I think this is pretty cool. The basic idea is that Filecoin builds on top of the existing IPFS storage layer to add an incentive to provide storage to the glob

I think this is pretty cool. The basic idea is that Filecoin builds on top of the existing IPFS storage layer to add an incentive to provide storage to the global network. If you're someone who follows cryptocurrencies, the first question you're probably asking is "what's their consensus algorithm?". The answer is "proof of storage". Assuming they've figured out the technical details (I haven't read their paper thoroughly yet), this seems like a decent idea. It avoids the massive power requirements of proof of work, and there's lots of unused storage out there in the world for people to offer for a price, and they can offer it at a very low power usage. Persistent storage doesn't actively require power. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, if you total up the storage capacity of every iPhone in the world, you'll probably reach something like 64000 petabytes [1] [2]. Backblaze, a fairly large cloud storage provider, has a total network size of around 500 petabytes [3]. Maybe S3 is a hundred times larger? Maybe? Still, it's good that the combined storage capacity of all the iPhones in the world alone can compete with the big storage providers. That gives me hope that there's at least the theoretical potential for actual decentralization, as opposed to with proof of work, which tends to favor a minority of people with large compute rigs. Normal people don't want to max out the chips in their phones and laptops 24/7, but maybe they wouldn't mind using some passive storage. I'm not sure about how consistently people in Filecoin need to be connected to the network, but that could prove to be an issue. Another thing to look at would be whether there's any way for a third party to see what data you're holding. This is an issue because you probably don't want to let random other people store whatever they want on your machine. Lots of that content could be illegal, and (IANAL) I'll bet the law can hold you accountable just for storing it. [1]: https://kommandotech.com/statistics/how-many-iphones-have-been-sold-worldwide/ https://kommandotech.com/statistics/how-many-iphones-have-be... [2]: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/average-storage-capacity-smartphones-cross-80gb-end-2019/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/average-storage-capacit... [3]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/500-petabytes-and-counting/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/500-petabytes-and-counting/