Thread by @Felipether

1/

Many dismiss Filecoin for "taking years" after one of the biggest ICOs ever.

I actually think @protocollabs is doing a great job at

(1) consistently shipping;
(2) attracting world-class talent;
(3) orchestrating a big team at a fast pace;
(4) getting their stuff used!

👇

2/

@protocollabs is likely among the best funded open source efforts in history (cc @devonzuegel).

They’ve brought to life @IPLDbot, @Multiformats, @IPFSbot, @libp2p and, now, @MineFilecoin.

The ICO financed the latter. But also a massive push for a more distributed web.

3/

While Filecoin is in development, @Cloudfare added support to IPFS.

Most ETH projects use it one way or another.

Js-libp2p alone has 500+ dependants on Github.

@OpenBazaar, @PolkadotNetwork, @Holochain, @Keep_Project & many others rely on libp2p.

parity.io/why-libp2p/

4/

As the recent @MineFilecoin dev update shows, the last 2 years were a long R&D journey as for a crucial component of the network.

The encoding algorithm that miners run when they commit to replicate data.

It needs verifiability, proven storage guarantees, fast unsealing...

5/

This is not a new problem in computer science.

MojoNation, @MaidSafe, @SiaTechHQ & myriads of others faced it.

Part of the novelty of the approach is to “combine proofs” in one.

Proof of Replication = Proof of Retrievability + Proof of Space ("Proof of Useful Space").

6/

ZigZag PoRep is the best performing algo so far.

Written in Rust, it uses bellman, a library developed by the @zcashco team for efficient pedersen hashing inside of SNARKs.

Lipp2p had Go and JS implementations - since 2018 it has a Rust one too - made by @ParityTech 🤖

7/

〰 Now ZigZag is under threat.

github.com/filecoin-proje… … …

☝️ is a fun way to benchmark PoRep locally and compete for top spots in the leaderboard.

One can outperform ZigZag via parallelisations, a different language, squeezing performance out of hardware...

8/

🔭 Cc @nlw narrative watch:

Game of Stakes (@cosmos )
Game of Replication (@MineFilecoin)
Merkle Mining (@LivepeerOrg)
Olympic Testnet (@ethereum)

🎲 “Games” as a way to get initial stake out to users and kickstart what will be a PoS-like system.

9/

📅 The updated roadmap suggests a launch at the end of the year.

It’ll be fun to see the generalised mining & co. services pointing to this one as the testnet comes in Q2.