Filecoin is going to be huge !
Some news about Filecoin.
They raised more than $250 million in a month: 52 million from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures and the remaining 205.8 million from the ICO.
The team behind Filecoin is the same from IPFS which is already used in @dtube, will be used in @eos and in several other projects (https://protocol.ai/projects/)
The White Paper is well written, easy to follow and well structured.
How does it work ?
Clients pays to store and retrieve data from the Filecoin network.
Storage miners offers disk space and they have to put a deposit proportional to such disk space. They generate Proofs-of-Spacetime to the blockchain in order to prove such data is stored through time. If they miss a proof, they are penalized accordingly to the deposit. Also they can mine new blocks and receiving the mining reward for creating a block and transaction fees.
Retrieval miners provide data retrieval to the Filecoin network: most Storage miners will be probably Retrieval Miners too.
There are two Markets one for Storage and one for Retrieval: it makes sense to have such asymmetric design due to the different kind of workloads you have.
How to store files ?
When you want to store files as client you bid in the Storage market with some coins, a miner eventually accept and you sign a deal order that is submit to the orderbook of this market.
How to retrieve files ?
This is exactly the same scheme when you want to retrieve a file, you bid with some coins, a miner eventually accept and you sign a deal order in the Retrieval market.
Smart Contracts
Filecoin supports different kinds of "smart contracts" and can be also in integrated with other platforms.
Roadmap
https://filecoin.io/research-roadmap-2017.pdf
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