Key Concepts

Key Concepts

For clarity, we refer the following types of entities to describe implementations of the Filecoin protocol:

  • Data structures are collections of semantically-tagged data members (e.g., structs, interfaces, or enums).

  • Functions are computational procedures that do not depend on external state (i.e., mathematical functions, or programming language functions that do not refer to global variables).

  • Components are sets of functionality that are intended to be represented as single software units in the implementation structure. Depending on the choice of language and the particular component, this might correspond to a single software module, a thread or process running some main loop, a disk-backed database, or a variety of other design choices. For example, the ChainSync is a component: it could be implemented as a process or thread running a single specified main loop, which waits for network messages and responds accordingly by recording and/or forwarding block data.

  • APIs are the interfaces for delivering messages to components. A client’s view of a given sub-protocol, such as a request to a miner node’s Storage Provider component to store files in the storage market, may require the execution of a series of API requests.

  • Nodes are complete software and hardware systems that interact with the protocol. A node might be constantly running several of the above components, participating in several subsystems, and exposing APIs locally and/or over the network, depending on the node configuration. The term full node refers to a system that runs all of the above components and supports all of the APIs detailed in the spec.

  • Subsystems are conceptual divisions of the entire Filecoin protocol, either in terms of complete protocols (such as the Storage Market or Retrieval Market), or in terms of functionality (such as the VM - Virtual Machine). They do not necessarily correspond to any particular node or software component.

  • Actors are virtual entities embodied in the state of the Filecoin VM. Protocol actors are analogous to participants in smart contracts; an actor carries a FIL currency balance and can interact with other actors via the operations of the VM, but does not necessarily correspond to any particular node or software component.