Mosh from Protocol Labs here. Specifically on energy use, the Filecoin Green initiative is working to rigorously map and authenticate energy consumption on the network, and become the first carbon-neutral (and eventually carbon-negative) blockchain.
Filecoin uses about the same energy as a comparably sized data center. Specifically, Filecoin provides about 0.77% of all data center storage capacity across the world and consumes about 0.62% of total data center electricity use.
We're also ramping up our ability to help build new solar generation, including a $38M fund to build new solar projects in the US, to produce at least as much renewable energy for the grid as the network consumes.
It’s worth noting that Filecoin and IPFS are independent, but mutually beneficial projects and networks. Using IPFS and Filecoin together is completely optional - as you can see by projects like Pinata, OpenBazaar, Qri, and DTube already using IPFS in the wild today.
By design, the Filecoin Network stores data on Filecoin nodes — not IPFS nodes. While we want to make these two networks even more interoperable (https://github.com/filecoin-project/specs/issues/143) — so that, for example, you could choose to supplement IPFS nodes with Filecoin nodes — we want to leave the choice up to users. There is a big opportunity to have a distributed marketplace for ensuring IPFS persistence, and multiple solutions optimizing for different use cases will likely coexist.
Filecoin uses about the same energy as a comparably sized data center. Specifically, Filecoin provides about 0.77% of all data center storage capacity across the world and consumes about 0.62% of total data center electricity use.
We're also ramping up our ability to help build new solar generation, including a $38M fund to build new solar projects in the US, to produce at least as much renewable energy for the grid as the network consumes.
More on this here: - https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/12/02/filecoin-might-have... - https://github.com/redransil/filecoin-energy-estimation/blob... - https://filecoin.energy/methodology