Filecoin's Juan Benet on Upgrading the Heart of The Internet with Blockchains
This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs and the inventor of the InterPlanetary File System.
Juan is also the creator of Filecoin, a storage network incentivized by crypto. Both of Juan’s ventures are hugely ambitious as they are in direct competition with the basic rails of the internet, with protocols such as HTTP and data giants like AWS. We begin our conversation with Juan explaining what led him to start IPFS and Filecoin.
Juan points out that all of the layers of the internet that run below the application layer, rely on trust. He believes that the promise of web3 is to be able to upgrade the whole stack with trust-minimized public verifiability primitives.
One of the key innovations of IPFS is in data addressing, which increases the efficiency of data fetching. But there’s more to IPFS than just this, and we talk about some of the other features of IPFS.
Juan says universities would be a good next step to expand the user base of Filecoin since they deal with large amounts of data and run intensive computations. We go on to discuss Filecoin's plans to encourage the adoption of its technology beyond web3 users.
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a16z Podcast: Trends in Cryptocurrencies
The internet, believe it or not, was just the beginning. Yes, it spawned an incredible number of uses (some unexpected), from marketplaces and commerce to publishing and social networks... but that’s all been built with old models of funding and coordination. Now, as we enter a new phase of blockchain-enabled innovation -- decentralized, distributed, crowdfunded -- we’re finally bringing capitalism to open source: Smart people can come together in new ways, to build new things.
In this brief discussion from a16z Summit November 2017, founder and CEO at Protocol Labs Juan Benet and founder and CEO of Polychain Capital Olaf-Carlson Wee -- both of whom have appeared on the a16z Podcast for more in-depth conversations -- chat with general partner Chris Dixon to summarize the big picture on crypto, going beyond the buzz around ICOs to the golden age of protocols.
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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a16z Podcast: Getting Applications Into People's Hands
with Juan Benet and Chris Dixon
The story of how innovation happens is a long one — from government funding early basic research, to the heyday of corporate R&D like Bell Labs, to startups as experiments before product-market fit. Through all that, we’ve ended up with “unprecedented superpowers” distributed through the internet, and people building on top of it. Yet there’s still a huge lag in going from brilliant ideas in the form of research papers to an application that’s actually working and in people’s hands, observes computer scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur (founder and CEO of Protocol Labs) Juan Benet.
Benet initially designed the peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol IPFS or “InterPlanetary File System” to help build a more robust, distributed, open web. But those ideas were around for a while — they just weren’t implemented in a way that people could easily use. The same was true for early computing revolutions as well… until Apple came along and vertically integrated from research to production, bringing together different groups of people (design, hardware, etc.) to make something amazing that everyone could use, wanted to use.
What if open source, online networks — enabled by blockchain and cryptocurrencies — could do something similar? [Full disclosure: we’re investors in the ‘Filecoin SAFT’ security mentioned in this podcast, but are not otherwise affiliated with Protocol Labs or Filecoin.] This episode of the a16z Podcast, hosted by general partner Chris Dixon, explores all of the above and more with Benet, going beyond the buzz around just “ICOs”. What’s the big picture?
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) (Interview)
Juan Benet joined the show to talk about IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open — addressed by content and identities. We talked about what it is, how it works, how it can be used, and how it just might save the future of the web.
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Featuring:
Juan Benet – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
IPFS is a new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol.
IPFS Alpha Demo - YouTube
Ralph Merkle’s Home Page
EverythingStays - Immutable & Distributed NodeJS Modules With IPFS
Self-certifying File System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Conflict-free replicated data type - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
OpenBazaar
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!