Liftoff Day 1 Recap
Yesterday we wrapped up Day 1 at Filecoin Liftoff Week. We heard from Filecoin founder, Juan Benet, Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-Wee, Stanford Professor Dan Boneh, outside general counsel Marta Belcher, and more. Here are some highlights from the day, as well as a snapshot of what’s in store for Day 2.
🦸♂️The Internet has given us superpowers
In his opening keynote, Founder and CEO of Protocol Labs Juan Benet asked everyone to first take a step back and think about what our lives are like now. He divided civilization into pre-computing and post-computing eras, and emphasized that very few of our actions today are done without Internet assistance. He asked the audience to consider how even the most mundane actions we perform today online are superpowers when compared to the capabilities of the pre-computing era. We are giving computers more privileged access to our daily lives, our daily communications, and our relationships. Juan wrapped all of this up in the statement that we don’t know where the world will be in 80 years, and it is prudent of us to solve the issues with the Internet today in order to best set ourselves up for whatever the future may hold.
“Filecoin’s mission is to create a decentralized, efficient, and robust foundation for humanity’s information.”
Juan closed off by encouraging the Filecoin community to take ownership of the network and take it to the next level.
3 challenges:
- Bring deeply valuable data to the network.
- Build a new application using Filecoin technology.
- Make Filecoin yours.
3 pieces of advice:
- Build something people want.
- Always think long term.
- Be resilient.
🌏 The ultimate goal is to
make life better for people
Juan Benet and Dan Boneh, Stanford Professor of applied cryptography, talked about the future of cryptography with blockchain technology and Filecoin. Juan asked what the most important technological innovation would be for cryptography in the next 15-20 years. Dan stepped away from the specifics of cryptography and said that the most important role any technology could play is to make life better for people. In particular, he emphasized the importance of private conversations, and the need to ensure we protect those conversations from being policed.
♻️ Until now, most blockchain networks
have been (purposefully) wasteful.
Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-wee gave his talk “The Decentralized Cloud is Here.” He explained the importance and innovation of the Filecoin network by comparing it to well-known blockchain networks like Bitcoin. Most blockchain networks that require “work” to arrive at consensus are purposefully designed to be wasteful. Bitcoin’s hashpower, for example, can only be used to mine bitcoin. There is no other way a person, company, or government could use Bitcoin’s “work” - a successful, if wasteful, method to ensure security. Filecoin, however, through FIL, its staking architecture, and its storage marketplace, combines incentives to ensure the work being done on the network is in the overall benefit of the decentralized storage economy. This “tying of economic work function with distributed file storage network” is fundamental to Filecoin’s future success.
🏆 The Golden Age of DAOs is around the corner.
Later in his presentation, Carlson-wee discussed the importance Filecoin and decentralized storage will play in the evolution of DAOs. For much of blockchain technology’s history, financial primitives have been some of the easiest forms of logic to code into smart contracts. DeFi is a prime example of how robust that use case has been. DAOs have been built to oversee and govern these finance-forward applications. Building more complex and “web-like” applications, however, is distinctly more difficult. Ethereum’s smart contracts, for example, do not easily serve up files like media/images/videos to users. With the Filecoin network live, smart contract platforms like Ethereum can easily and natively serve up those files to end users. What we are likely to see is a new wave of not just DeFi applications, but applications that feel a lot more like the web applications we’re used to today, with their robustness and complexity. These applications too will be overseen and governed by a new wave of DAOs. This is what Carlson-wee referred to as the “Golden Age of DAOs” we might see in the near future.
🚀🚀🚀
Join us today!
Today, day 2 of Liftoff Week, is focused on Mining on Filecoin. It’s a day full of talks, demos, and workshops focused on what the value of Filecoin is to miners and what information they need to know to continue (or start) participating in the network. A preview of the agenda:
- 11am PDT: Kick off day 2 with “Filecoin Proofs and Upcoming Improvements”, a presentation with Kelly Olson and Sean Gulley of Supranational and Dignifiedquire of Protocol Labs
- 12pm PDT: “Filecoin Mining for Solo Miners”, a detailed workshop for individual miners with Filecoin miner, Benjamin Hoesjbo
- 3:30pm PDT: Join Jacques Swanepoel of StorageHive and Neo Ge, co-founder of IPFSMain for their “Filecoin Mining Hardware & Architecture” talk as they take you through their setups and architecture and discuss some of the things to consider and avoid when constructing your rigs.
- 5:20pm PDT: Join some of Filecoin’s top global miners to learn how they won Space Race at the “How We Won the Space Race” panel
- 7:05pm PDT: “Filecoin Security and Bug Bounty Program” with Deep Kapur and David Dias of Protocol Labs
