Filecoin

Filecoin is a decentralized system that enables anyone to rent out space on their computer.
The Filecoin mainnet went live in October 2020.

You can rent out space in your car on a peer to peer system like HyreCar and you can rent your house out on AirBnB. Well, now you can rent out space on your computer and earn Filecoin.

Filecoin raised $257 million in their ICO in 2017, making it one of the largest ICOs in the history of the crypto space. They took their time going live, but now they have, the project seems to be strongly supported.

The company behind Filecoin is Protocol Labs headed by Juan Benet. He wants to disrupt cloud companies like Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. You can see where the excitement is coming from, as there is a lot of profit in these companies.

Pros

  • Lower cost of storage for users
  • Very scaleable if they can incentivise millions of computers to participate in a huge storage network.
  • Eco-Storage – rather than building new banks of storage with all of the associated cost and energy use, Filecoin taps into storage that is already there.
  • Security – a decentralised network should be safer from hacks as there is no one single point of entry.

Cons

  • Speed – with files spread out potentially across multiple servers, it may take longer to access files. Participating servers need to be active and Internet speeds will vary from node to node.
  • The whole system is powered by the Filecoin token which may limit the take up initially.

Safety in Numbers

Using someone else´s computer to store your files might seem crazy, but Filecoin splits up the files so that individual pieces are worthless. Only the owner has the power to group the pieces back together and access the complete file., a bit like shredding it, so nobody can piece it together. The host wouldn´t be able to access the file, just a meaningless portion of it. pretty clever!

How to Earn Filecoin

There are 3 types of Filecoin miners:

  1. Storage miners. These nodes store the data on the Filecoin network;
  2. Retrieval miners. These nodes pull the files and
  3. Repair miners.

Storage miners can earn $FIL by storing data. Retrieval miners earn $FIL by bidding and mining for a particular file, the reward for which is set by the market.

Buying Filecoin

You can buy Filecoin at many exchanges, it’s pretty well distributed.

Exchanges where Filecoin is available include Coinbase, Binance, Huobi, Kraken, Bitfinex, Gemini, KuCoin, Bitrex, OKEx. Read our Kraken Exchange Review for a deeper look at that platform.

Filecoin Chart