0/15 Filecoin is about storage but it’s common to misunderstand storage on Filecoin.

1/15 Filecoin is a protocol and a platform economy enabled by a blockchain. Filecoin mining is more like Airbnb hosting than traditional cryptocurrency mining. That’s also a key to making blockchain mainstream.

2/15 Miners offer cloud storage on Filecoin in "sectors". Sectors are like shipping containers with predetermined space and time dimensions. Miners are expected to honor their sector promises. Unreliable storage on Filecoin will result in heavy but still reasonable penalties.

3/15 There are three types of sector content, Committed Capacity, Regular Deal, and Filecoin Plus Deal. Not all sectors are equal and are incentivized differently based on content.

4/15 Committed Capacity (CC) is for storage providers to commit and prove storage capacity to the network. Note that it is entirely possible for miners to store data with some private utility in CC, such as personal backup or data that someone else asks them to store.

5/15 Regular Deals and Filecoin Plus Deals are deals on Filecoin with CID for indexing and retrieval. The difference is that Regular Deals, like CC, do not carry additional incentive since the protocol can’t algorithmically distinguish between useful data and mere capacity.

6/15 Filecoin Plus Deals, however, carry a 10x multiple in the share of block reward. Filecoin Plus Deals are deals from Filecoin Plus clients and Filecoin Plus is charting new territory in decentralized governance.

7/15 Filecoin Plus, Filecoin plus social trust, is a decentralized program where clients are notarized by a network of community-selected Notaries. Notaries are selected based on a rubric governed by the community. It's easy to fool a machine but much harder to fool a community.

8/15 Filecoin Plus is a pragmatic way to make Filecoin more useful and decentralized and put token production power in the hands of storage clients and application developers on Filecoin.

9/15 Storage providers are strongly incentivized to take Filecoin Plus deals and offer different value added services and incentives, such as bandwidth and replication. Many of these offers are free today.

10/15 Many more miners are building applications, providing tooling, and onboarding users for the network through Filecoin Plus.

11/15 Continuously proving storage trustlessly carries cryptographic overhead. However, this cost is small relative to operating a cloud business and going down over time as hardware and software mature. More importantly, this cost may not be the cost that end consumers pay.

12/15 When using storage on Filecoin, clients are using storage provided on Filecoin. Fast retrieval and warm storage are possible today. So are redundancy and encryption. The cost of storage that consumers experience depends on providers and many are offering free storage.

13/15 The design is to give miners and clients options and flexibility to compose new modes of interactions as opposed to prescribing a monolithic and rigid pattern. Prescriptions sometimes feel good but hurt emergence and evolution in the long run. Emergence takes time too.

14/15 Filecoin is about storage and is well suited for both Web2 and Web3 style interactions. Composability of interactions and content addressing create a path from storage to provenance, delivery, trade, and attribution. The journey of building data supply chain has just begun.

15/15 While the cost of storage on Filecoin can be very competitive for clients, Filecoin storage is not just about cost. Storage on Filecoin is about experience. Hundreds of teams are working to improve that experience and create new experiences that the world has never seen.