How is this any different from what Amazon does? They don't manually inspect all uploaded files. Instead, they rely on legal protections given to service providers.

Filecoin miners can do the same by (a) registering as service providers and (b) complying with blacklists and takedown notices as mandated by their legal jurisdiction. Note: Filecoin miners don't just store arbitrary files assigned by the network; they sign contracts with specific clients to store specific files. The only difference from Amazon is that the network itself enforces these contracts.

> The only difference from Amazon is that the network itself enforces these contracts.

No, the difference is that Amazon's contacts can identify the buyer and they're actual, legal contacts. They also have terms and conditions. Miners have contacts in terms of what the network is doing, which have nothing to do with contracts as understood by law. These are two meanings which just happen to use the same word.

Amazon has an army of lawyers, a well written TOS, an identifiable customer, and a corporate shield. They also have the ability to take down offending material.

>> Filecoin miners can do the same by (a) registering as service providers and (b) complying with blacklists and takedown notices as mandated by their legal jurisdiction.

That would be a huge overhead to be replicated across participants, driving out smaller players, lowering the "distributed" aspect of the system, creating larger points of failure and increasing the price.

No need to imagine. There's an enormous amount of case law here. It has repeatedly been upheld that hosts are not liable for hosted content published by others (at least in the US):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

And when you tell the judge that you don't even have the ability to take down the offending material, what then?

You can absolutely take down the offending material; you'll just lose the collateral (you can also transfer the contract to someone else but that will likely not be legal in all jurisdictions). However, as the contracts are made between the clients and miners directly, miners can choose to charge anonymous/untrusted clients more to make up for this potential eventuality.

But you do, as far as your own hosting of that data is concerned - You shut off your node and delete your data store.

out of curiosity, who is this judge talking to again? A storage node?

Storage rental is a concept that most people are familiar with. Extending that from physical objects to data isn't a very big step. Of course, storage facilities probably have some regulations to comply with that you won't be following.

Yes, with this logic, storage rental should expand into the sharing economy. You could rent out a room in your house for strangers to store their stuff in. Not a big step at all.

You say that like it's not going to be the next unicorn. You just LOCKER your stuff. We use machine learning AI to process an snapshot and dispatch an appropriately sized box via a car sharing service, the driver packs up your shit, and delivers it to a LOCKER storage contractor. All on the blockchain.

The market probably isn't going to be comprised mainly of individual people. They're going to be farms in russian, china, and anyplace w/ cheap power and proximity to a backbone or population center.

Filecoin runs on top of IPFS and with IPFS, you don't host anything you didn't chose to host.

Don't worry man, blockchain.

Yeah, you are getting paid a few cents to act as a proxy for criminals. Somehow I don't think this will catch on with the general public any time soon.