TL;DR: It's a solution in search of a problem, like so much good, early technology.
Dalton Caldwell [31:07] – What is the burning, and it’s okay if it’s not consumers, but what is the thing that, with Filecoin, that is gonna make, whether it’s business or consumers, people get really excited about using it?
Juan Benet [31:19] – Filecoin is not representative of the entire industry. Filecoin is one example. With Filecoin, the point is being able to, this is a whole different argument that I think makes sense with or without a peer-to-peer winter or summer. The thoughts around Filecoin are about thinking about the massive latent storage that’s out there and putting it to good use. There’s exabytes of storage that are not in use right now, and that if you were to add them to the market, you would drive the price down significantly......That’s, I think, fundamentally different about this type of thing than normal consumer products. They solve a lotta problems for a lotta people.
Dalton Caldwell [33:41] – You said financial, though. Again, they’re doing it for financial reasons. Again, what I’m looking for is what is the incentive for someone to get involved, whether it’s a business or a consumer, the reason you would put a miner on the network?
Juan Benet [33:53] – For Filecoin specifically, the reason why somebody would add storage to the network, the primary motivator will be money....
Obviously, no one is going to admit it because then your network is tainted but every file sharing outfit ultimately ends up do pirated.
I've been mining lbry and it seems lot more ahead of these others. https://lbry.io/
The beneficiary will be AIs, not humans.
Right now, we're just now thinking of clouds, containers, and "serverless" (functions-as-a-service). If we take those ideas and iterate them forward, we converge closer to a real "serverless" paradigm -- what Ethereum already provides today in principle, if not at scale. This will require storage that can keep up with it, and that is where FileCoin comes in. While human consumers may benefit from this, it enables autonomous software that can live on its own and manage its own matabolism (resources accounted for through the blockchain). What those autonomous software will do? I don't really know.
Filecoin to my knowledge has or will have no capabilities of sharing files. It's dumb end-to-end encrypted decentral storage (which is a good thing!).
However, the IPFS team is aware of this problem, and is building in measures to allow nodes to opt out of storing globally available blacklists of known bad objects (i.e. pirated content or illegal content)
In practice, this is definitely a really hard problem to solve, and very important. But I think doable.
I'm personally glad that the fathers of the internet had better things to do than moralizing legality.
Sounds like the opposite of something most would consider "important".
I think blocking a hash can already be a victory, since it basically makes all the metadata that was associated with the hash useless and forces reseeding under a new hash and publicizing that hash. As long as you make it inconvenient enough, very few people will bother, which is the best the copyright holders can hope for.
Reseeding might be pretty easy though in IPFS since there is a block layer below the object layer, and I guess you can't really block block-hashes.
Eventually I'd like to open source code that lets any user create their own index/search server and potentially charge for usage if they want.
You can't implement indexing and search over end to end encrypted data file chunks. You would have to work with the hash of complete files and a localizer, and you want that in the initial design.
Care to elaborate and share examples of other "good, earl technology"? Typically when I hear "solution in search of a problem", I start thinking "this is going nowhere".
Not insinuating, that's my claim - nearly every big technology was too early (eg. a solution looking for a problem - whether in form or scale) before it blew up years or decades later. I don't think that's controversial. It's also true that a lot of trash that never makes it are also solutions in search of problems.
Decentralized blockchain orchestration of storage = you can raise $200M... in the first hour.
That would mean filecoin is less about the use of decentral file storage, but more about giving people a different way to create something that looks like bitcoin that does not involve buying sold-out gpus, unlike ethereum, and storing files is more comfortable than having a gpu make noise all the time anyway.
I think by the way, that's absolutely vital to progress, and I am glad someone has convinced VC/Money to fund something potentially breakthrough (whether I think it is or not).
His favorite response was "...and a whole bunch of other things".
On a more serious note, it's very early days for the filecoin and related group of projects that they intend to fund, so the answer to Dalton's question is : "we don't have the answers yet. There are a whole bunch of theoretical use cases and the most promising seems to be decentralized storage. The reason we are raising money through this ICO is simple : people are ready to invest dumb money and we are more than happy to take it. We have legitimacy because we are backed by the most well known VCs who are eager to 10X their money within 3 years and we have a whole bunch of protocol design/specs."
It's kind of self fulfilling : promise a grand vision, take hundreds of millions and hopefully deliver any working product sometime in the future.
(1) Hard drives are dirt f'ing cheap. Buying more than one and putting them at different locations (home and office etc.) is not hard. Storage is still experiencing a Moore's Law type geometric increase in density so this is going to get easier not harder in the future.
(2) Cloud storage is cheap too. S3 is cheap. S3 reduced redundancy is really cheap. Backblaze B2 is stupid cheap. There's no privacy problem here if you encrypt your data on your end. (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive. They go together nicely. Keep your data local and then back it up encrypted to cheap cloud storage. Many very affordable NAS devices will do this for you.
(3) Enterprise users categorically don't want a system where they don't know who's running their infrastructure. In some cases such a thing would be prohibited by data residency regulations. You will never ever ever convince a CIO to use this. In some cases it might be illegal for them to use this.
(4) The real problem for end users is data handling UX, not actual storage. (1) and (2) are adequate for virtually all users.
(5) The web does have an ephemerality problem but I fail to see how this will solve it.
(6) These systems are mostly too heavy for mobile and don't cope well enough with node ephemerality for laptops. They only work well on desktops and servers and those already have mega-cheap storage and backup options in the form of (1) and (2). Look into how much disk you can cram in a desktop these days for under $500.
(7) The anonymous/uncensorable niche is already filled by Tor, I2P, and Freenet.
This really looks like a solution to a non-existent problem. Am I missing something?
Not trying to hate, just questioning.
Would love to see a theoretical analysis of Filecoin's impact on the storage market, presuming that it can build the foundations for competing in that market.
For example, when you buy a new computer, with a 500 GB drive, 400GB of it isn't going to be used for a while.
Hard drives may be cheap, s3 may be cheap, but that extra 400 GB of hard disk space? That space is literally FREE.
Hard disk space is weird, because there is so much completely unused space out there, that would be literally free to use.
Filecoin will allow this free space to be put on the market.
Because operating a node for File Coin is certainly not free in terms of network costs and requires the opportunity cost of giving up your local storage for the duration.
With Filecoin I think what happened in that conversation was that to Juan it wasn't a big deal, it's just one of the things possible in the IPFS paradigm. But since crypto currency is all the rage these days, and this being YC, he was being lead to talk about the money side of it, but I don't think he really gave it much thought, other than that Filecoin is a neat way to trade storage without any paper/fiat currency, across country borders, etc.
To put it another way - IPFS is the thing. Filecoin is just a side-effect. But in our present times, Filecoin is worth actual millions, while IPFS is just a protocol. But it's clearly a fluke, the most important technology/idea here is IPFS.
It seems to me that their team has underestimated those challenges and were more busy on designing a big ICO than actually thinking about those problems and the feasibility of their claims. Most probably it will take much more than 6-18 months that they claim or it will be launched with centralized components of the system ("compromises") until they figure things out.
This company might be different because they demonstrated their ability as IPFS is fleshed out but as others pointed out Filecoin is a different beast entirely and they are basically starting from scratch again.
The higher end of 6-18 months of pure dev time is a long risk range to get an untested product out. But I guess they have plenty of runway now to work on it with this massive ICO. Let's just hope they don't spin their wheels forever in research mode and spend their time and money wisely.
It's entirely possible someone else figures it out before them and this play will be a game of scale. I've heard this idea from more than one person well before Filecoin was around.
There are occasional exceptions [0].
[0] https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/25/khosla-ventures-leads-50-...
I think as the inventor of IPFS he would have thought a lot about these things so he should at least have a few interesting consumer use case but he gave 0. I'm guessing because it's all illegal ideas. Instead he said it's more about B2b (or something like that) and about people making money from sharing their drive.
Just to be clear I still think IPFS is awesome. Just like how i think BitTorrent is awesome. They will have the same problem if the leader doesn't have a clear picture of how it can be used. Most successful platforms started out NOT as a platform but as a single application and then expanded. He's obviously not trying to build an application but an equivalent of the Internet itself, but then we have the problem of how are you going to make money and how are you going to get consumers excited? And this is something they do need to have an answer to.
If costs and functionality are equivalent to our current solutions (like S3), then the cryptocurrency ecosystem is certainly better, but how much better is it? That is arguable and I would expect the developers to be inflating its value quite a bit.
On the technical side, I find it doable. Unless they actually try to implement it "on the blockchain". Given blockchain transaction rates, by the time you'll download your porn, you will not need it anymore.
Of course we can ask, how big is the market for cold storage? On the other hand, how big is the market for gold?
In the future you will see that the only profitable miners are ones who can "sell" their heat, i.e. using it for greenhouses or other applications.
[1] - https://blog.ycombinator.com/ipfs-coinlist-and-the-filecoin-...