Where Filecoin is Accepted Locally and Globally
FIL powers the Filecoin decentralized file storage system, it’s “the AirBNB” of file storage. Having attained a top 30 coin market cap rank and a respectable token price, it’s credible as a commerce coin and even accepted as payment by some businesses; from a Berlin-based fashion line to a Canadian eco soap factory.
Who Accepts FIL
Are you an Entrepreneur, freelancer, or manager of a business accepting cryptocurrency?
Should you buy FIL?
Picking up FIL is a bet that their data storage service will be adopted, Filecoin aims to disrupt file storage and compete with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive. People and companies are naturally skeptical about having their files stored on random people’s hard drives around the world, but this is of course the chief concern of its developers. They have created an ingenious system for decentralizing the individual files being stored so the people storing cannot access them. It runs on top of the InterPlanetary File System and utilizes and Proof-of-Spacetime (which just sounds cool!) I am always running out of space on my MacBook, smartphone, and Google Drive account so I like the idea of blockchain-powered decentralized storage!
After its ICO that raised over $200 million, its price has been volatile, driven by the hype around its disruptive use-case. Recently it crashed down below 50% of its all-time high.
About
I’ve still got questions about Filecoin, they claim to be censorship-resistant — how committed to that are they? Different countries have dramatically different ideas of what’s considered legal speech. The team behind it, Protocol Labs in San Francisco, took nearly $260 million in venture capital so I have my doubts about it really being censorship-resistant and loyal to the decentralization ethos. And we also have to question free speech itself — if they genuinely don’t censor anything, very bad people could use it to share some pretty horrific stuff.
Filecoin is a peer-to-peer network that stores files on the internet, with built-in economic incentives to ensure files are stored reliably over time. Available storage and pricing is not controlled by any single company. Instead, Filecoin facilitates open markets for storing and retrieving files that anyone can participate in.
From filecoin.io
The internet is in the middle of a revolution: centralized proprietary services are being replaced with decentralized open ones; trusted parties replaced with verifiable computation; brittle location addresses replaced with resilient content addresses; inefficient monolithic services replaced with peer-to-peer algorithmic markets. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain networks have proven the utility of decentralized transaction ledgers. These public ledgers process sophisticated smart contract applications and transact crypto-assets worth tens of billions of dollars. These systems are the first instances of internetwide Open Services, where participants form a decentralized network providing useful services for pay, with no central management or trusted parties. IPFS has proven the utility of content-addressing by decentralizing the web itself, serving billions of files used across a global peer-to-peer network. It liberates data from silos, survives network partitions, works offline, routes around censorship, and gives permanence to digital information.
From the abstract of the Filecoin whitepaper
