| The first question (economics) is one we've thought a bit about. Not affiliated with Filecoin/IPFS/Protocol Labs, so these answers may be wrong: Filecoin creates a market for storage. The price of B2 is an important variable in this market, because it creates an arbitrage opportunity where you can use B2 to mine Filecoin. But why not just use B2 directly? Three reasons. One, B2's replication isn't perfect (at least, not as perfect as S3), and both B2 and S3 have nonzero political risk (a sovereign could order them to destroy your data). B2 plus a layer of blockchainy replication could be quite attractive to some low-price-sensitivity customers. Two, to work with B2, you need a business relationship with B2. This is obviously no big deal in the normal world of multiuser, single-server apps that we live in today. However, if we can somehow migrate to a world in which users have their own servers, it's much easier for those personal servers to have simple, maintenance-free automated relationships with decentralized token-based services. Think about how many centralized service providers a typical startup has relationships with (and how much they cost). This design can't really be scaled down from industrial computing to personal computing. Three, Filecoin has an interesting consensus design in which the word "miner" is used in two senses: "miners" participate in storage transactions, and also receive block rewards based on proof of stake, where stake is defined as the storage of the whole system. The effect of this on the economics of Filecoin is extremely hard to predict, but it can only be positive. The one point that seems unresolved about the economics of Filecoin is this interesting interaction between FC as a cryptocurrency and FC as a payment mechanism in a storage market. It does seem that you could take FC's storage market and port it to an existing blockchain. But there may be more subtle technical requirements from a blockchain -- a storage market is certainly a demanding application. |