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I guess the important aspects are:

- Filecoin is not a filesystem. The whitepaper doesn't even talk about the technical implementations of storage. Filecoin focusses on "how to retribute peers" more than "how to store data".

- Filecoin is supposed to be used on the network

- Filecoin is supposed to be used in a cluster of mutually distrusting peers, who by the power of the oldest and most effficient incentive ever (aka money) can come to an agreement that is beneficial to everyone.

Given these, I wouldn't advise you replace your hard drives with it, not even your home computers; high latency should be expected. OTOH, Filecoin is the way to go if you want to backup your whole TBs of data without paying thousands of dollars each month.

Note: I only speak from a very quick glance at the whitepaper. When I see something like that I always rush to the technical explanations, and I was a little bit sad that it only talked about the coin aspect...



Rakoo, perhaps you'll be interested in Filecoin's sister protocol, IPFS: http://static.benet.ai/t/ipfs.pdf

You can think of it as Git + BitTorrent + Web as a file system. A talk describing it will be up soon.

Oh, and:

> The whitepaper doesn't even talk about the technical implementations of storage.

It does talk about the storage of pieces. Not at a file system level, but at piece storing + distribution.


Coincidentally, I just looked at ipfs, and am now waiting for the talk :)


Wow, thanks!


Just getting back to this.

I wasn't thinking that Filecoin was a filesystem, but that a filesystem could be built on top of filecoin. It turns out that what I'm thinking is probably what MaidSafe[1] is doing.

>high latency should be expected.

Unless you can reward low latency with more coin.

[1] http://maidsafe.net/




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