Filecoin are:
🚗 Speed — Instead of accessing one server, it needs to access multiple servers to piece together documents when required. This depends on servers being online and Internet speeds.
📵 Dapp — By processing transactions using the Filecoin cryptocurrency, it creates a barrier to entry, as someone has to buy another coin and exchange it to use the service.
Filecoin: a DSN Construction
Filecoin DSN is a decentralized storage network that is auditable, publicly verifiable and designed on incentives. Clients pay a network of miners for data storage and retrieval; miners offer disk space and bandwidth in exchange of payments. Miners receive their payments only if the network can audit that their service was correctly provided. In this section, we present the Filecoin DSN construction, based on the DSN definition and Proof-of Spacetime. Any user can participate as a Client, a Storage Miner, and/or a Retrieval Miner.
- Clients pay to store data and to retrieve data in the DSN, via Put and Get requests.
- Storage Miners provide data storage to the network. Storage Miners participate in Filecoin by offering their disk space and serving Put requests. To become Storage Miners, users must pledge their storage by depositing collateral proportional to it. Storage Miners respond to Put requests by committing to store the client’s data for a specified time. Storage Miners generate Proofs-of-Spacetime and submit them to the blockchain to prove to the Network that they are storing the data through time. In case of invalid or missing proofs, Storage Miners are penalized and loose part of their collateral. Storage Miners are also eligible to mine new blocks, and in doing so they hence receive the mining reward for creating a block and transaction fees for the transactions included in the block.
- Retrieval Miners provide data retrieval to the Network. Retrieval Miners participate in Filecoin by serving data that users request via Get. Unlike Storage Miners, they are not required to pledge, commit to store data, or provide proofs of storage. It is natural for Storage Miners to also participate as Retrieval Miners. Retrieval Miners can obtain pieces directly from clients, or from the Retrieval Market.
Filecoin Architecture:
A storage deal is like a contract with a service level agreement (SLA) — users pay fees to storage providers to store data for a specified duration. To keep data safe, Filecoin uses a cryptoeconomic incentive model that regularly verifies the storage with zero-knowledge proofs. To incentivize storage providers to participate in deals, Filecoin rewards them with the network’s native token (FIL). At the same time, storage providers are slashed if the data is unretrievable or if the storage fails.
To retrieve data, Filecoin users pay a retrieval provider to fetch the data. Unlike storage deals, which involve transactions on-chain, retrieval deals use payment channels to settle payments off-chain, resulting in faster retrieval.
Guarantees and Requirements
Filecoin DSN achieves integrity, retrievability, public verifiability and incentive-compatibility:
• Achieving Integrity: Pieces are named after their cryptographic hash. After a Put request, clients only need to store this hash to retrieve the data via Get and to verify the integrity of the content received.
• Achieving Retrievability: In a Put request, clients specify the replication factor and the type of erasure coding desired, specifying in this way the storage to be (f, m)-tolerant. The assumption is that given m Storage Miners storing the data, a maximum of f faults are tolerated. By storing data in more than one Storage Miner, a client can increase the chances of recovery, in case Storage Miners go offline or disappear.
• Achieving Public Verifiability and Auditability: Storage Miners are required to submit their proofs of storage (πSEAL, πPOST) to the blockchain. Any user in the network can verify the validity of these proofs, without having access to the outsourced data. Since the proofs are stored on the blockchain, they are a trace of operation that can be audited at any time.
• Achieving Incentive Compatibility: Informally, miners are rewarded for the storage they are providing. When miners commit to store some data, then they are required to generate proofs. Miners that skip proofs are penalized (by losing part of their collateral) and not rewarded for their storage.
• Achieving Confidentiality: Clients that desire for their data to be stored privately, must encrypt their data before submitting them to the network.
Filecoin Storage and Retrieval Markets
Here is a question how we are gonna do the business or can enter in filecoin so let’s look into that. Filecoin has two markets: the Storage Market and the Retrieval Market. The two markets have the same structure but different design. The Storage Market allows Clients to pay Storage Miners to store data. The Retrieval Market allows Clients to retrieve data by paying Retrieval Miners to deliver the data. In both cases, clients and miners can set their offer and demand prices or accept current offers. The exchanges are run by the Network — a personification of the network of full nodes in Filecoin. The network guarantees that miners are rewarded by the clients when providing the service.
Does Filecoin have any competitors?
Filecoin isn’t the only company tackling decentralized file storage a number of others have started to get the ball rolling.
- Siacoin already has more than 360 storage providers with a capacity of 2.3 petabytes, or 2,340 terabytes. Its cryptocurrency is currently tradable on crypto exchanges.
- Storj launched its Tardigrade decentralized cloud storage service in March 2020, and as of October 2020, claimed 80 petabytes of storage capacity across its network. Its cryptocurrency STORJ is also live.
Current Filecoin State
The following topics represent ongoing work:
• A specification of the Filecoin state tree in every block.
• Detailed performance estimates and benchmarks for Filecoin and its components.
• A full implementable Filecoin protocol specification.
• A sponsored-retrieval ticketing model where any client C1 can sponsor the download of another client C2 by issuing per-piece bearer-spendable tokens.
• A Hierarchical Consensus protocol where Filecoin subnets can partition and continue processing transactions during temporary or permanent partitions.
• Incremental blockchain snapshotting using SNARK/STARK
• Filecoin-in-Ethereum interface contracts and protocols.
• Blockchain archives and inter-blockchain stamping with Braid.
• Only post Proofs-of-Spacetime on the blockchain for conflict resolution.
• Formally prove the realizations of the Filecoin DSN and the novel Proofs-of-Storage.
Filecoin Community :
YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPyYmtJYQwxM-EUyRUTp5DA
Blog- https://filecoin.io/blog/
Newsletter- https://filecoin.io/build/#events
Twitter- https://twitter.com/filecoin
WeChat- https://www.wechat.com/mobile
If you want to discuss more about filecoin project please reach out to us at
info@coindelta.io with your queries.
