What is Storage Miner (Filecoin)?

The Filecoin protocol relies on storage miners to furnish its marketplace of decentralized cloud storage. Storage miners are essentially nodes that solve cryptographic proofs in order to verify storage across time. These nodes must use Filecoin tokens (FIL) as collateral to ensure that they uphold their contractual obligations, and in return earn additional FIL by storing data for clients on the network. Due to the design constraints imposed by Filecoin's Proof-of-Replication (PoRep) and Proof-of-Spacetime (PoSpacetime) mechanisms, storage mining requires fairly powerful hardware to meet the network's storage and algorithmic proof requirements.