Interview
IPFS, CoinList, and the Filecoin ICO with Juan Benet and Dalton Caldwell
Y CombinatorJuan Benet, Dalton Caldwell, Craig Cannon, Dan Galpin, Francesc Campoy, Mark Mandelmann, Mark Blythouse, Mark Mandelbaum, Chris Broadfootnich
- Protocol Labs intends to upgrade internet software and protocol machinery over the next few years, with a specific focus on improving information distribution and transitioning from location-based to content-based addressing.
- The organization anticipates needing a global-scale consensus protocol or trust graph to manage human-readable naming, while warning that the reliance on such consensus systems creates significant complexity and limitations.
- Filecoin is planned to create a decentralized storage network within two to three years, utilizing a native currency to mediate the market and incentivizing storage providers through financial rewards rather than computational power.
- Development for IPFS and Filecoin aims to follow the original 2014 timeline, though software delivery is expected to take longer than originally projected.
- Juan Bonet predicts that usability will outweigh peer-to-peer model elegance for end-user adoption, expecting mainstream blockchain consumer applications to emerge within one to two years despite current usability blockers.
- Current peer-to-peer projects are distinguished from the 2003–2009 "winter" by superior tooling, smart contract capabilities, and the ability to realize trustless computation.
- A divergence in infrastructure costs is expected where bandwidth improvements lag behind storage and computing gains, potentially making physical data transport via hard drives cheaper than digital transmission.
- The primary driver for storage contribution to the Filecoin network is identified as monetary compensation, supported by financial instruments that can be created cheaply with near-zero verification costs.
- Ethereum is expected to fundamentally innovate by enabling the trivial creation of financial instruments like insurance through smart contracts, potentially eating into finance and law sectors.
- Venture capital funding models are predicted to remain misaligned with infrastructure needs, as VC requires 2–3 year adoption signals while projects often need 10–20 year horizons; a new funding model using native tokens with limited supply is proposed to bridge this gap.
- Future economic models aim to solve the credit assignment problem in open source projects, potentially allowing contributors to work without traditional employment and distributing rewards across company lines within five to ten years.
- Filecoin sale details are expected to be released within the next few weeks, with the new protocol paper following shortly after a month and a half of redesign to address identified issues.
- CoinList is expected to facilitate token launches with reduced legal friction and eventually enable crowdfunding for non-accredited US investors, focusing on high-signal projects through technical merit rather than marketing spend.
- Filecoin version two will compete with SIA and Storj by offering different guarantees, while the protocol will prevent cross-listing cheating via Proof of Replication, though miners may participate in multiple networks based on token rewards.
- The network expects to become intractable to DDoS attacks as content is replicated across thousands of nodes, contrasting with logical centralization risks in tools like Slack or Google Docs.
- Decentralization is predicted to provide superior unit economics for global storage by leveraging individual actor optimizations that centrally planned entities cannot match.
- Ether is projected to gain significant value and potentially create billionaires if Ethereum continues to be used and accrue value over the next five to ten years.
- Token value is expected to depend strictly on continued protocol utility and growth, with future experiments planned to issue tokens to contributors who create value for Protocol Labs projects.