This project has always felt DOA to me - I can't think of any other possibility than the first adopters for this product being distributers of child porn over just about anything else.
point is there will be illicit content being shared, and why would I want to spin up a node and be roped into some FBI investigation because my computer has bits and pieces of the illicit content they are looking for?
whatever tiny reward they offer isn't worth it
You could have just said that, or 'pirated movies', but neither are as inflammatory are they? Instead you chose to make the most offensive assumption you could think up.
Paedophilia is not like theft, it's only attractive to a small subset of people.
So for any service that's going to put random files on an end user device it's very relevant to ask the particular question "how are you going to ensure that child porn does not get put there?", with the explicit focus on child porn - it's acceptable if the service has no solution for pirated movies, because if pirated movies get put on someone's PC without their knowledge, that's not going to them in jail, but for child porn at least some answer is mandatory. For example, at the very minimum, censorship of known bad file hashes, such databases exist - of course, that's circumventable by e.g. encryption, but it would help from the legal perspective.
if you really think the first adopters are going to be sharing cat pics you're being incredibly naive.
can filecoin do that? obviously not. the whole point of being decentralized is that that kind of action is not possible. why wouldn't that be incredibly beneficial to any distributor of any type of illegal content that would otherwise be removed from the centralized storage systems?
Sorry, what? How do you imagine that works? Wouldn't it actually constitute destruction of evidence, which is a felony?
In the situation that you somehow get the unique hash for the encrypted CP files before the FBI can tell that you host them, I don't know what would be your legal responsibility. But naively thinking about it, I would expect a good citizen to delete them, therefore not contributing to spreading cp around.
edit: As to your second paragraph, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure that would technically be felony destruction of evidence (odds of prosecution being another question entirely).
Exactly. In your initial post, you claimed it was a foregone conclusion that they would decline to press charges. And I don't know about you, but having my electronics confiscated for an indeterminate length of time would be more than bad enough. How are you even going to pay your attorney, if you can't do your job without a computer?
I'm pretty sure that in the end, you wouldn't be liable. But you might have to prove it. For example, it's perfectly legal to run a Tor exit node in the US. It's still strongly advised that you don't do it from your home, however.
I do however see how the fear that one's servers might be used to store CP or equally problematic content could stop Filecoin and similar systems from getting adoption.