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I think this is pretty cool. The basic idea is that Filecoin builds on top of the existing IPFS storage layer to add an incentive to provide storage to the global network.

If you're someone who follows cryptocurrencies, the first question you're probably asking is "what's their consensus algorithm?". The answer is "proof of storage". Assuming they've figured out the technical details (I haven't read their paper thoroughly yet), this seems like a decent idea. It avoids the massive power requirements of proof of work, and there's lots of unused storage out there in the world for people to offer for a price, and they can offer it at a very low power usage. Persistent storage doesn't actively require power.

As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, if you total up the storage capacity of every iPhone in the world, you'll probably reach something like 64000 petabytes [1] [2]. Backblaze, a fairly large cloud storage provider, has a total network size of around 500 petabytes [3]. Maybe S3 is a hundred times larger? Maybe? Still, it's good that the combined storage capacity of all the iPhones in the world alone can compete with the big storage providers. That gives me hope that there's at least the theoretical potential for actual decentralization, as opposed to with proof of work, which tends to favor a minority of people with large compute rigs. Normal people don't want to max out the chips in their phones and laptops 24/7, but maybe they wouldn't mind using some passive storage.

I'm not sure about how consistently people in Filecoin need to be connected to the network, but that could prove to be an issue.

Another thing to look at would be whether there's any way for a third party to see what data you're holding. This is an issue because you probably don't want to let random other people store whatever they want on your machine. Lots of that content could be illegal, and (IANAL) I'll bet the law can hold you accountable just for storing it.

[1]: https://kommandotech.com/statistics/how-many-iphones-have-be...

[2]: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/average-storage-capacit...

[3]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/500-petabytes-and-counting/

oh look, an unnecessarily complex and inefficient way to store data :(

Has anyone calculated approximate annual storage price per GB?

As blockchains are slow and inefficient databases, it's only reasonable to employ them where censorship resistance is required. If no one is trying to censor what you are doing, avoid blockchains. I believe torrents have shown their censorship resistance.

So if it's not for discovery or censorship resistance, what could it be for? Efficiency? Vertical integration of hard drives into the highest density 4u space is already open source. For instance 60 drives in 4u: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...

Backblaze and others also use vertical integration to get better prices from all vendors for the drives, connectivity, and they even use fancy parity systems to get redundancy across machines with minimal overhead. Distributed (horizontal) scaling loses to vertical integration.

So what are you left with? Yet another token, with a proof of storage instead of proof of hashing or proof of memory hard hashing, or proof of time locking (caveat, I founded a cryptocurrency based on that last one, for inflation only, consensus is still vanilla POW.) At least one or two "usuable" things came out of the billions wasted of 2017 ICO money... I guess.

filecoin will be a useful protcol for independent warehouses of data, all in an effort to consolidate in a pool against the biggest players. it will NOT be for the 'masses' of people, except to the extent they enjoy donating a few dollars of their electricity every month to someone's file storeage for shits and giggles.