Filecoin · 2020
How Filecoin turned a storage promise into something testable
A customer can check a download today. How does a network check that a provider kept the file through the months in between?
On 15 October 2020 the Filecoin team announced that its mainnet had gone live. The product it described was a marketplace for storage. A person with spare disk space could offer capacity to someone who needed it. The interesting part of the announcement was the evidence that would sit between those two strangers.
Imagine paying to preserve an archive for a year. Downloading one intact copy on the first day establishes very little about day two hundred. Asking the provider to send the whole archive over and over would consume much of the bandwidth that storing it remotely was meant to save. Filecoin’s design uses cryptographic proofs to establish that a provider created a distinct replica and continued to hold committed data over time.
For an archive owner, the distinction between storage and retrieval still matters. The network can check evidence about a provider’s storage commitment. A newsroom facing a deadline has a separate concern: can its editor actually retrieve the required file through the available route in time? The launch solved a specific problem well enough to build a market around it, while leaving that second question for customers and providers to test.