What is Filecoin (fil)?

Filecoin is a peer-to-peer network that stores files, with built-in economic incentives to ensure files are stored reliably over time. In Filecoin, users pay to store their files on storage miners.

What is a Filecoin miner?

A miner could be any internet-connected computer with spare disk space or a dedicated system with lots of storage built specifically for Filecoin. Filecoin’s blockchain rewards miners for contributing useful storage to the internet, not for completing wasteful proof-of-work computations.

What is Filecoin proof-of-replication?

The Filecoin blockchain relies on two mechanisms, or proofs, which help the network verify that miners store the data they claim to hold. These two proofs allow other participants to assess whether miners are trustworthy or not. The Proof-of-Replication indicates that miners have stored the number of copies of data they claim to hold.

Is Filecoin a decentralized storage system?

We should note that, along with Filecoin, other protocols offer cryptocurrency-powered, decentralized storage and file-sharing systems. These include Siacoin, which already has a 2 petabyte network capacity, and Storj, which already has a more-than100 petabyte network capacity.