The mission of Filecoin is to create a decentralized, efficient, and robust foundation for humanity’s information.
Here is a short overview of each of these terms:
- The network is not dependent on any one party, e.g., not dependent on a company, foundation, or other organization to continue operating.
- No centralized parties can control, stop, or censor the network, its operation, or its participants.
- Users and providers are not controlled or governed by powerful intermediaries (unlike markets like Uber or Airbnb).
- Activity is trustable (web3) through the public verifiability of operations and rational incentives.
- Refers to the decentralization movement of 2015+, including IPFS, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more.
- Third parties cannot prevent willing participants from exchanging data and/or payments for it.
- Filecoin uses cryptography, end-to-end encryption at rest, and incentives to secure information and network operation.
- Make digital storage (spacetime) a proper commodity with real markets
- Decouple digital storage from cloud computing moat feature sets -- turn storage market into a real market where any provider can sell their storage.
- Enable humanity to create an efficient digital storage market, with small margins and as close as we can get to physical limitations.
- Ensure efficient usage of digital storage resources -- reduce digital space waste (unused storage supply while prices are high enough to warrant using it).
- Drive more and more efficient usage of storage media.
- Enable fast (sub-second) buying and selling of spacetime.
- Enable programs to buy and sell spacetime (without having to be humans or have an associated bank account) -- i.e., a cryptocurrency wallet and code should be enough to buy storage.
- Clients can trust Filecoin will serve data quickly and efficiently back to them.
- Filecoin will not waste user resources (storage, bandwidth, computation, time) unnecessarily.
- Filecoin has five 9s of uptime or more.
- Clients can trust Filecoin to keep their data safe.
- Clients can trust Filecoin to serve their data in a variety of extreme circumstances (in the distant future).
- Clients can trust Filecoin to replicate storage and to self-repair lost replicas over time.
- Clients can use Filecoin to store critical application data and trust it to work whenever they need that data back.
- The network is robust to attack by all sorts of powerful parties, including state-level actors.
- The network is robust to changing market dynamics and powerful counter incentives -- meaning, it is rational to continue operating the network.
- The network is robust to network censorship attacks (given there exist willing storage providers).
- The network is robust to specific file censorship attacks (given there exist willing storage providers).
- The network is robust to catastrophic attacks (i.e., nuclear war, long-running internet partitions, etc.).
- Filecoin can be used as the foundation of other technologies and applications. It is a platform.
- Filecoin supports data storage-intensive applications.
- Programs, Webapps, DApps, and smart contracts can be written to store and retrieve data from Filecoin efficiently, safely, and with high confidence.
- Filecoin is a trustable, dependable foundation for critical systems and applications.
- It becomes possible for parties to store information indefinitely (using rational incentives, and money), without having to be online or alive to renew or re-upload things.
- Filecoin leads data reliability and replication efforts.
- Filecoin marshals vast storage arrays to store most of humanity’s valuable information.
- Filecoin stores all human knowledge -- all scientific papers, history, press, etc.
- Filecoin forms a public record for humanity.
- Filecoin is one of the best choices to store any kind of data (from small incremental app data to massive datasets).
- Filecoin stores personal data end-to-end encrypted at rest, and can store it indefinitely.
- Filecoin becomes the default “digital storage locker” for all computer users.
- Filecoin becomes the default “external hard drive” for all computer users.