By Val Elefante
On Thursday, October 12, Hunter Treseder and Ian Davis, two representatives from Filecoin Foundation and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FF/FFDW) gave a presentation called Unlocking the Potential of Decentralized Storage.
Hunter Treseder, who works as Head of Global Social Impact Programs, began the presentation talking about how decentralized storage systems have the potential to “upend the flawed systems” of Big Tech by providing a vital alternative data storage infrastructure. To Treseder, “decentralized” systems have three important characteristics:
- Permissionless, meaning you don’t need permission from anyone to use them or stop using them
- Trustless, meaning there is no intermediary you need to rely on to use the technology or transact over it
- Open, meaning we can “see under the hood” into how the technology works
He continued to discuss the benefits of decentralized storage, mainly that it frees our data from the unilateral control of monopolistic Big Tech companies currently deciding who sees it and how it’s used.
Treseder presented three use cases for these decentralized storage technologies.
Archiving Community Data
Decentralized data storage networks can help ensure a secure and resilient backup for a large open or public dataset. This can be extremely useful to communities, especially marginalized communities, whose data is vulnerable to censorship on mainstream platforms (such as in the case of the Rohingya people) or those with limited resources. These communities should reach out to Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web for operational as well as possible financial support.
Keeping Traceable and Immutable Records
Blockchains can be trusted to keep accurate public records, for example, of accounts of war crimes waged in Ukraine or police violence in Latin America. They can also automatically execute financial transactions through smart contracts without the need for any intermediary or centralized point of control.
Information Storage Redundancy and Resiliency
The Internet Archive’s Democracy Library project brings together more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations with more than half a million documents from local, regional, and national governments. This project helps to ensure that citizens and researchers around the world can attain freely accessible information about our governments at any given time.
Technical Structure of Decentralized Storage
For the second half of the presentation, Ian Davis went into some detail about the technical structure of decentralized storage and what makes it different from the centralized web. For example, rather than accessing content based on its location via URLs, content on the decentralized web is identified based solely on itself (and its unique cryptographic hash) via a CID (content identifier). Ian accompanied this deep dive with a live demo of exactly how to upload and retrieve content stored on the decentralized web.
Next Actions
Both Ian and Hunter stressed the importance of doing research and talking with experts to figure out exactly if and how decentralized data storage could support your project or community. They also pointed to other projects in the Filecoin ecosystem that, depending on the use case, could be preferable, including web3.storage, NFT.Storage, and w3ui. They offered themselves as resources for folks who are curious to learn more! Reach them at hello@fil.org.