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.

Whether you’re a storage or dapp developer or just curious, there are a range of tools and infrastructure services to help you get started with Filecoin.

Filecoin facilitates open markets for storing and retrieving files.  Anyone can participate in this market.  The Filecoin project documentation homepage provides all the necessary resources to learn about Filecoin, the software and the tools to contribute to the network, either as a user looking for storage, or as a miner providing it.

Filecoin is the missing incentive layer for IPFS and verifies that your data is being stored, while maintaining the efficiency, authenticity and resiliency provided by IPFS. They can also be used in conjunction with other blockchains.

IPFS, is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open. IPFS has a dedicated learning playlist to help you understand how IPFS deals with files, developing with the API, and more.  IPFS aims to surpass HTTP in order to build a better web for all of us.

IPFS claims that today’s web is inefficient and expensive. And, they also claim that today’s web can’t preserve humanity’s history. They point to how the average lifespan of a web page is 100 days before it is gone forever.  And, that it is not good enough for the primary medium of our era to be this fragile.  Also, IPFS keeps every version of your files and makes it simple to set up resilient networks for mirroring data.

HTTP downloads files from one computer at a time instead of getting pieces from multiple computers simultaneously. Peer-to-peer IPFS saves big on bandwidth up to 60% for video making it possible to efficiently distribute high volumes of data without duplication. 

IPFS is a great way to store and share files.  The IPFS desktop app offers menu bar/tray shortcuts and an easy interface for adding, pinning, and sharing files plus a full IPFS node ready for heavy-duty hosting and development. This is a great choice for devs and non-devs alike.

Your file, and all of the blocks within it, is given a unique fingerprint called a cryptographic hash. IPFS removes duplications across the network.  Each network node stores only content it is interested in, plus some indexing information that helps figure out which node is storing what.  When you look up a file to view or download, you’re asking the network to find the nodes that are storing the content behind that file’s hash.

You don’t need to remember the hash, though — every file can be found by human-readable names using a decentralized naming system called IPNS.  IPFS Companion can be added to your browser.  IPFS cluster is for big servers or big data, which automatically allocates, replicates, and tracks data as pin sets across multiple IPFS nodes.