Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network

The five-minute read

One action, walked through

1. A client and a miner agree a deal: price, duration, and the piece of data.
2. The miner seals a unique replica and posts a proof that the sealing was done.
3. Over the deal's life the miner posts proofs of spacetime. Missing a window is a fault.
4. The client, or another party, pays a retrieval provider to serve the bytes. That payment is not the storage deal.
5. If the miner fails the proofs, collateral in the paper's design is slashed and the client can treat the deal as broken.

The argument, unpacked

What has to be true

• The proof system matches the paper's replication and spacetime claims. Later proof changes need their own citation.
• Collateral is large enough that deleting a paid sector is a loss.
• Someone will retrieve. A stored file with no retrieval path is an archive, not a service.
• Clients verify deals rather than trusting a miner's website.

What happened after the paper

Filecoin mainnet launched after this paper, with proof constructions and deal-making that continued to evolve. The storage-versus-retrieval split is the lesson that still separates a serious deployment from a slogan. The historic 2014 PDF is a different, earlier sketch.

What to check before you use the idea

• Is the deal a recorded storage deal with a duration and collateral?
• Which proof is required, replication, spacetime, or a later replacement?
• Who is paid to serve the file, as distinct from storing it?
• Is the citation the 2017 paper or the historic 2014 sketch?

Terms

Proof of replication

A proof that a miner encoded a unique copy of a client's data, rather than pointing at someone else's copy.

Proof of spacetime

A sequence of proofs that the replica persisted for the deal's duration.

Retrieval market

A separate payment for serving bytes. It is not implied by a successful storage proof.

Sealing

The expensive encoding step that creates the unique replica the proofs are about.

The problem the paper names

Cloud storage concentrates files, prices and the decision to delete inside a few firms. The paper asks for a market in which a storage provider proves it still holds a unique replica, and in which the chain's consensus power is tied to that useful storage rather than to an empty hash.

What the design proposes

• A storage market and a retrieval market are separate. Storing data is not the same job as serving it.
• Proofs of replication are meant to show that a miner dedicated physical storage to a particular copy.
• Proofs of spacetime extend that claim across time, so a miner cannot prove once and delete.

How the mechanism is specified

• The paper formalises a decentralised storage network as a scheme with properties, then argues Filecoin meets them under stated assumptions.
• Orders, deals and proofs are protocol objects. A deal is not a reputation handshake.
• The 2017 text says the work was in progress. Later proofs and the live network's parameters are subsequent specifications.

What this page does not treat as proven

• Do not cite the 2014 sketch in the historic library as if it were this paper.
• A proof of storage does not make retrieval fast, and the paper separates the markets for that reason.
• We do not repeat offering language or price targets from 2017 fundraising material.

Why a venture studio still reads it

The distinction between the storage market and the retrieval market is the part ventures drop. A network that can prove a disk still holds a file, but cannot price the moment a user wants the file back, has built only half of this design.