Filecoin, one of the useful cryptos
With most cryptos you can do very little, except pay with it or invest in it. But there are also some cryptos with a real utility, which you can do something special with. One of the better known is Filecoin. The advantage of these cryptos is that they will never fall below a certain minimum value, namely that of the services you can buy with them.
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Buy your own piece of server space
All websites, including Apparata, consist of data and software. Of course you have to save it somewhere. That is why there will always be a need for places where you can store data. Say, to the digital garage boxes of the internet.
With the crypto currency Filecoin you can do just that, namely rent that server space. For an amount in Filecoins you get storage space for your files. These are also stored redundantly, i.e. in several places, so that your data is safe.
And that is of course good news if you have a website with a lot of data. Especially because with the current Filecoin price, this hosting is a lot cheaper than cloud hosting at Amazon, Alibaba or Microsoft.
Mining Filecoin by Hosting Files
And there is another nice side to Filecoin. Do you have a fast computer and a good internet connection? Then you can also earn this coin by making file space available on your computer. Mining coins, not through energy-guzzling calculations, but by doing something useful, so that others really benefit and pay you a fair price for it.
How does Filecoin mining work exactly?
If you want to pay with Filecoin or invest in the coin, it is a crypto that can be compared to, for example, Bitcoin or Ethereum. You can store these in a crypto wallet, just like other crypto coins. Only mining Filecoin works differently. You conclude a contract in which you save a certain file, a broker data, on your computer.
You earn Filecoins every time it is checked that you have actually saved that file. You also earn Filecoins if you upload the file after someone requests it. You will be fined if someone requests or checks the file and you are unable to provide it.
So your computer has to be pretty heavy, really on 24 hours a day and connected to the internet. Is your computer already and do you also have 10 terabytes or more of free storage and 128 GB or more RAM? Then you have already lost those 2 kWh per day and it is certainly interesting to “mine” Filecoin and earn a little extra. If not? Then think about it carefully. There is a chance that you will lose more energy than it produces.
Using Filecoin to host data
This of course costs quite a bit of power, but you may have a website or other platform where you would like to store your data. Suppose you are a software developer and you would like to make your software available for download.
In that case you can use Filecoin for this. You set up a contract where you pay per download. The prices for this are very low, less than a dollar per terabyte per year as of the writing of this article (September 2022). That’s less than 1/20 the price of any of the big three cloud hosting providers.
Conclusion: useful crypto and especially interesting for data hosting
The hardware requirements to mine Filecoin are high. So that’s especially interesting for really hardcore computer users. Much more interesting is this coin to use for file storage. In terms of price, Filecoin beats the competition from Amazon, Google, Alibaba and Microsoft by pieces. Definitely worth considering if you want to be able to access your data anywhere in the world.
Writer is not in possession of Filecoins or involved in this project.
