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Research corpusStorage and networksBLC-PAPER-0009

Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network

The July 2017 paper specifies a storage market and a retrieval market. Miners are supposed to prove they still hold a replica, and to keep proving it.

  • Official external source only
  • Design paper
  • Official source
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Record

Authors
Protocol Labs
Date
July 2017
Publisher
Protocol Labs
Version
July 2017 paper. The historic filecoin.pdf is an earlier sketch and a different record.
Document ID
BLC-PAPER-0009
DOI
None recorded
Last reviewed
1 October 2026
Licence
No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.

Direct answer

The July 2017 paper specifies a storage market and a retrieval market. Miners are supposed to prove they still hold a replica, and to keep proving it.

The historic library's filecoin.pdf is an earlier sketch. It is not this document.

Why it is in the corpus

  • It separates storing bytes from serving them. Those are different jobs.
  • A proof of storage is a claim about a disk, not a claim that anyone wanted the file.

Where to read

Metadata and commentary only.

Full text

Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.

Claims and assumptions

Blockchain Lab's reading of what the document is doing. Not a quotation and not the source text.

  • Clients and storage miners make deals the protocol can check.
  • Proofs of replication and spacetime are how the paper tries to stop a miner proving once and deleting.

Assumptions

  • The proofs show what they are named to show, under the paper's own assumptions.
  • The 2017 text says the work was in progress. Later proofs are later documents.

What changed

Network proofs and clients moved on. The study is about the 2017 paper. The 2014 sketch has its own corpus record.

Relationships

Construct with this

A pattern link for people designing a system. It is not a claim that this paper is a product specification, and it is not permission to copy anyone’s code.

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Protocol Labs (2017). Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network. Protocol Labs. https://www.filecoin.io/assets/documents/filecoin.pdf

BibTeX

@techreport{filecoin20172017,
  title = {Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network},
  author = {Protocol Labs},
  year = {2017},
  institution = {Protocol Labs},
  url = {https://www.filecoin.io/assets/documents/filecoin.pdf},
  note = {Rights status: Official external source only. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/filecoin-2017}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network
AU  - Protocol Labs
PY  - 2017
PB  - Protocol Labs
UR  - https://www.filecoin.io/assets/documents/filecoin.pdf
N1  - Rights status: Official external source only
ER  -

CSL-JSON

[
  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-PAPER-0009",
    "title": "Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Protocol Labs"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2017
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "Protocol Labs",
    "URL": "https://www.filecoin.io/assets/documents/filecoin.pdf",
    "note": "Rights status: Official external source only. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

JSONBibTeX fileRIS fileCSL-JSON

Rights record

Source status
Official source
Use status
Metadata and commentary only.
Rights
Official external source only
Training and retrieval
Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensingCorrections

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