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posted by martyb on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the 'flip'-a-coin? dept.

A blockchain-based cloud storage technology called Filecoin has already raised $52 million from investors. The company is poised to raise millions more on Thursday when it begins selling units of its bitcoin-like cryptocurrency to a larger set of wealthy investors.

Filecoin aims to disrupt conventional cloud-based storage platforms from Amazon and others. If it succeeds, the technology could be worth billions of dollars. But the company will need to overcome some significant hurdles first.

First and foremost, Filecoin's technology doesn't actually exist yet. The Filecoin team has done extensive research and planning, producing a series of white papers describing the technology it's building. But an actual, working Filecoin network is still months away. When it launches, Filecoin will compete with rival blockchain storage networks, including Sia, which has been available to the public for two years.

"Filecoin currently is just a white paper," Sia co-founder David Vorick told us earlier this week.

Have any Soylentils encountered or used blockchain storage, and if so what did you think of it?

Source: Ars Technica

Also at Medium, TechCrunch, and CoinDesk.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:26PM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:26PM (#552924) Journal

    TFS should have included this single paragraph from the White Paper:

    Filecoin is a decentralized storage network that turns cloud storage into an algorithmic market. The
    market runs on a blockchain with a native protocol token (also called “Filecoin”), which miners earn
    by providing storage to clients. Conversely, clients spend Filecoin hiring miners to store or distribute
    data. As with Bitcoin, Filecoin miners compete to mine blocks with sizable rewards, but Filecoin mining
    power is proportional to active storage, which directly provides a useful service to clients (unlike Bitcoin
    mining, whose usefulness is limited to maintaining blockchain consensus). This creates a powerful incentive
    for miners to amass as much storage as they can, and rent it out to clients. The protocol weaves
    these amassed resources into a self-healing storage network that anybody in the world can rely on. The
    network achieves robustness by replicating and dispersing content, while automatically detecting and
    repairing replica failures. Clients can select replication parameters to protect against different threat
    models. The protocol’s cloud storage network also provides security, as content is encrypted end-to-end
    at the client, while storage providers do not have access to decryption keys. Filecoin works as an incentive
    layer on top of IPFS [1], which can provide storage infrastructure for any data. It is especially useful
    for decentralizing data, building and running distributed applications, and implementing smart contracts.

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  • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Monday August 14 2017, @01:40PM

    by Fnord666 (652) on Monday August 14 2017, @01:40PM (#553645) Homepage
    Fair point and I agree. I'll try to look at my submissions a bit better for points that could be clarified. Thanks for the feedback!