I'm still confused why I would want my storage to be decentralized. No I don't want my files spread on thousands or millions of computers no matter how encrypted etc.
Trustless, distributed, scalable, redundant, anonymous cloud storage with a market-driven pricing scheme? Why _wouldn't_ you want that? For me that's pretty much the ideal cloud storage system.
"distributed, scalable, redundant" describes AWS pretty well, and if I can pay much less for a faster more reliable service but sacrifice "trustless and anonymous", I'll stick to it.
What makes you think AWS would be necessarily be faster or more reliable? If done correctly, think a decentralized system could be significantly faster and more reliable than even the best centralized storage solution.
For example, with a decentralized system files could be broken up into shards and distributed across multiple nodes, so unless a significant percentage of computers on the planet all melt down at once your data would remain accessible (i.e. zero downtime). That would also allow downloads to be parallelized across multiple connections like with BitTorrent, meaning bandwidth wouldn't be an issue either.
And that's not even considering the effect that a commoditized pricing system would have on the costs of a distributed storage solution. I imagine it'd be significantly cheaper than AWS too, as storage would be sold at a price very close to costs.
> files could be broken up into shards and distributed across multiple nodes
You can setup any old distributed database to do this... If there was a benefit to breaking down a file rather than replicating it, AWS would be using this efficiency to provide a better service.
> the effect that a commoditized pricing system would have on the costs of a distributed storage solution
It'll always be cheaper for someone to sell their hard drive than to sell access to their hard drive, just like it is cheaper to buy bitcoin instead of mining it.
Here is why: let's say Alice is profit-driven and greedy and is making $1 profit for 1gb of space. She can use those profits to buy more hardware, make more profit, buy more hardware, and so on and so forth until she has 100,000gb of space being offered. At that point, because of economies of scale, it will cost Alice less to maintain 100,000gb then the total cost of 100,000 people hosting 1gb each (eg. reduce total electricity cost because of bulk purchase).
Now, Alice can grow her operation so big (say, 100 petabytes) that it actually becomes no longer profitable for Bob to host 1gb. Alice has so much lower costs per gb that she was able to drive the price per gb down to a point where the price is lower than Bob's costs.
This is basic economy of scale so far, right? And it's the same reason why data centers filled with ASICs make it useless for you to mine Bitcoin on your laptop.
OK now that Alice is hosting say 100petabytes and has priced out all the individuals on the network, she will be subject to data policy rules and will have to obey law enforcement to kick out users that are using her hard drives for illegal activity.
> If there was a benefit to breaking down a file rather than replicating it, AWS would be using this efficiency to provide a better service.
Are you suggesting that AWS is doing every possible thing that would increase efficiency, or in other words, that AWS' services are optimally efficient? That seems very unlikely.
Yes. This is how capitalism works. If there is an inefficiency in the market, there is an opportunity for a competitor to beat you on price or quality. If AWS is not incorporating these efficiencies into their tech, then Microsoft Azure will and beat them by providing either a cheaper or higher quality service.
If FileCoin actually worked as a better technology, Google or some big name would say they will start using it to beat AWS in the data storage game.
I'm not saying FileCoin is useless, it is useful to store 3D printed gun designs and illegal media, because it is outside the reach of the law. But to think it is a more efficient technical solution to data storage is a bit naive...
"Yes. This is how capitalism works. If there is an inefficiency in the market, there is an opportunity for a competitor to beat you on price or quality. If AWS is not incorporating these efficiencies into their tech, then Microsoft Azure will and beat them by providing either a cheaper or higher quality service."
Not that I'm saying Filecoin or a decentralised storage coin is in any way the way forward or even a competitor.. but saying that is how capitalism works is such rubbish.
In an ideal system you are right, but how often have you worked for a company that is raking in the cash by marketing well and being the "established" hand in the market?
There are so many companies kicking around that are the biggest player in their field that continue to make bank because accountants and upper management decide they are the proven, safe pick in the market and have signed up for long, entrenched software packages.
Also, if this upended the entrenched business model companies were using, they would not be able to quickly switch to it.
There are plenty of ways this could be the a better solution and AWS wouldn't switch to it, saying capitalism proves this is not a good argument.
It is not just AWS. The data storage market is saturated with competitors fighting hard to come out on top. Amazon, Apple, Box, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft are all in this and some of these companies have massive R&D budgets, have a history of delivering cutting edge tech and have strategies to overcome the Innovator's Dilemma (which is the problem you're describing).
It is precisely because these companies are not entrenched that my argument holds. But also consider the technical downside to FileCoin (slow connections to unreliable laptops VS fast connections to redundant data centers) and the economic downsides to FileCoin (it won't be worth hosting due to economies of scale).
Just a minor nit... Apple doesn't really belong on that list. But you're right in general. Cloud storage is a big race to the bottom, and add-ons are going to be what's monetized. I can't see Filecoin or Siacoin having any advantages here.
I don't know how big the Filecoin network is, but it's very telling that they're not sharing this information. I expect that the amount of data stored is not large. Siacoin makes this available but total contracts are currently a bit under 200TB.
For those of you keeping track at home, that's a single medium-size storage appliance.
Again, Filecoin monetizes IPFS. The guy in the same Starbucks as you may have the file you want, so it could be faster to get it from him than from some data center.
> If there is an inefficiency in the market, there is an opportunity for a competitor to beat you on price or quality.
Of course. That's why when someone proposed a potential mechanism for increasing efficiency, it doesn't make sense to say "that couldn't possibly work, because if it could work then AWS would already be doing it."
1. Filecoin is the monetization layer for IPFS; on IPFS you never store stuff you didn't agree to store. So there won't be 3D printed gun designs, porn and other illegal media on your drives unless that's what you wanted.
2. Filecoin enables a transparent market for storage with bids and asks for storage, so you'll know what you're paying compared to AWS, Azure, etc. and you can decide what to do.
3. I'm on Comcast; if some guy two towns over from me is running his Filecoin-enabled IPFS node also on Comcast, there's going to be less latency than hitting an AWS or Google data center thousands of miles away.
4. My DigitalOcean droplet is ~200 miles away from me; trace route says it's 10 hops away. I can see the network name for Comcast two towns over from that's just 4 hops away. The other guys may be big but they can't change the speed of light.
5. Because IPFS is content addressed, I don't need to know where the content I want is located; thanks to the distributed hash table, any node that has that data can respond to my request.
6. IPFS and therefore Filecoin still work even if you can't reach the internet backbone… you can still get stuff via your neighborhood mesh network.
Bittorrent at least has has much higher latency than a protocol like HTTP with simple auth.
As for price, AWS has some of the cheapest operating costs due to scale, something which smaller players will have trouble competing with. Moving data within AWS is fast and sometimes free.
Smaller players also pay the highest cost for bandwidth. If some plans don't have bandwidth caps yet (many already do), they will get caps as soon as serving bandwidth as an individual becomes profitable.
Pretty much all distributed systems have the following in common: You pay for resilience with overhead. If it wasn't that way, everything would become as distributed as possible over time.
> Smaller players also pay the highest cost for bandwidth. If some plans don't have bandwidth caps yet (many already do), they will get caps as soon as serving bandwidth as an individual becomes profitable.
Isn't it the other way around? Small providers offer low traffic costs while the big cloud providers (Google, AWS, Azure) charge significantly for bandwidth.
Small providers pay the most for traffic to their ISPs, because they get smaller volume discounts. What Google/AWS/Azure charge is a different topic entirely, they themselves pay much less.
I had been recently looking at Siacoin, but still a lot of work is needed before it can displace something like AWS. Took nearly a day with lots of stalls just to sync the blockchain. Also I am not sure about how price competitive it will ultimately be. Amazon has huge buying power which I am sure means they pay less per TB then consumers. Also other economies of scale. I bet the cost of labour to bring online each 1TB on S3 is very low.
That is maybe a not a big enough price saving to convince conservative corporations to switch. Imagine going to your accounts department to request they purchase a cryptocurrency so you can use it to pay for data storage.
I don't know how using Sia works in practice, but comparing it with regular S3, which is connected to the entire AWS ecosystem (including EC2), is absurd.
Amazon S3 also offers "glacier" for longterm storage with few accesses, which is $4 per TB.
But that's the problem. S3 is cheap if you use it with other AWS services and it's designed to be only cheap that way. Bandwidth is expensive to avoid that people pick services from a combination of Azure/AWS/Google.
If you're just looking for storage, S3 is certainly not the cheapest provider. Glacier is a bit different but clearly just for archives.
I'm comparing just storage prices, because I have no idea how Sia works in terms of latency/bandwidth/access. Being distributed, I suppose it will fare worse in most (if not all) these respects compared to Azure/AWS/Google and maybe even glacier.
As for bandwidth cost: I don't believe Sia can be successful and stay that cheap. Why would providers of bandwidth for Sia be able to offer it magnitudes cheaper than the biggest tech companies in the world? Answer: It's offered by a bunch of individuals with no caps on their data plans. If Sia takes off and lots of people start using terabytes of bandwidth, the ISPs will put an end to it.
Does backblaze have a single enterprise client that anyone knows of? That's Sia's target market. They are targeting companies that use S3, not a company that's pretty clearly targeting personal and SMB's.
If the decentralised network is popular and stable and clients happen to be next to you and they happen to have parts of your files, then yes. It could be fast and reliable.
Sarcasm aside, option A works and option B does not, as you admit. What's your counter-argument? If it is that option B will one day be better than option A, you will need to provide evidence because that's a claim that is not addressed in the posted filecoin.pdf.
> If it is that option B will one day be better than option A, you will need to provide evidence because that's a claim that is not addressed in the posted filecoin.pdf.
Argument to the Future. You can't provide evidence of a future event and asking for it is a joke. Maybe Sia/File/Storj are the future maybe it's something else, but asking for "evidence" of a future event is a joke.
What do you think Apple or Google does with your files after they are uploaded? Do you think they aren't encrypted and spread out over several machines?
But with Apple and Google, I know my data won’t go missing because the p2p network decided to stop seeding my file. Torrents die all the time due to lack of seeding.
Torrent hosts do not have a monetary incentive to host files.
Filecoin (and other decentralized storage systems) provide monetary rewards and penalties for storing or failing to store files. This is introduced in Section 4.1.1 of this paper.
Exactly. As long as there's demand to keep hosting files in the network, there WILL be providers hosting your files. Even if a hosting company who hosts 5% of the network (that's a lot) decides to exit the and stop hosting, your files are spread between enough computers and you only need about half of them to be online to recover your files.
Unless some parts of your data happened to be replicated across multiple shards on that same hosting company's hardware. Then you would have a partial loss of data.
The bad thing is that you would not be able to hold them responsible.
I think it's a problem of reputation, actually. Google and Apple keep stuff online because they promised they would, and there would be backlash if they turned it off all of a sudden. There's nothing stopping a random, anonymous "filer" (like miner) from stopping the upload stream.
To go even further, if you orchestrate several miners carefully (maybe computationally) they can together perhaps stop people from accessing certain files.
What's the problem with them being on random machines? I believe the purpose of Filecoin and other projects like Swarm is to incentives people to store the files long term and in some cases verify that those files are still being held.
What I don't understand is how this will guarantee the existence of these files. How do I know my files are secure? If my files are spread over several machines, and one or several go offline, are reinstalled, whatever. How do I know my files are secure?
I don't know how Filecoin strengthens reliability, but Sia splits your file to 30 small pieces and distributes them randomly among hosts. You only need 10 of the pieces to recover a file. So, in effect, you rely on 10 out of 30 random hosts to be online at the time of recovery. The chance of more than 20 random hosts that are holding your file are offline at the same time is extremely small as long as there's enough diversity among hosters (particularly many different hosting companies and many individual hosters in different regions, so hosting isn't mostly "centralized" to one region or company).
I think Sia's method would prove to be extremely reliable, but again, it depends on the hosters. If the largest single hoster owns less than a third of the capacity of the network, even if they suddenly go offline, you should be able to recover your file since you rely only on a third of the 30 hosts who hold your file to be online.
Also, I think that the number of pieces you need to recover a file can be tuned, so if 33% would prove to not be reliable enough, Sia/Filecoin can tune it down to increase reliability.
I haven't had a chance to dig into this paper yet, but for a similar system Swarm [0], there is a system of insurance and escrow on file chunks, and a system of verifying the hash of piece of the file to see if they still have its contents.
The file is encrypted locally before uploading to the network. Then the file is sharded, and the shards are replicated among the nodes. Once a shard falls below a certain replication threshold, it will get copied to a new node.
There are other schemes that don't require a copy of each shard, allowing you to reconstruct the file if any subset of the nodes is online.
Presumably your data is duplicated to the point that all nodes containing any particular piece of data are very unlikely to be offline at a given time.
No censorship, files are not held by any specific organization, etc. Basically the same reasons why someone would prefer torrents over web hosting (e.g. megaupload).
1. Safety. One place could go burning in fire. Second place could be destroyed by some missile. It might happen simultaneously or while you're trying to retrieve the backup. So you need multiple decentralized copies to ensure safety. Also you can't just use AWS because then might ban your account and you'll lose your data.
2. Price. There are many computers with a lot of free unused storage space and unlimited internet plans. Basically storage and transfer is 0-cost for them. So they'll compete creating very affordable pricing. AWS can't compete with that, because they have real operational costs.
This is the reason I can't take Silicon Valley too seriously. It isn't the magic algorithm, it is that no sane person would want Pied Piper's storage because it does just what you said in the context of the show.
The same reason I can't take Ethereum seriously. Do people seriously trust, or want an unproven hypervisor running code remotely on their hardware/network?
> I'm still confused why I would want my storage to be decentralized.
Say... if you were running a torrent site? Or you just wanted redundancy for your cat videos.
The encryption doesn't bother me. The way I encrypt it ensures it won't be unencrypted without actually knowing the passcode. What bothers me is that when you finally need to access it, it might not be there.
You should check out Tahoe-LAFS, but Tahoe-LAFS does RAID-style striping and parity. So you can spread bits and pieces of a file on 5 servers, and require that minimum 3 servers need to be active to retrieve your file, for example.
I think this argument fails even by its own standards. It applies equally well to Bitcoin mining, and while there is clearly some centralization there, it is still quite decentralized. At least, decentralized 'enough'. Secondly, storage is fundamentally different than other commodities. The decentralized storage market is more like AirBnB, where you're consuming the excess capacity of capital. Most people have tons of storage already that they're not using. Extracting rents from that space is found money, and therefore they have inherently lower costs than anyone supplying storage in a commercial way.
Why do you think decentralized storage could ever work on excess capacity? I cannot imagine any incentive for it. It's either profitable enough to do it on a dedicated capacity, kind of like a hosting company, but without all the hassle and marketing. Or it's a burden.
The point is most people have a bunch of free space on their hard drive they're not using anyway. I've got a few hundred free GB on my desktop, and a couple more TB on my home server. The physical hardware for those drives is sunk cost, and I'm already paying for the electricity to run those machines all day. It doesn't cost me anything extra to merely have some data sitting on the unused space on my drives, so why not make some money off of it?
On the other hand, if I wanted to create a dedicated machine just to farm filecoins, that _would_ cost me extra for hardware and electricity.
This is why decentralized storage has an advantage in this regard. Unlike mining, storing files incurs almost no extra costs for the average home user, but does incur costs for dedicated storage systems.
It costs you the bandwidth (it's not a long term cold storage) and extra processing power (so electricity cost) for running filecoin. This may well be lower cost than the gain from hosting, but it's still non-zero.
Bandwidth is effectively free for many users (no data cap), and the amount of processing power required for something simple like file storage is pretty trivial. You're right that it's non-zero, but I'd imagine it's probably on the order of pennies a month.
Is it really? Even just extra 10W over a month is just under 7 kWh and might approach a dollar[1]. Spinning 3.5" HDDs from time to time is especially costly and they often spin down when unused for a long time. Load spike might also make CPU freq scale up and consume more power. Same with bandwidth, you'll incur ISP wrath or saturate it (or keep wasting most of that free space), even 80 Mbps[1] is 'just' 36 GB / hour and under 1TB per 24h. And that's without including overhead from Filecoin, TCP/UDP and IP themselves.
It sounds lose-lose-lose situation: keep wasting your space or saturate your bandwidth or waste power on keeping HDDs spinning all the time due to accessing them every few minutes. It may vary with your usage patterns (if these disks are already always spinning and you have REALLY good bandwidth or two separate lines) but still, seems barely worth the effort.
And why couldn't it be optimized in a purpose built machine? Cheap Tibetan hydro and free cooling (altitude), low power CPUs, fast internet, fast switches and routers, 10 gigabit lan, many HDDs and SSDs (dug up from the Western trash piles even, it's not like failing once a month is a big deal). Chinese already have ASIC for bitcoin and this seems easier to make than that.
[1] I have no idea if I'm generous or stingy on USA power prices and network speed.
I guess the exact costs would depend on usage patterns, frequency of file read/writes, etc.
It's worth noting though that Sia (another decentralized storage network) is estimating their current storage costs at $2/TB-Month. That's half the price of Amazon Glacier. Whether that's the result of users farming from their home PCs or giant Chinese storage farms though I have no clue.
If you don't have data caps, be happy. But, they're still very common and even if you don't have them in your contract, you may get penalties applied after some threshold.
The cost can be also in concurrent access. Unless you apply a heavy QoS on your network, serving filecoin network may degrade your other tasks.
Now if you don't have caps and want to keep it that way, I wouldn't be excited about filecoin. Unless you're actually paying for guaranteed bandwidth and it's part of your contract, your ISP is overcommitting. The moment people actually start relying on that fact, the ISP can do one of: raise prices and buy more pipes, lower the speed, reintroduce caps. The first one is a limited resource that takes time to apply. The other two are quick and known solutions.
You could make the same argument about AirBnB. If it's profitable to rent out a room in your house, it's profitable to open a hotel. But people are still renting out AirBnB's because their homes are a sunk cost.
Not necessarily if the inputs are free (e.g. unused disk space). However Spotify, Skype, and Joost all found that CDNs are cheaper than borrowing free bandwidth from people so the same may apply to storage.
Also, if decentralized storage systems become very popular, then people will buy lesser storage space with their computers, because they expect storage space to be cheaply available online. In that case, the number of individual hosters would reduce and big companies/pools would step, making it less decentralized.
You achieve reliability with erasure codes, not with more replication. And failure rates are likely to be identical if not better, since incentives are the same as with hosting companies, but since it is decentralized there are a lot more availability zones.
> You achieve reliability with erasure codes, not with more replication
If nodes are not trusted then replication has to play a major roll.
It doesn't matter how you mix up the data. You still have to store it somewhere and if that somewhere is a random untrusted stranger you will need to copy your data to a lot of random untrusted strangers in order to have kind of reliability.
It does play a major role, in fact I think not everyone figured this thing out yet, some not even taking into account countries as risky availability zones. But the storage space overhead for redundancy is at worst 2x, which could eventually be reduced by a lot.
Here's one easy rebuttal: on the Sia network, renters are able to choose which hosts their store data on, and they will use a number of factors to decide which hosts to use, not just price. For example, low latency is important for some applications (e.g. a CDN), so it's not acceptable for host in China to be serving content to users in Europe.
Another way of thinking about this is to realize that the centralization of all data storage in China has not happened already. Why not? A motivated company (one as big as Amazon or Google) could move their datacenters to China if price was the only consideration. But they haven't, because latency (among other things) matters.
I'm not sure if this rebuttal applies in the case of Filecoin, since it's not clear to me to what degree renters are able to choose the hosts that store their data.
Basically the same reason that bitcoin mining is becoming centralized by a small set of miners in China.
At least there is a benefit to being close to the requestor in terms of bandwidth/latency so as long as the network rewards that storage should be more decentralized than mining.
This whitepaper is the first overview of updated Filecoin protocol. More details about specific components of Filecoin (like Proof-of-Replication, Proof-of-Spacetime) will be released in future in their own publications.
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):
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.
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.
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.
FileCoin is using proof of storage of client data for blockchain ledger security. That's a very tricky thing to get right (I didn't think it was possible.) Search the white paper for "Sybil attack, outsourcing attacks,
generation attacks", and see section 7.4 of the SiaCoin whitepaper for contrast: https://www.sia.tech/whitepaper.pdf
Considering that they have three important citations of the paper unpublished, I think it's okay to continue to be skeptical that they have achieved their claims. This paper is not complete, and on it's own does not demonstrate that they have solved the problem.
It is always trivial to simulate storing client data that you don't have. So you'd have to invent a system where simulating client data is equally expensive to storing real client data. But, simulating client data can always be done deterministically using a seed, which means you don't actually have to store the data.
So you have to prove that generating client data is equally expensive to storing it, if not more expensive. Given that legitimate client data can literally be all zeros, I don't see how you can achieve this without some overhead.
That overhead will make you less competitive than Sia, which doesn't have the overhead.
I haven't yet gotten to the point where I fully understand proof-of-spacetime, but that is hard when the paper is literally referencing unpublished work. But I'm skeptical they have solved the generation / simulation attack.
I'm not skeptical, yet, just surprised -- haven't had a chance to dig in.
My main concern at this stage is the replication setup time, which needs to be computationally expensive for the strategy to prevent generation attacks. That can possibly be amortized over long-term storage, but it sounds like it might be a long amortization period.
Replication setup also likely could be optimized by ASICs, so attackers willing to spend money on specialized hardware may have a 1000x advantage/asymmetry when it comes to generation attacks
Filecoin and its underlying protocol IPFS assemble the world’s knowledge and data into one big content-addressed graph (Merkle DAG), and attempt to make it accessible to any device, anywhere. This is great because it allows for all kinds of use cases apart from just securely storing and sharing files. It’s much more than an app: it’s an underlying protocol, rather than Dropbox on a blockchain.
> FileCoin is using proof of storage
Yeah, Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime, to be precise.
I don't understand how decentralizing file storage and storing my files on people's laptops / desktops can come even close to efficiency and performance of a centralized storage service with powerful servers on fast network with 99.99 uptime.
Can somebody explain to me how in theory could this decentralized storage beat something like AWS in efficiency, performance and uptime? I just think big beefy servers in dedicated data centers with fast and robust uplinks/downlinks should be better than consumer hardware on unreliable slow networks with shaky uptime?
First of all, AWS is very very expensive and tries hard not to compete on price with other players. They are there to make high-margin profits, not to give you efficient and resilient storage. They don't actually care about efficiency, to the point, that they probably aren't even doing reed-solomon yet.
Second, hardware-level reliability doesn't actually matter for any distributed storage, reliability is achieved on the higher level with software. It's all about software. Decentralized global internet network is also better than any centralized equivalent, it has orders of magnitude more capacity and resilience. Ever noticed how bittorrent can saturate any link and how even google global caches sometimes have problems serving youtube videos for like months?
Other than that I don't believe decentralized laptop/desktop storage could even exist, for the same reasons why people don't mine cryptocurrencies on excess capacity on their laptops/desktops in the background. It can only be attractive to run it on dedicated storage nodes working 24/7 with good bandwidth.
It's cheaper. Why? Because people have spare disk and spare bandwidth.
It's also more likely to survive a major war if it's redundant enough.
Is it better for serving hot assets, no. Is it better for storing a massive amount of raw data that you need occasional random, indexed access to? Maybe.
Edit:
Also, less regulatory concerns since in theory nobody knows who is paying for it. This is probably it's biggest weakness, to be honest, since it could be used to spread child porn.
> It's also more likely to survive a major war if it's redundant enough.
If there is a major war, international Internet will be one of the first things to go. In that scenario, having your files spread out across the world is a major negative. If you want the data to survive a major war, bury an external hard drive.
Yes I don't really understand the war argument. If there were a massive war (like a world war scale not some conflict in Middle East), the first thing Russia/China would do is cut underwater internet cables.
Most nation states would probably block outside internet access to avoid propaganda during time of war. I think I would have bigger concerns than whether I could recover my files stored online.
For cases like this I'd much rather trust just a simple USB stick or external drive which I could carry with me in my backpack and backup important files there so I don't have to rely on internet.
No, it's not like that, blocking internet access would cripple nation states' economies too much to even be able to fight a war. But censorship even without a major war requires centralization of control over the internet, which introduces a country-wide weakness that makes the internet unreliable to the point of complete blackouts, like during anti-government protests. Furthermore even a small conflict has an impact on the supply of electricity in the country which also could make all storage nodes there unavailable for prolonged periods of time. There are a lot of other weaknesses too, like not that many countries even have good global internet connectivity and cyber attacks could shut it down entirely.
Perhaps for the anonymity part? I imagine the market for things like this will have more overlap with the former user base of MegaUpload than the user base of S3.
Perhaps. But megaupload users were storing a lot of movie content such as full HD / blueray movies. You need very fast download/upload speed for this to be useful. Not sure if something like filecoin or sia can offer comparable download/upload speeds.
This sounds interesting academically, but what I don't understand (I have the same problem with Siacoin, StorJ and Swarm) is:
You could build a Dropbox clone where users have the option of contributing storage to get rewarded with real currency. Why would anyone want to use the decentralized version instead, both as a user and as a contributor of storage?
The decentralized version is going to be much harder to get right for the developers, and why should the users believe that the technology is trustworthy? I just don't see the advantage, but I would be truly interested in hearing what I may be missing.
Because once they do get it right, it's open source and no one can take it away. A centralized system can and most likely will eventually degrade and disappear. Also, privacy.
I believe the market right now tells you that people value neither redundancy (creating business for file recovery services) nor privacy all that much.
They do value simplicity of use above all and they do trust large companies (for better or worse).
What makes this system better than the other systems that fulfill essentially the same purpose? What does "getting it right" mean? Are they getting it right and how so?
If you can build a Dropbox clone that is faster, cheaper and can hold your files longer than one single entity ever could, wouldn't you chose that one instead?
Filecoin and IPFS assemble the world’s knowledge and data into one big content-addressed graph (Merkle DAG), and attempt to make it accessible to any device, anywhere. This is great because it allows for all kinds of use cases apart from just securely storing and sharing files. So the idea is not to build an app, but public infrastructure.
Anybody with a better understanding of filecoin - can you explain how the protocol can tell the difference between a legitimate hardware failure and a storage miner who stores the uploaded file, signs proof of replication to the blockchain, then immediately deletes the file so that he can "store" more files, collecting more payment, and then refuse delivery upon download request, claiming hardware failure?
Does the blockchain have some way to prevent miners from double-spending their storage space? Is payment only collected upon retrieval, allowing Filecoin to be abused for storing backups that are rarely retrieved?
> can you explain how the protocol can tell the difference between a legitimate hardware
From the perspective of the network, there is no difference. When you agree to dedicate some storage to the network, you post a collateral in FIlecoin. If you lose something you've agreed to store (fail to prove that you're storing it when asked to do so by the network), you pay a penalty out of your collateral.
> Is payment only collected upon retrieval
No. Storage miners continuously prove (probabilistically) to the network that they're storing the files they've agreed to store.
One disappointing but also reassuring thing about the Filecoin ICO is that it's only open to accredited investors[1]. It shows they are doing it right and legal but that unfortunately locks out non-millionaires.
Coming from academia, these sort of papers would not pass any sort of double-bind peer review process. Where's the actual science? Where are the experiments?
It seems to be just a document describing the protocol of Filecoin, which is fine. The problem is that all these "whitepapers" coming from these cryptocurrency communities seem to be promoted as scientific papers, but in reality do not stand a chance in any science/academic-related setting.
I'd wish they'd give more attention towards the science, if there's any. Otherwise, hey, sure it's just a PDF on some site - but don't call them "papers".
Meh. This article doesn't claim to be a scientific paper, so I don't see any reason to complain. I understand that some people will be confused because it has similar formatting to a "scientific" paper. But what are we going to do about it? Regulate LaTeX templates?
On the other hand, this is massively better to what normal corporate types call a "whitepaper" (usually just a glossy brochure that tells you nothing new.)
> Where are the experiments?
The experiments are in the markets. :) I.e. "here's a new coin, will it make money?"
> Coming from academia, these sort of papers would not pass any sort of double-bind peer review process. Where's the actual science? Where are the experiments?
Also coming from academia, I'm surprised with the amount of crap that makes it through "peer review". And there's nothing wrong with concept papers as long as they don't purport to be more than that. Lastly, I don't think the review stage is ever truly double-blind. In a niche field, you almost always have some idea of who the paper's authors are.
I don't think this or any paper like it pretends to be academic or scientific.
don't call them papers
This is ridiculous and elitist. Papers outside of peer reviewed academia can and do exist. If anything, academics ought to qualify what they mean when they say "paper".
Also satoshi nakamotos original bitcoin whitepaper wouldn't pass as academic paper. However it still is veey useful at explaining the basic idea behind bitcoin. In this context whitepaper means a little bit different thing than in scientific context.
Please be honest. When the original Bitcoin or Ethereum whitepapers came out, wouldn't your original comment, of these wp not passing any science/academia setting, still ring true then?
Also, even if they don't pass an academia setting, what is your point? So many papers actually pass academia setting but does it do anything worthwhile? Filecoin is a project in existence for the past 3yrs working on top of IPFS, a popular file sharing protocol, and being built by a venture funded startup. Its founder has a vision of a decentralized future which makes intuitive sense.
Also coming from academia, experimentation is not necessary for publication - both reviews and observational studies exist and are published in peer reviewed journals quite often.
In engineering (although I worked in neuroscience, I worked with many academic engineers and read way too many of their papers), whitepapers and concept papers are also often published - there's nothing to indicate here that this was a reviewed journal article. It's just a formatted PDF.
The fact that this paper uses a very vanilla LaTeX format is almost taunting to academia. At least many other "whitepapers" (e.g. Gnosis) format theirs more like a corporate brochure.
Suggestion: implement a mandatory uploading fee (like a mandatory transaction fee), which is distributed among the miners who host the files. It should encourage people to dedicate more space to hosting files.
StorJ doesn't allow users to exchange coins for storage. Last I checked you had to buy storage from some kind of broker and conveniently, the only people running one were the StorJ devs themselves.
