You could say Filecoin is a distraction, but in trying to raise seed money, 50 VCs arranging 100 meetings, 5 verbally committing to you a measly $1M each and negotiate over investment terms while you try to live on ramen, and then 3 out of the 5 backing out in the process, is arguably a MUCH bigger distraction to getting any real work done. It also causes a lot of actual brain rot when you spend that much consecutive time away from tech.
And, just for the record, a cryptocurrency fund raise is simply selling access to given private/public key pairs which contain values, like a database. Even hardened by mining, these values and keys are intrinsically worthless until they are used widely for something valuable. It's when convincing someone it's "valuable because you think it is" that it gets "tricky".
I don't think thats a fair claim to make. There are many attacks on 'pay for distributed storage' that Filecoin addresses. Take a look at [the paper](https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf), in particular section 3.1 where we discuss sybil attacks, Outsourcing attacks, and generation attacks. We cover a lot of cases, and build in incentives to continually increase the amount of available storage and push down the price-per-byte. If we thought it was possible to properly incentivize data storage on ipfs without building a blockchain, we would have done so.
And is intended to run on an IPFS network. After reading the replies to this comment, I started looking into Sia, and wanted to try it out, but it seems that I first have to buy some Sia before even being able to become a host (!), which is an instant turnoff.
At the same time, I am already able to try out IPFS and have been able to develop apps using it for quite some time. I am not sure what the plans are with Filecoin, but IPFS also has a default-public (hosting) use case, while as of now Siacoin has private-only.
I tried to answer your question about why people are hyped for IPFS/Filecoin (some only for one of the two) rather than the alternatives. It is not only because IPFS/Filecoin are "flashy", but because contrary to your claim developers _did_ have something working to play with from the same developers for quite some time which is also superior in some regards (public hosting).
From the beginning, we've prided ourselves writing code instead of pushing PR pieces and designing flashy websites. So I'm glad that you (and others) picked up on those values. By keeping our heads down, we've built the only truly distributed and decentralized marketplace for storage, and we did it with a team and a budget far smaller than our competitors.
Thanks for your support -- posts like this motivate me more than almost anything else.
I am going to give some definitions (please chip in case of my misunderstanding) - “nobody likes you”: reputation is not central to Filecoin, so I guess you cannot be “not liked”. Whether you are trusted or not, the clients will pay you only if you have provided a proof of having offered a service. Note: Filecoin has pseudonyms, if for some reasons your address is not liked, you can create a new Filecoin address. So every “not liked” case eventually reduces to being a new user. TL;DR I will assume you mean “a new user”. - “low-performance node”: Filecoin does not require special hardware, but off-the-shelf CPUs, and whether you have 1 or 1000, it should not matter in practice (all the operations are sequential). I wouldn’t consider the amount of storage as “performance”, your node can always participate as a small miner. If by low performance you mean faulty hardware, then you are really not contributing to the network. So I am going to consider “low-performance” to mean slow network connection.
Now, if you are a new node without much track record and with a bad internet connection, you could: - participate as a Storage Miner in the Storage Market (your job will be mainly storing the file and generate proofs offline that you have stored the file, you will need just enough internet connection to be updated with the head of the chain) and every now and then (even with a bad network connection), submit the proofs to the chain. In addition, if you are happy listening to new transactions and have enough storage (unless you consider yourself REALLY lucky), then you can participate to mining Filecoin and earn tokens from transaction fees and mining rewards. My strategy would be to start with lower prices than the rest of the network, if you are also mining, block reward could cover for your lower prices - participate as a Retrieval Miner, you might not be that successful in comparison to fast speed super connected nodes that have incredible amount of storage, BUT you could try to store and serve “rare” files or serve to nodes that are closer to you (since you could become their node of preference)
I took advantage to explain my reasoning so that others could find this helpful too :) I will take a look at the paper, thanks for sharing, there is a lot the community can learn from the first wave of p2p file sharing.
> clients will pay you only if you have provided a proof of having offered a service.
Sounds like a good approach. You need to make trade-offs in your design for storage providers I believe. You can bias clients to deal with and pay reliable plus fast providers. That means slow peers have less chance to earn coins. Or take a performance hit and use fairness as a guiding principle. Then slow or new users get selected with increased probability. True?
> you could try to store and serve “rare” files
Has your team done work on 'investment functions' to select which "rare" files to store? You want to be paid, so what is incentive compatible? For a few years our phd/master students have been struggling to get a high-performance algorithm: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/1842#issuecomment-...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EE...
1) data storage with trusted centrally controlled infrastructure will always be cheaper (probably much cheaper) because you need far more redundancy in an untrusted network and the centralized infrastructure has superior economies of scale.
2) Your (encrypted) data is public so you are relying on the platform having zero exploitable bugs ever, which is just not a smart assumption. For this reason alone I can't really see any serious person being willing to store their data on this network.
1) You have full control over which hosts you store data on; if Amazon makes their data centers available on Sia, you can choose to store at 1x redundancy with them. I will note, though, that erasure coding can get you many nines of reliability at fairly low redundancy, as long as the hosts aren't completely flaky. And you can do even better if you actively replace hosts as soon as they go offline.
2) The only thing you need to trust here is the client-side encryption code, which is fairly straightforward. And if you're really paranoid, nothing prevents you from using your own encryption scheme instead of our default one.
Disclaimer: I am a Sia core dev.
In filecoin (as in sia, and most other decentralized storage networks) the client who is storing data has control over who stores their data. It's a market. So for example, if a well known company decides to offer storage through filecoin, they can publicly attest to their miner IDs, and you can choose to make deals with them for data storage (even at a slightly higher price if they want to charge it).
Separately, we are working on schemes to allow miners to only serve a clients data in situations they approve of (authorization/authentication). This would address the problem of the data being 'public'. If you can control who stores your data and who can access it, it has the same attack surface as any traditional cloud storage provider.
For (2), there's nothing preventing nested encryption, if your threat model dictates.
Even if you assume your crypto scheme is perfect you are still giving adversaries unlimited access to brute force your key.
For security conscious parties (corp, gov, mostly) encryption is a failsafe when other layers of physical security fail. No one is trusting encryption to be their sole means of securing their data.
Not to mention that if you put data on an untrusted system you lose the ability to track break attempts and detect breaches if they do occur.
If that is true for your security model, then encryption is always pointless for you[1]. Later on, you mention "security conscious" parties, which means you understand that security is a cost gradient, meaning one size doesn't fit all, and less-than-perfect assurance has value in some contexts.
Do I think the DoD is going to move all their storage to this? That would be idiotic. Do I think there is an achievable scheme like this that is "good enough" for a variety of use cases? I think the answer is pretty clearly yes; the difficulties of actually realizing it are elsewhere.
[1] Yes, OTPs exist. They don't count.
I don't think that is true.
If your first line of defense is physical security that doesn't mean you don't use crypto. The person who can break your physical security can't necessarily break your crypto. Even if the crypto isn't perfect it may be good enough.
The point is that no one in the real world relies on crypto only. Everyone has a physical security layer and then crypto. That is just a fact of how corp, gov, and concerned individuals manage their data.
A distributed network with untrusted peers would radically change the accepted security model and in a way that I don't think any qualified decision maker would accept.
So maybe you can get consumers to use the network for the same thing they use Backblaze for, but Backblaze is already hella cheap, and I am pretty sure the distributed network will be more expensive, so where is the value prop to the people who don't care or aren't knowledgable about security?
Some system roughly like this has potential use cases, even if it may be unsuitable for others. While I wouldn't expect a public company to store their financials in it, there is a lot of data that is held less tightly out there.
And more speculatively, "The street finds its own uses for things." Who knows what obvious-in-restrospect thing emerges. Maybe after 10 years and some evolution, commercial software and data systems live in a system like this and purchases are ledger operations, so the user-base of a given product becomes the distribution platform.
They saw dollar signs and got bit by the ICO bug. Truth be told, I still like the idea of Filecoin as a method to get around the problem of Tragedy of the Commons.
But overvalued and overhyped indeed.
If anything, you did the ICO the "right" way, even if I didn't like the fact that you excluded it to official investors. But that's an issue with the SEC laws as the way they're written - not you or jbenet.
My biggest hope is that you all continue working on both, IPFS core, and Filecoin. And secondarily, reduce memory footprint with IPFS itself. It's still gobbley - cause I'd like to be able to get a /bt/mac/ node available for serving locally via BTLE.
There are complaints about the discounts private investors got etc but at the end of the day I'm glad this is research getting funded and I think calling it a scam is straight up wrong. We'll see I guess.
Bullshit.
Importantly, if Filecoin were usable right now to guarantee storage and retrievability of files, I have use cases I'd use that for right this second.
> The public should be allowed to take risks though!
I have complex feelings about this. For example, I wanted to participate in the Filecoin ICO, and I could not because I don't meet the accredited investor requirements. On the micro level, I was a bit disappointed. It's my money, if I want to give it to a charlatan, I should be able to. On the macro level, I understand that it makes sense that most people like me shouldn't be investing in companies that aren't required to make any disclosures, financials or otherwise, particularly when people like me aren't really in a position to negotiate for that information. In my mind, protecting mom and pop is still a worthwhile goal.
So while I definitely agree that the public should be allowed to take risks, it's relevant that there are quite a few markets that they have unimpeded access to. And I'm generally sympathetic to the SEC's desire to shield the least sophisticated investors from the riskiest investments.
Since filecoin is going to be built on top of ipfs, there is a pretty big incentive to make it solid.
IPFS is fantastic technology, but the main developers getting sidetracked with yet another scammy ICO is the last thing we need.