Filecoin Filecoin Liftoff - the Main Event, 25 Oct 2020

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From YouTube: The Future of Filecoin

Description

How Filecoin will be the first use case that captures people’s imagination beyond crypto-native. Join us for The Future of Filecoin, featuring Jeromy Johnson (@Why), Molly Mackinlay, Ryan Zurrer, and moderator Colin Evran.

Join us for Filecoin Liftoff Week, an action-packed series of talks, workshops, and panels curated by the web3 community to celebrate the Filecoin mainnet launch and chart the network’s future. https://liftoff.filecoin.io/

Events take place all week, October 19-23, 2020. #FilecoinLiftoff
For more information on Filecoin
- visit the project website: https://filecoin.io/
- or follow Filecoin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Filecoin

Get Filecoin community news and announcements in your inbox, monthly: http://eepurl.com/gbfn1n

Chapters
00:00 How did everyone get involved with Filecoin?
09:12 What is possible now that Filecoin is launched that wasn't before?
13:48 Why Polychain Capital chose to invest in Filecoin
17:55 Crossing the Chasm with Filecoin
21:05 The potential of blockchain ecosystems
23:52 How Filecoin could accelerate Web3
35:30 Problems with the current internet

A

So I am absolutely delighted to interview and talk with three visionaries who have been embedded.

A

In the crypto ecosystem, far longer than I have.

A

I know they have a lot to share about, how the filecoin network and community and ecosystem can evolve in the longterm.

A

and so we'll get to that in just a minute. But I wanted to first ask each of these folks.

A

How they got involved and first turned their attention.

A

To ipfs and filecoin, early on?

A

and I'll start with ryan. who's been embedded in the bitcoin and ethereum space for a long time.. How did you kind of first get involved with ipfs and filecoin?.

B

So it was a project that we knew about tangentially.

B

From kind of late 2014-2015, onward.

B

But really the big aha moment for me was.

B

In shanghai, at devcon2.

B

Where all week, long talking with ethereum projects.

B

And different dev teams, we noticed that.

B

As many or even more teams were building on ipfs.

B

And were excited about filecoin as we're building.

B

On ethereum and excited about ethereum.

B

and then I think on the third day.

B

Juan gave this incredibly charismatic speech and demo.

B

B

and for context, were there behind the great firewall of china in shanghai.

B

The internet at this hotel was terrible..

B

Everybody was having problems with it all week, long.

B

And juan does this demo of ipfs at the time where he's pulling video from beyond the great firewall and streaming in real time.

B

And for some of us that's,, it's really interesting,.

B

But for a lot of the chinese in the audience,.

B

Being able to pull a video and stream it in that quality.

B

Was just a seminal moment. and people were up on their chairs like screaming.

B

And just like celebrating.- and it was just this crazy moment where you could tell.

B

That this was maybe the first project.

B

That we saw that was going to have a real impact.

B

On real people beyond crypto natives.

B

That liked it just for the intellectual curiosity.

B

that really filecoin ipfs was going to have an impact.

B

Beyond this small community of early believers.

B

And that speech that juan gave was really.

B

A moment that I think all of us mark devcon2 for.

B

And was certainly a moment where I decided.

B

That I needed to be head first into this ecosystem.

A

That is fantastic., awesome, and jeremy,. Why don't you take us even further back., big things and humble beginnings,?

A

How did you first interact with juan and the open source community around ipfs?.

C

Got to unmute myself there. yeah,, so back in, back in 2014, I was working with some friends at this file. Storage company called isilon, which then got bought by some other company got bought by some other company,. Nobody knows about it, anymore, it's fine., but one of my friends sent me this hacker news post about this thing called ipfs., so it was a demo like source graph or something.

C

And, and it had been similar to some project that we'd tried to start on our own and like, oh,. That's really cool.

C

We should try to use it and start like figure it...

C

Like got on github and looked around and there wasn't,, it was kind of hard to figure out what was going on., and so I got on irc and said..

C

I started asking questions and figure out well,. It didn't actually exist, yet., it's like,, well,, okay,, that's,, that's cool., maybe I'll help build it. and so pinged, juan and was, didn't know juan at that time.

C

Just pinned jay bennett on slack, on irc.

C

Like, "hey, can I help do anything here?" and what's the state of things.

C

and ended. Up, just started hacking on things and building pieces out., and I spent a large portion of like the next weekend,.

C

I went on some like some like trip to go camping.

C

Or whatever, but I brought my laptop and like hacked out a bunch of code on ipfs., I was really excited and building out this thing and eventually, like juan convinced me to join him.

C

At protocol labs,, which was at the time, called interplanetary networks.

C

and,, I just... and I was really excited. Building something new in a different,, exciting space and like open source was fun.

C

And you got to interact with a ton of different people.

C

and it was also building this really interesting piece of software, where it didn't matter where your data was., and so you could have it on your phone or on your laptop or wherever,, and it would just pull the data from wherever it needed to to get it to you..

C

Which sounded extremely exciting.

C

and yeah, that was kind of how I got involved.

C

And from there, it's just a bloomed.

C

Into wherever we are now, six years, later.

A

Awesome, awesome., thanks for sharing that. and molly before you went two feet into filecoin,.

A

You were actually the project lead for ipfs for a long period of time.. So why don't you talk a little bit about how you got involved there and what you potentially saw of the ipfs ecosystem.

A

That made you want to also contribute to filecoin?.

D

Absolutely. yeah, prior to ipfs,, I was at google for a long time.

D

And worked on the education team, there. building a lot of educational tools for teachers and student to collaborate, more effectively. and my classic problem working and building up the mobile apps for google classroom was,.

D

Oh no, the internet just sucks in schools, everywhere.

D

It's pretty much like no matter where you go in the world,.

D

Pretty crappy internet. and constantly we're having this problem, where you had groups of students and teachers in a room with each other, and they're sitting, there 5, 10 minutes out of a 45 minute class period, just desperately trying to connect to each other.

D

To like turn in an assignment., something that was so basic in the paper, world, that when here we'd gotten to a digital model that was so centralized that the connections were missing.

D

Between those teachers and students in the classroom, physically 5ft from each other., and so we kept looking for solutions and tools that were more,, more adaptive, more able to enable people.

D

To connect directly with each other, without having to go through kind of middlemen,.

D

Or centralized routers and finding and understanding.

D

How ipfs could fit in and solve that problem, to me was like a kind of an aha moment, where,.

D

Here was a problem that we've been confronting and the problem wasn't with the tool we were building on top,. It was the stack below it didn't support...

D

Wasn't flexible enough to give us the connections we needed.

D

In order to connect these students and teachers with each other., and so that for me, was kind of a,, oh wow, ipfs can really come in and fit like a really key problem that I and I think many other developers had been kind of facing.

D

Across the web2 ecosystem., and so that for me, was like my pivot, point.

D

And from there jumping into the ipfs ecosystem, was...

D

I joined back in 2018 and it was like an awesomely creative.

D

And generative time for the ipfs community., we had like 12 different working groups.

D

All building like awesome, projects,.

D

And this was about, I guess nine months.

D

Before we did the first ipfs camp.

D

and I'm really looking forward to covid being over, so we can do another one., but that was just an amazing example.

D

Of the sort of community and ecosystem, that's building on top of ipfs that has kind of formed around these building blocks and figured out.

D

How to use them for a variety of different use, cases., and so I think that sort of ethos.

D

Of a highly collaborative ecosystem, where everyone is building on top of everyone else's thing,.

D

Versus I think many other ecosystems is,, it's very, very collaborative and very generative.

D

And so tons of different projects are working in that space.

D

And kind of,, the interesting thing on the ipfs team was like.

D

Looking across all of those projects and figuring out how we could kind of support and add the things like performance,.

D

Things like that are like developer, ux, things that can then support this amazing growing ecosystem.

D

And just bring it to more places and make it more accessible to people. so like working with browser vendors to get ipfs embedded.

D

Working with groups like netflix to optimize.

D

Various different, like algorithms in the protocol.

D

Those were some of the things that, like in joining ipfs and kind of ramping up, there became really,, really fun, new opportunities.

D

and, I think, are going to continue being a pretty core part of ipfs trajectory for the next couple of years..

A

Awesome, fantastic., so that was a great kind of trip down memory lane in the past.. I want to spend a couple minutes on the present and what filecoin really enables, for developers today.

A

And maybe I'll start with jeremy.

A

Jeremy, now that filecoin is out in the wild,.

A

What are some of the interesting things that just were not possible before the launch of mainnet that are possible today?.

C

I mean, the biggest thing is that,.

C

Any account with some tokens in it can then cause the storage of files, right?, that's kind of,. You don't have to make an account,.

C

You don't have to do whatever,. You just have to acquire some tokens from somewhere anywhere, and make a deal store. Some files.

C

And that's pretty big.

C

I mean, it's things like,! You can have automated processes that are just living out on the internet, somewhere,, storing and managing data without having to have humans, involved.

C

And like all these things can like,, you can have some process running that receives donations from anybody and then uses those funds to maintain and store data, right?.

C

And that can just live out somewhere., so I think one of the cool thing is it moves us closer towards having autonomous, programs,, be able to really like live on the internet,, which is kind of a cool thing.

C

There is a bunch of like cool, deep technical things.

C

In filecoin, like we're using more snarks.

C

Than any other system that's been deployed, I believe.

C

Like millions and millions of zk-snark proofs being like sent around and verified and proving like petabytes of data., it's like really crazy. Huge amounts of stuff here.

C

Yeah,, I don't know how much you want me to go into here., there's just a lot--, that's great.! That's perfect.!.

A

And molly, back to you, what really is now possible at the intersection.

A

Of ipfs and filecoin that wasn't possible before?.

D

Yeah,, I think the point that jeremy's pointing to here, takes..., if you think of some of the tools that have been built on ipfs, so far,, some of the projects and ecosystems, and then you add in filecoin it just unlocks brand new opportunities.

D

So for example, think about kind of, audius, which exists on ipfs today and storing.

D

It's all of these content creators who are storing their songs and kind of having ownership over the music that they create.

D

And this is differentiated from centralized systems.

D

Where it becomes this huge lock-in moment where now content creators don't actually own their music anymore.

D

Now with,, if we have the audius and then go a step further.

D

And take something like filecoin, where you can connect in things like kind of a steam oriented uploading system.

D

Where songs that are more popular, that are more prevalent,.

D

Could actually fund their own storage.

D

And their own existence and replication throughout ecosystems., you have this idea of datasets that are funding their own storage and their own existence..

D

You can take that to some other areas as well.

D

You could think about like, news, integrity, news that like backs itself up over time and stores itself.

D

You could think of kind of machine learning data sets where, by enabling people to run a computation over a dataset.

D

You fund the data, set's existence and the growing like utility and usage of those data sets.

D

And so I think that's a really interesting space where you have, ipfs, has always been a great place for.

D

Making data accessible and collaborating on it with others.

D

And now we're entering a place where not only can you do that,, but even if those individuals go offline.

D

The dataset could fund itself and its own existence and time.

D

an example that I think really resonates here is back in 2016, during the 2016 election,.

D

Edgi, the environmental data government initiative.

D

Put a ton of climate data on ipfs because they were very concerned that the epa and a number of others were getting their funding cut and this data might be lost and we'd no longer have the information we need to fight climate change.

D

And so here's an example of like really critically important humanities data that we want to make sure persists into the future,. But we don't want to have to rely on any particular group to hold on to that data.

D

We all want to be able to preserve it and we want it to be able to preserve itself so that we can all benefit from it. 10 years from now,.

D

When we want to chart the full history of our fight against climate change.- and so I think those are some of the areas- I'm super excited about., I think we've barely scratched the surface.

A

Awesome, fantastic. and ryan to you,. You brought kind of filecoin.

A

As a potential opportunity into the fund.

A

That you were working, that you co-founded.

A

Polychain ventures. and you must have had a longterm thesis in mind on what this network could do in the long-term to be able to make that play out., and so why? Don't you walk us through what that thesis was,, how it's played out and how people should think about it from here on it?.

A

Oops, you're on mute, there,, ryan.

B

Sorry,, my bad here. so very central to the thesis.

B

That we had that remains today,.

B

Is this idea of all of this latent storage.

B

All around the planet has effectively zero variable cost.

B

Or minuscule variable cost.

B

and you could combine all of that extra storage.

B

And drop the cost of storage dramatically.

B

My colleagues at polychain have recently.

B

Spun up a site called philstats.com.

B

Where they're tracking, the cost of storing.

B

A gigabyte of files on ipfs.

B

Which, incidentally, is less than 1 cent per gigabyte?.

B

Which is 32 times cheaper today than amazon web services.

B

So the detractors in the,, in kind of the early days.

B

Were always like,? Well, you're, never going to be able to beat the scale of amazon or they're always going to be able to cut their costs.

B

And kind of out-compete you.

B

and we've already seen from day one that was clearly not the case.

B

And it's combining all this latent storage around the planet.

B

At zero variable cost has already played out.

B

To offer a much more compelling solution for data storage.

B

And so, now, instead of people spending nine bucks a month.

B

To store a few gigabytes worth of data on dropbox.

B

They can spend a few cents per month to store.

B

Those gigabytes on ipfs.

B

and to molly's point not need to trust in any one. Authority,, that's subject to any one: governments', views and politics.

B

And so it offers just a dramatically better solution.

B

At dramatically, lower prices. and that's really where we disrupt markets.

B

And you can take this a step further.

B

And for certain people to like rent out part of their laptop.

B

May not be the most interesting business.

B

That they're going to undertake.

B

it's not going to necessarily pay the bills but try to like,, think about,, say the psychology of like a young boy in india.

B

Who's now able to potentially finance a laptop.

B

Through the cash flows that he'll receive.

B

In renting out the storage on his laptop.

B

And you've got now, you're, enabling a new generation.

B

To have access to computation that they would not have otherwise had access to through the combination.

B

Of defi and using ipfs.

B

And so it's really the putting these different building blocks together and offering just a dramatically better service.

B

At dramatically better economics that made this compelling.

B

From the early days of the thesis.

B

And all of that remains true. Today.

A

Awesome, fantastic., so, let's pivot, to the future.. So obviously everyone in this room is a big believer in web3 technology.

A

we have awesome early adoption of the web3 tech stack.

A

But we all want web3 to kind of make that transition.

A

Into mass adoption, where billions of people are dependent and use it in a way, that's that, spans the entire world.

A

So molly,, why don't you outline your vision for how filecoin can help accelerate that web free adoption to, billions of people?.

D

Yeah,, I think filecoin has a huge opportunity.

D

To cross the chasm like file storage is the thing that resonates with many communities..

D

It's something that we're all doing all the time on the internet., and so it has a huge opportunity to kind of tie into something that I think a lot of people are already looking for. and especially having, over 10x improvement.

D

From a cost perspective is definitely helps.

D

It's sort of thing: that, people build businesses around those sorts of 10x improvements., and so I think that that offers a very clear bottom line.

D

Value add as well., but I think,, I think, there's a huge opportunity here.

D

To just pull together a community and ecosystem.

D

And a set of killer products that are utilizing this technology and reach out to others.

D

Like what we've seen over the past year, especially, is just a huge ramp up that the technology.

D

At the lower layers is getting just.

D

At a high enough fidelity that building really smooth user.

D

Experiences on top of them building the netlify for ipfs.

D

Building like blogs and other tools that are just.

D

Really easy to spin up. we're, starting to cross that chasm and that started happening in the ipfs ecosystem. and I think, we'll accelerate with filecoin coming in.

D

And adding an incentive layer that also can benefit people who are, storing their data.

D

Who are participating in this ecosystem.

D

I think it adds a lot of opportunity for more people to get involved and to take those, those ideas, further.

D

And I've just been so impressed at the kind of amazing projects that are coming out of.

D

The filecoin ignite stream of events and hackathons.

D

Like hackfs, apollo,, the launchpad series.

D

Like there's, really amazing businesses.

D

I think things that, three years from now five years from now, we'll be like,. This is where it started.

D

That these are now like the titans of web3 that are.

D

Are starting to build on this tech stack.

D

because it's,, it's modular,, it's accessible.

D

It's easy to inter-operate with each other and have close connections between applications.

D

and it allows, everyone to not go back.

D

And rebuild the building blocks themselves.

D

To build on top of it and focus their energy on reaching out.

D

To users and other communities and have that be their focus.

D

Which leaves a lot more time to do it really really well.

D

Than having to build up all of the internal layers of infrastructure., so I'm super excited for all of the work that folks, who have been in the ipfs space for a little while, like textile and infura and pinata.

D

they're, pulling in filecoin and they're, making it accessible to these groups that are going to take it. So much further.

A

Awesome, and jeremy, you've been around the space.

A

A long, time,, obviously you're very familiar with some of the other blockchains that exist, and you ping me constantly, even this morning with ideas on how filecoin can work with other blockchains.

A

Can you give a vision for how you see filecoin, interacting.

A

With other blockchains in the ecosystem, five, 10 years out, and how it can start today?.

C

Yeah., I think, there's a lot of cool potential here.

C

like for example,, I mean the easiest thing is.

C

So many blockchains have to worry about as you're doing computation and as you're doing different things. How do you store all this data?.

C

Like, ethereum smart contracts.

C

How do they deal with data availability??

C

How do they deal with like,?

C

If you need to do anything more than a few kilobytes of data.

C

In a ethereum, smart contract,, it's going to bankrupt you.

C

And so having filecoin be able to answer that question.

C

Is really tricky. there's so many concerns around like how data availability works and how like providing the data.

C

And so on, happens., but I think in the future, we're going to figure that out and we're going to have some really interesting opportunities. There.

C

also,, I think one, cool thing is as blockchains get larger and larger over time,.

C

Like they become untenably large., I think ethereum is hearing about two terabytes now to like have a full archive node.

C

That data needs to go somewhere. and we happen to have quite a lot of storage..

C

I think the,, the security model of having a bunch.

C

Of random filecoin miners store this data and have it be.

C

Like more economically secured is like, a very nice addition.

C

To how to store all that data, when not everybody needs it.

C

There's a lot of,, just any sort of data where you need to not necessarily.

C

Trust, a single party to,, keep it safe and keep it around.

C

Well, filecoin has the answer for that.

C

I also see there's being a lot of,.

C

A lot of cool stuff for like..., a thing I'm potentially excited about is maybe, with zcash, where you can use different payments,, you can do encrypted payments where nobody can know who's sending what..

C

You can store data on filecoin with a shielded transaction from zcash. like that would be a really exciting thing to have built.

C

And there's, a lot of interesting interplay. There.

C

Where,, you don't necessarily want everything to be public.

C

So if we have a coin, who is specializing in that.

C

We can figure out how to bridge that. and like, if you want ethereum smart contracts to be able to have some logic that ends up storing data.

C

In filecoin, being able to have functioning calls in ethereum that ended up making deals on filecoin.

C

That'd be really cool., there's just a bunch of different ways that we can leverage this basic functionality of like store data.

C

And retrieve data into everything else in the ecosystem.

A

Awesome, and ryan, obviously you're a proponent.

A

Of web3 tech, more than anyone,, and you understand the ethereum blockchain,, the polka dot blockchain and all of these other different things..

A

How do you see filecoin playing its role in accelerating web3 to the next stage of adoption?.

B

So filecoin is really unique in that.

B

Very truly, when you sit down and talk with teams.

B

In any of these,, these major ecosystems, these layer, ones.

B

The common thread is that they all plan filecoin integrations.

B

And they all plan to use ipfs for storage.

B

So,, as jeremy, you very poignantly pointed out,.

B

You can store the chain that the canonical ledger.

B

On filecoin, on ipfs, and just pull from that.

B

And that's going to allow a lot of these chains to achieve the scalability that they propose to achieve..

B

To have faster transaction throughput,.

B

And also continue to deliver decentralization.

B

And continue to deliver the security,.

B

That that concept of of having the canonical chain.

B

Readily available to call entails.

B

And so it's one thing that every team.

B

Of every sort of major layer, one shares in common.

B

Is they use lib/ptp and they they have every intention.

B

Of using filecoin ipfs to to store their data on over time.

B

And make their chain higher performing., so its great.

A

Awesome, fantastic.

A

there's so many different folks, hundreds of teams experimenting with filecoin, launching different applications and things like that.

A

In web3,, especially always have to think many years ahead and start early., and so when you give advice to entrepreneurs.

A

And developers building on filecoin,, what would you have them? Invest in what types of applications,, what types of use cases,.

A

So they can really capture the opportunity five, 10 years out, and maybe I'll start with molly.

D

Yeah., I mean,, I think this, the new businesses that are just being unlocked at like the very earliest layer.

D

Of this ecosystem are,, no one else has moved on. These couldn't have moved on these.

D

'cause, they didn't exist like just mere weeks. Ago.

D

And that's super exciting and super cool. and I think there's, a huge opportunity for folks to.

D

Dive into the new possibilities that have been unlocked and find killer use cases killer, businesses that are just going to be massively more successful than we can predict today.. Another area that I know some folks have already started. Looking at,, but I think has huge opportunity is looking at the set of technologies on the retrieval side of filecoin that can and will exist and grow over time.

D

So things like incentivize, pub/sub, incentivizing kind of.

D

Offline propagation of messages, such that, when you know you as a node, go offline, you can still make sure that, and incentivize others.

D

To push your message to others in a swarm., these are things that I think they're going to be immensely useful for filelcoin on the retrieval side of data,, but most blockchains,.

D

Most web3 applications will have really interesting.

D

Use cases and benefits for utilizing some modular protocols.

D

And tooling around that connectivity, layer.

D

And so, you can imagine, a world where it's like incentivized push, notifications and other things like that.

D

That could be a really interesting, model, but,, no one's looked into it that deeply yet..

D

I think there's some, some opportunity, there.

D

if,. If you're looking for ideas, if you're a developer in this space, like one,.

D

The filecoin ignite events are just immensely generative.

D

the,. The hackfs project had a brainstorm in the early days.

D

And generated,, I kid you not like thousands of ideas..

D

There is a google doc that is just 50 pages long.

D

Of like different brainstormed and concepts that folks are coming up, with., and so I think, there's a lot of opportunity here.

D

For just things that people haven't thought of yet.

D

And what I'd urge you to do? There is just come, get involved., there's a lot of great ways to talk to other builders and creators.

D

and we're stronger as an ecosystem when we build together.

D

and we have an immensely strong and collaborative ecosystem..

D

So finding niches, where,.

D

Groups like pinning services as a concept,.

D

Slotted into an open gap in the ipfs ecosystem.

D

Where it's like,, hey like I, have this data,.

D

But I as a node, want to go offline, who's going to persist it for me.. Can I pay someone to do that?

D

and that, was an aha moment that I think came out of an ethereum,, a hackathon and then pinata existed, infura started taking this on.

D

And a number of groups form to fill that niche.

D

I think we're creating a lot of new niches like that,.

D

That developers in the future are going to fill and find.

A

Awesome., how about you, ryan??

A

What will you have folks invest in that will really pay off on filecoin in five to 10 years?.

B

So the conversation that I'm having with a lot of entrepreneurs right now, is, around creating novel mechanisms to drive demand.

B

We've seen this explosion of supply, of the supply side on with, filecoin.

B

And now it's, it's become so cheap.

B

That there needs to be, say, like referrals.

B

And various mechanisms to, start to drive, demand.

B

So that the miners stay on the network over the long-term.

B

And so part of that is getting ui right.

B

Part of that is getting the messaging right.

B

and sort of like,. How can I,? How can we explain this to like my mom or grandma.

B

In two seconds such that they'll not only understand it.

B

But they'll want to participate.

B

and hitting those points that resonate with different audiences, and that's really different around the world..

B

So when I speak with entrepreneurs in china,.

B

The discussion around pinning services is very different. Than, say when I speak with entrepreneurs.

B

In, here in europe or in north america.,.

B

And kind of hitting the incentive points.

B

For each part of the world,, so that we start to see this massive wave of demand.

B

That will again, kind of drive further supply.

B

I think that's really the opportunity set.

B

That will create great value both for the network and for individuals who solve those problems.

A

And jeremy, you built in a lot of mechanisms.

A

Into the protocol to make sure that, miners are showing real demand, that real demand and real use cases get prioritized in the filecoin network.

A

Do you want to maybe touch on a few of them like filecoin, plus or others?,.

C

Yeah the, what colin mentioned the filecoin plus.

C

Is the data or verified data really? Is this whole mechanism.

C

For setting up ways of allowing people to vouch.

C

For, like particular data being real, and not necessarily just be miners,, storing data.

C

Just to bump up their own numbers. and the cool thing about this is it allows you to,.

C

It allows miners to discriminate on storing.

C

Like real useful data for people.

C

And then they're rewarded for that by the.

C

The network gives you more power for storing data.

C

That's been verified in this way.

C

It gives, people a pretty significant incentive.

C

And also like helps to lower the actual costs, here.

C

Because miners are rewarded more for this data., so if you are working within this model,.

C

You're going to have much cheaper prices for the miner.

D

And to bring that back to ryan's point earlier like this is yet to come. Online, this whole system., so any sort of gains and benefits we're seeing.

D

Over alternate solutions, right now is just the tip of the iceberg..

D

The filecoin plus is kind of in development.

D

And working to amass a larger community.

D

Of kind of verifiers and folks who can go out.

D

And find kind of parties throughout the ecosystem.

D

Who can then consume it and bring the data online.

D

And I think it's really interesting there, because it creates this immense incentive.

D

For miners to go and find people to consume the data.

D

So not only, is this amazing supply being amassed.

D

As part of the filecoin incentive system, but now that supply as incentivized to fill the supply.

D

And go out and be the parties who are bringing online really massively important datasets.

D

And so, that balance in the market.

D

And in the ecosystem is really, really interesting.. We've already seen a number of minor groups like finding.

D

Immensely important data, sets, robotics data, machine learning, data, astrological,, astronomy, data.

D

Cosmology data,, like things about the universe.

D

And so like, there's a lot there and putting a much broader community to work to identify and bring those groups online to the filecoin ecosystem is, I think, going to be way stronger.

D

Than putting that in the hands of any individual group.-.

B

It's kind of this concept where, until this year.

B

The idea of negative interest rates, was unfathomable.

B

That you would like make money to borrow money.

B

And it's almost this, concept of negative interest rates.

B

For, for data that I'm like, like they're, paying me to store my data on this network to start. and,. Obviously, interest rates change.

B

Over time and costs will change over time, slightly.

B

But there is this, sort of like mind, blowing notion.

B

That you can effectively be remunerated.

B

To use the network as a user.

B

Which is really special, and to my knowledge,.

B

Unique,, like we have that we're in uncharted territory at this point., so pretty cool.

A

Awesome, fantastic., so obviously filecoin is now in the community's hands, right?

A

and it's the community that's going to be driving the future of filecoin.. So an open question to all three of you folks.

A

What are the challenges that you want to issue to the community in the next five or 10 years?

A

That you would want them to invest in and accomplish?, and that could be to researchers or engineers that tend to help improve the protocol.?

A

It could be. The developers that are building on top of filecoin, could be the users or community members.

A

What are the challenges that you would want to see? People invest in?.

C

Yeah, I mean, one of the,. One of the big ones is.

C

That the internet itself is just too slow.

C

The amount of data people want to store and that they need to move around for that.

C

Is significantly higher than the internet today can handle.

C

So if you actually,, if people actually want to,.

C

Use filecoin to store all their data, that even filecoin allows them to afford to store.

C

Because things are getting way, cheaper, right?.

C

You'll quickly run into problems with. How do you move that data?, your bandwidth costs will start to dominate., and so the thing we need to figure out is how do we move more data faster?

C

and that can be a better internet infrastructure that can be like better services for like moving drives,.

C

Filled with data. that can be like more interesting, like back halls of like,, maybe there's like free capacity moving through satellite networks,. If you need it.

C

or it's just any number of things like how do we move petabytes and exabytes of data around.

C

That's a really interesting research problem.

C

We need to figure.

B

And to that point,.

B

I like to remind people that ipfs stands for the interplanetary file system.

B

And we're really seeing the emergence of the space industry.

B

In this moment. and I think that we're, kind of at the knee of the curve of space. but,, I think, there's a great opportunity for a lot of teams.

B

To get in front of some of the, like the spacex's of the world and so on and so forth,.

B

And build kind of white glove solutions for these companies.

B

That, as they go into space, they don't need to,, take the extra weight of heavy servers.

B

That we can get a communication system using.

B

The interplanetary file system, which, by the way, was designed for this.

B

and effectively make it the internet of space.

B

Which, I think we're, we all think that that's what it could be.

B

B

I'll save the like "star wars" and "star trek",.

B

Like cheesy one-liner jokes, but this is an amazing frontier that people can explore.

B

And I think, there's great value to be unlocked there as well.

D

Yeah. I mean for me, the origins of ipfs and filecoin.

D

Around making humanities data more resilient,.

D

Empowering scientists and individuals to share data,.

D

Collaborate on data. like,, I think, there's a lot of awesome tooling. There.

D

That's possible to bring that collaborative nature around large data sets.

D

And make them, put them to use for humanity,.

D

And help us use them to improve our own lives.

D

And our own society. that's,, what I'm super excited for,, which is, a layer above the sorts of tooling.

D

That gives people agency with the technology.

D

To go and solve their own problems., so that's an area! I'm super excited in., I'm also just,. I spend a lot of time with the various different filecoin implementations, forest,, fuhon,, venus, lotus., and so I'm excited for more filecoin implementations.

D

And also the differentiation,, where I think these groups are going to find opportunities to take on new problems.. I know that the fuhon team has already looking into.

D

Like significant performance improvements by being written in c++., the venus team is looking into mining, pools and optimizing their implementation to like bring together communities of smaller miners to work collaboratively..

D

Those are some really interesting, hard problems that I think, will we'll see, new capabilities being added to filecoin, by the many different implementations over time.

D

and I'm jazz for that.

A

Awesome. all right,, I'm going to take a few questions from the audience here.. So what is filecoin and the community.

A

Doing to value interoperability in terms of converting fiat or other digital assets,.

A

Into filecoin contracts so that we can onboard,.

A

Folks, outside the crypto community, with integration of existing centralized payment, rails.

A

Does anyone have thoughts on that one?.

C

Yeah. I mean one of the, we're doing a number of things.

C

And the first obvious one is that we have this wrapped fill token on ethereum.

C

That allows you to at least move your filecoin into the ethereum ecosystem and back., and do things like, get a filecoin loan.

C

By putting ethe down as collateral,, which is pretty cool.,.

C

And I think I've seen a good number of people doing already..

C

So that's pretty exciting.

C

As we move forward, I think we'll start thinking about adding more native support for like getting different tokens moving in and out.

C

Of ethereum, or in and out of filecoin here, like.

C

From ethereum, from zcash,, maybe from bitcoin et cetera,,.

C

Where you can have more native,.

C

More native interactions- here., it's really tricky to do right, but we're already talking to a bunch of different groups.

C

About how do we do this?? How could we do this?.

D

I know there's a lot of work in progress, too., the pending services that came into play in the ipfs ecosystem, augmenting themselves, with filecoin, backup and support..

D

That's another way. Where,, like you kind of currently have a monthly bill to whichever ipfs pending service you might be using.

D

That can then translate into having a filecoin wallet associated with your pinning service and.

D

With the storage they're utilizing on the network.

D

such that it goes in and creates, storage deals as needed.

D

With various miners throughout the ecosystem.- and so I think that's another way to like very seamlessly and smoothly, like sign up for a subscription that also ends up being backed by filecoin and utilize. This filecoin tokens in order to kind of propagate your dapp data.

D

To a number of resilient backups., so I think that's another area that is kind of work in progress., like pinata,. If you're, a number of other groups are all...

D

Textile's already implemented it. and so a lot of, groups there are just making it even easier for anyone who's already interacting with the space to just be file. Point backed.

B

One thing I would quickly add is.

B

I don't think we've ever seen a crypto token.

B

Be picked up and adopted by so many exchanges, so quickly.

B

In fact, we haven't. that's, not a question, it's definitely the case.

B

So, whether it's kraken, or coinbase, or, or binance,,.

B

Or shapeshift or huobi or hundreds of others,.

B

From china to san francisco,.

B

You have access to to filecoin to the extent that.

B

You have access to any other crypto you already have,.

B

A really robust access to filecoin.

B

And,, it's going to get easier and easier.

B

It's going to become mobile native., it's going to be able to be bought with a credit card,, even though indirectly, it could already be bought with credit card.

B

we're seeing the adoption of this explode in a rate,.

B

That the industry has, has not yet seen., and so it's already just as easy.

B

If not easier to get filecoin than it is to get bitcoin or anything else.

A

Awesome.- and I think we have time for just one more question.

A

Jeremy,, this is an interesting one. so,. One of the challenges that we face.

A

Is around metadata., so the discovery of data and data sets and...

A

It's great that we can store mass amount of files, but how do you, enable people to find them in 10, years,.

A

By their content and metadata., and so how are we thinking about that, with respect to filecoin?.

C

Yeah., so content discovery is a really hard problem.

C

and it's kind of, one of the central problems of ipfs right now is like,. How do you...

C

ipfs can serve you any data you wants,, but how do you find who has what?.

C

And moving forward, there's a bunch of different ideas: here.

C

Like really, ipfs goes very idealistic here.

C

Where the dht is kind of this decentralized catchall.

C

For being able to find anything., but moving on from that, you can do a number of things, like, well, for one you can do an incentivized dht..

C

Where you have effectively,, you can pay for a faster,.

C

Better curated experience here.

C

it's one idea.. You can also have a bunch of different groups running aggregators., and since this is all verifiable, it doesn't matter who serves you the data about who has what.

C

You can request from a bunch of different people, and different people can build businesses around like providing a very effective and efficient aggregator service.

C

I mean, this essentially comes down to like being a decentralized,. Google type set up where,.

C

You are searching these large vast networks of information and providing just like who has what and where,, and where is this data, and keeping track of that.

C

It's, business model is a difficulty here, but like effectively figuring out,, the equivalent of search providers for decentralized networks is going to be.

C

A really interesting next step in that direction.

D

Yeah,, I think the-- awesome., retrieval market has a whole lot of opportunity here to like create really cool incentives around like charted indexes and routers, like the whole idea.

D

And the direction that the ipfs dht has been moving.

D

Is like nodes have different, capabilities.

D

and they're,. In addition to providing content or finding content, there can be nodes that are routing you to content and that's something that they have a niche for and an incentive for in the ecosystem to help you find the content you're looking for via,.

D

A whole ton of different inputs that you might use.

D

and I think, that'd be,- that's a really interesting thing.

D

And area for more exploration and more design.

D

that is still just coming up in these retrieval conversations around filecoin and will be huge in the future.

A

Awesome. great,, so in the interest of time we'll wrap up here.. I can't thank ryan,. Why and molly enough.

A

For participating in this. and my takeaway from this discussion is that we are just getting started.. What will be possible in 10 years will absolutely eclipse what's possible. Today.

A

And it's really up to the community, and the broader set of developers and entrepreneurs.

A

And founders that are tackling this ecosystem to capture those opportunities.. So thanks everyone.