Reason: this lets me repurpose my harddrives and opens my options

Concern: filecoin likes having a beefy system to run.  Many gigabytes of ram.

[Side question: is there an existing hash database of operating system install images, pgp key fingerprints?  I'm quite sure that there's a timestamped merkle tree of OS images somewhere.  Maybe scan some blockchains for such things?]

Question: are there public interfaces to filecoin, to preclude running a node?  I think a couple tutorials indicate this.

Subgoal: visit filecoin tutorials, discern the 2 public filecoin nodes I vaguely recall them indicating.