Are NFTs a full-on scam?
Well, sometimes it might feel that way.
Take example what happened at Coachella Music Festival back in 2022.
Thousands of NFTs were frozen
because, well, the servers, they were owned by FTX,
and it went down.
So you had all of these people partying at Coachella that just got this really cool NFT.
When they pull it up,
all it shows is a blank screen.
This is a problem not just for NFTs but for the entire decentralized space.
Servers are usually hosted by a larger company like Amazon Web Services or Google.
And if those were to go down,
well, you don't have anything in your wallet.
This could be the Achilles heel of NFTs and Web3,
but there may be a player coming to the game try to solve it.
Let's get it!
Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is Ben.
Imagine you finally got that cute little animal profile picture,
but you go to your crypto wallet and pull it up,
and there's nothing there.
What gives?
Is it a rug pull?
Is it the NFT creator's fault or something else?
This is a fatal flaw when things are left on centralized servers
like Amazon Web Services, Google or Microsoft.
When things are on centralized servers, you're not in control.
In fact, some people would argue that this is a way
that these big tech companies use to censor people,
removing their websites if they don't agree with their opinions or their latest posts
on Twitter-Facebook-gram-chat.
If things black out and your server goes kaput,
well, what does that leave you with?
Nothing and in the dark.
And a great example of this?
Well, look no further than Parlor.
No, I'm not talking about the place where you go get your manis and pedis done.
I'm talking about the social media service that was a reaction to the presidential election.
Parlor was a social media app that was created kind of to be an echo chamber
for Republicans, if you will, because, at the time,
Twitter seemed to be an echo chamber for the other side of the aisle.
But they started getting a lot of heat and a lot of controversy
from other social media platforms.
Big shocker.
So, what happened?
Well, they stood on the wrong side of big tech and they lost.
You can love Parlor or hate it.
Love its politics, hate its opinions, whatever the case may be.
But this is an outright example of direct targeted censorship
because you didn't agree with the masses.
But if Parlor was on a decentralized server,
it couldn't have been censored and it would probably still be up to this day.
So let's look at why decentralized servers are far superior to centralized servers.
They're more resilient.
And, of course, this has to do with not having a single point of failure.
If one point on your network goes down and that brings down your entire server,
or in the case of Google or Amazon,
a whole host of servers that affect millions websites around the world,
well, then you have yourself a closed system
and you also have a system that can go down any moment.
With a decentralized network,
what you'll find is there's no point of failure.
So that means even if one server went down or one node went down,
the site would keep running.
The NFT would stay in your wallet.
That's important.
Second reason they're superior is because they're not controlled by anyone.
It's a network unto itself, like Bitcoin.
When it comes to these big tech companies,
well, you bet your bottom dollar that they're going to try to censor you at every single turn.
And they have no problem, like they did with Parlor,
removing you from their app store or their website or their servers
if all you did was disagree with their opinion.
Decentralized servers, for all the reasons listed above, are censorship-resistant.
And that's always important in a world
where people are constantly getting canceled or censored
for things that they say, think and believe.
And lastly, a decentralized server is superior over a centralized server
because, well, frankly, it's more secure.
Think about this.
If it only takes one node to take down an entire network,
that's a problem. It doesn't seem very secure.
Bitcoin has the largest decentralized network in the world.
And for this reason,
that's why it's the most secure.
There's a lot more hoops to jump through to try to bring it down.
Almost so much so that it will be impossible.
You see, people are getting tired of being censored on these centralized servers.
And that's where Filecoin comes in.
My goal here isn't to bother you with the consensus mechanism
or talk about what markets it's on or give you the tokenomics of Filecoin.
The value of Filecoin is in its utility,
its use case, what it's going to be doing.
The price eventually is going to reflect that.
Filecoin describes itself as a decentralized storage network
that's designed to store all of humanity's most important information.
Filecoin allows users to send and receive any kind of data on a blockchain network.
Users get rewards for using the network
because you need the users ensuring that the data is permanent and immutable.
That way, the files won't get corrupted.
See, you get paid the coin FIL
in return for the use of your computer servers and network power,
or you could pay Filecoin to store anything you need stored in a safe place.
And their fees, well, they're much lower than their competitors like Amazon,
even though it's not really a competitor.
It's centralized!
As you can see, not only does Filecoin have a lot of value for the retail investor
or just the everyday person using a network,
it also has value for enterprise.
Imagine all the files that businesses can send back and forth
by using Filecoin's network.
According to coindesk.com,
over 4,000 storage providers contribute 16 exbibytes of storage capacity.
Keep in mind, one EiB is equal to over 1.15 million terabytes.
That's a pretty big iPod, if you ask me.
In fact, it's so big that it could archive the entire internet more than 275 times.
Now, speaking of internet archives,
back in 2021,
Filecoin donated $10 million to the company called Internet Archive.
You might know them as the company that created the Wayback Machine
where you can go and see everybody's mistakes on the internet.
They donated the money to the Wayback Machine
so Filecoin can archive all their data
because it's so incredibly valuable
and it was on a centralized server.
Makes no sense.
But the most important part of this entire project is called the IPFS,
or InterPlanetary File System protocol.
IPFS is going to replace centralized servers
with server protocols that power the World Wide Web.
It's going to be the de facto layer of storage when it comes to Web3.
All of the current websites you visit most likely are using centralized servers.
You're watching on YouTube?
Centralized server.
Checking out on Twitter.
Centralized server.
You're reading about how much they love me on Reddit.
Centralized server.
And these centralized servers,
well, not only can they go down, they're not as secure,
somebody with big enough pockets can come in and talk the company
into letting them take over your website.
So the IPFS relies on nodes,
specific parts of the network, not the entire network.
This is why its goal is to one day get the internet out of our planet
and into outer space.
I kid you not. That's really the goal.
Because when we're in the space ship,
we won't need to refer back to centralized servers on Earth.
It's all decentralized.
And it's going to be in outer space,
hence interplanetary.
So big update, in Q1 of this year, Filecoin is going to be doing something huge.
They're going to be releasing smart contracts through the Filecoin Virtual Machine, or FVM,
which will open the doors up for it to finally become a full layer 1 protocol on its own.
The way they put it in their FVM blog post is
think of storage and retrieval functionality as being Filecoin's layer 0 architecture.
The ability to perform on-chain computation
is now bringing layer 1 capabilities to the Filecoin stack.
This takes just the storage aspect of Filecoin
and blows expectations absolutely out of the water.
What this opens up is absolutely mind-blowing.
First and foremost, we did it!
Decentralization is here.
We're talking Web2 to Web3 onboards,
NFTs, metaverse, smarter storage markets, L2 bridges, auction mechanisms
and much, much more.
So let's get down to brass tacks.
What's going to happen to the price?
Well, I can't give you financial advice.
I can't tell you for sure.
But just for Filecoin to get back to its all-time high,
you're looking at a 63X from the time of this recording.
That's a lot of Xs!
Think about if every single one of those dollar bills in your pocket
on the way to the Shoe Show turned into a $63 bill.
Well, No.1, it'd be amazing because nobody's ever seen a $63 bill.
But it would also be great because you'd have more money.
And I'm not saying we'll definitely get to new all-time highs.
I do believe personally that it will for a lot of reasons.
It's focused on utility.
It's got a great project, good name recognition, strong backers.
But it's not guaranteed. So keep that in mind.
It does have some deflationary mechanisms built into the tokenomics,
so the supply over time may actually go down,
which is great for supply and demand.
Fifth grade economics.
So I don't want to pump you up and think Filecoin is going to the moon for sure.
But I will tell you is they're very far advanced in what they're doing.
They actually already, as a layer 0, have more storage
than almost any other layer 1 blockchain,
maybe the very most.
Once the FVM comes into play,
the incentivization begins to work
and people are earning coins for sending and receiving on the network,
well, people are going to be waking up to the fact that Web3 is here.
Filcoin is ready to take over.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft, you guys need to step to the side.
Because with the help of the IPFS,
Filecoin is taking the world decentralized in a big way.
And that's the future of the internet.
And I bet your portfolio is probably going to be pretty happy in this new world
if you have Filecoin in it.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.