Filecoin Mission

The mission of Filecoin is to create a decentralized, efficient, and robust foundation for humanity’s information.

Here is a short overview of each of these terms:

Decentralized

The network is not dependent on any one party, e.g., not dependent on a company, foundation, or other organization to continue operating.
No centralized parties can control, stop, or censor the network, its operation, or its participants.
Users and providers are not controlled or governed by powerful intermediaries (unlike markets like Uber or Airbnb).
Activity is trustable (web3) through the public verifiability of operations and rational incentives.
Refers to the decentralization movement of 2015+, including IPFS, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more.
Third parties cannot prevent willing participants from exchanging data and/or payments for it.
Filecoin uses cryptography, end-to-end encryption at rest, and incentives to secure information and network operation.

Make digital storage (spacetime) a proper commodity with real markets
Decouple digital storage from cloud computing moat feature sets – turn storage market into a real market where any provider can sell their storage.
Enable humanity to create an efficient digital storage market, with small margins and as close as we can get to physical limitations.
Ensure efficient usage of digital storage resources – reduce digital space waste (unused storage supply while prices are high enough to warrant using it).
Drive more and more efficient usage of storage media.
Enable fast (sub-second) buying and selling of spacetime.
Enable programs to buy and sell spacetime (without having to be humans or have an associated bank account) – i.e., a cryptocurrency wallet and code should be enough to buy storage.
Clients can trust Filecoin will serve data quickly and efficiently back to them.
Filecoin will not waste user resources (storage, bandwidth, computation, time) unnecessarily.

Filecoin has five 9s of uptime or more.
Clients can trust Filecoin to keep their data safe.
Clients can trust Filecoin to serve their data in a variety of extreme circumstances (in the distant future).
Clients can trust Filecoin to replicate storage and to self-repair lost replicas over time.
Clients can use Filecoin to store critical application data and trust it to work whenever they need that data back.
The network is robust to attack by all sorts of powerful parties, including state-level actors.
The network is robust to changing market dynamics and powerful counter incentives – meaning, it is rational to continue operating the network.
The network is robust to network censorship attacks (given there exist willing storage providers).
The network is robust to specific file censorship attacks (given there exist willing storage providers).
The network is robust to catastrophic attacks (i.e., nuclear war, long-running internet partitions, etc.).

Filecoin can be used as the foundation of other technologies and applications. It is a platform.
Filecoin supports data storage-intensive applications.
Programs, Webapps, DApps, and smart contracts can be written to store and retrieve data from Filecoin efficiently, safely, and with high confidence.
Filecoin is a trustable, dependable foundation for critical systems and applications.
It becomes possible for parties to store information indefinitely (using rational incentives, and money), without having to be online or alive to renew or re-upload things.
Filecoin leads data reliability and replication efforts.

Filecoin marshals vast storage arrays to store most of humanity’s valuable information.
Filecoin stores all human knowledge – all scientific papers, history, press, etc.
Filecoin forms a public record for humanity.
Filecoin is one of the best choices to store any kind of data (from small incremental app data to massive datasets).
Filecoin stores personal data end-to-end encrypted at rest, and can store it indefinitely.
Filecoin becomes the default “digital storage locker” for all computer users.
Filecoin becomes the default “external hard drive” for all computer users.