HN Gopher Feed (2017-07-19) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
104 points by aboodman
https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf___________________________________________________________________
niahmiah - 4 hours ago
storj.io
Veratyr - 3 hours ago
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.That level of centralization is unacceptable.
sharemywin - 4 hours ago
I still go back to this paper for questions about decentralized
storage:http://blog.dshr.org/2017/07/is-decentralized-storage-
sustai...
nemo1618 - 1 hours ago
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.
immad - 3 hours ago
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.
also_on_sunday - 3 hours ago
pfraze wrote a nice response to that post the other day:
https://medium.com/blue-link-labs/in-response-to-is-decentra...
darawk - 3 hours ago
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.
zzzcpan - 3 hours ago
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.
Ajedi32 - 2 hours ago
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.
viraptor - 1 hours ago
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.
Ajedi32 - 1 hours ago
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.
FRex - 8 minutes ago
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.
viraptor - 49 minutes ago
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.
calafrax - 3 hours ago
There is another macro-economic issue here:With a decentralized
trustless system you have to assume a higher failure rate for
nodes than with a central trust based system.If you assume a
higher failure rate you have to replicate data more extensively
to achieve reliability.If you have to replicate data more
extensively then decentralized will always be more expensive than
centralized.
wmf - 3 hours ago
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.
zzzcpan - 3 hours ago
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.
calafrax - 3 hours ago
> You achieve reliability with erasure codes, not with more
replicationIf 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.
sharemywin - 2 hours ago
you could achieve some trust through a reputation system.
the longer you've been reliable the more reliable you are.
zzzcpan - 2 hours ago
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.
sktrdie - 4 hours ago
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".
BraveNewCurency - 3 hours ago
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?"
nerdponx - 4 hours ago
I don't think this or any paper like it pretends to be academic
or scientific.don't call them papersThis 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".
Xcelerate - 3 hours ago
> 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.
gajeam - 4 hours ago
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.
repomies6999 - 4 hours ago
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.
sktrdie - 4 hours ago
Actually there were experiments in the original Bitcoin paper.
And it would've probably passed a workshop-related setting for
academia.More than the academic presentation though, I'm just
baffled by the lack of science that these projects with huge
followings have.
product50 - 4 hours ago
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.
zdkl - 3 hours ago
Care to elaborate on the "intuitive sense" part?
wmf - 3 hours ago
It's a math paper so I would expect proofs, not experiments. But
interesting conjectures are still valuable even if they haven't
been proven yet.
achileas - 3 hours ago
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.
kleebeesh - 2 hours ago
How does it compare to maidsafe? https://maidsafe.net/Maidsafe made
some noise in early 2014 but I haven't heard much from them since.
strictnein - 4 hours ago
Opening up my hard drive to store unknown materials? Imagine
trying to explain any of this to a cop, judge, or jury.
stebalien - 3 hours ago
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.
Zahlmeister - 1 hours ago
>> 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.
strictnein - 1 hours ago
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.
[deleted]
viraptor - 45 minutes ago
> 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.
jethro_tell - 3 hours ago
Don't worry man, blockchain.
kyledrake - 2 hours ago
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://e
n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
strictnein - 1 hours ago
And when you tell the judge that you don't even have the
ability to take down the offending material, what then?
stebalien - 1 hours ago
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.
FooHentai - 1 hours ago
But you do, as far as your own hosting of that data is
concerned - You shut off your node and delete your data
store.
GhotiFish - 1 hours ago
out of curiosity, who is this judge talking to again? A
storage node?
aboodman - 3 hours ago
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.
Govindae - 3 hours ago
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.
strgrd - 3 hours ago
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.
Govindae - 3 hours ago
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.
calafrax - 3 hours ago
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.
svara - 2 hours ago
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.
diggan - 24 minutes ago
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?
JohnnyConatus - 12 minutes ago
"If you could make a brown fizzy drink faster and cheaper than
Coca-Cola, why wouldn't everyone buy it?" Rebuttal: store brand
soda.Welcome to branding / advertising / marketing.
colordrops - 2 hours ago
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.
Zahlmeister - 1 hours ago
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?
lgierth - 2 hours ago
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.
[deleted]
JohnJamesRambo - 3 hours ago
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.
tenebrisalietum - 26 minutes ago
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.
sandov - 25 minutes ago
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).
Ajedi32 - 3 hours ago
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.
hudon - 2 hours ago
"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.
Ajedi32 - 2 hours ago
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.
viraptor - 2 hours ago
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.On the other hand, you could spend some money and
guarantee it instead: https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/
hbk1966 - 6 minutes ago
Also if people ever stop using the service your files
could be gone forever.
Zahlmeister - 1 hours ago
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.
hudon - moments ago
> files could be broken up into shards and distributed
across multiple nodesYou 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 solutionIt'll always be cheaper
for someone to sell their hard drive than to sell access to
their hard drive, just like it is cheaper for most 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 1000gb of space being offered. At that point,
because of economies of scale, it will cost Alice less to
maintain 1000gb then the total cost of 1000 people hosting
1gb each (eg. reduce total electricity cost because of bulk
purchase).Now, Alice can grow her operation so big (say,
10,000gb) 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 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
100TB 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.Alice is now
AWS.
wmf - 3 hours ago
What if it was 1/10th the price of normal storage?
RobertoG - 3 hours ago
redundancy? storage of public assets? because is fun?
aboodman - 3 hours ago
If it works, it's going to drive the price of storage to near
cost. So you'd use it because it will be dramatically cheaper
than the alternatives.
alikoneko - 3 hours ago
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.
strgrd - 3 hours ago
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?
easytiger - 1 hours ago
From 9 hours ago: https://etherscan.io/address/0xb3764761e297
d6f121e79c32a6582...
leshow - 3 hours ago
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?
_ar7 - 3 hours ago
All those machines are owned by Google or Apple though. They're
not completely random machines.
theschwa - 3 hours ago
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.
hollander - 3 hours ago
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?
theschwa - 3 hours ago
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.[0] http://swarm-
gateways.net/bzz:/theswarm.eth/
bjoveski - 2 hours ago
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.
greenshackle2 - 1 hours ago
> allowing you to reconstruct the file if any subset of
the nodes is online.Any subset? Surely there's some
minimum number of nodes (>1) that need to be online.
Unless each node has a complete copy.
zippoxer - 2 hours ago
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.
lend000 - 3 hours ago
They are most likely encrypted with your public key, no?
idle_zealot - 3 hours ago
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.
[deleted]
colejohnson66 - 3 hours ago
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.
theschwa - 3 hours ago
I believe that's what projects like Filecoin and Swarm are
trying to solve. How do you incentivise long term storage of
these files.
tyrust - 3 hours ago
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.
zippoxer - 2 hours ago
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.
equalunique - 2 hours ago
>my data won?t go missing because the p2p network decided to
stop seeding my fileIt'd blame Apple & Google for not being
p2p seeds.
nyolfen - 3 hours ago
well, it sounds like this is not the application for you.
Goodlooking - 4 hours ago
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.
mtgx - 3 hours ago
Have they announced the ICO yet? Or has it already passed?
lgierth - 3 hours ago
Token sale is gonna start on the 27th, here's more info:
https://protocol.ai/blog/ann-filecoin-token-sale-and-new-pap...
eco - 12 minutes ago
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.1.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp
binocarlos - 4 hours ago
so perhaps Ethereum miners will sell their graphics cards and buy
disks?
gremlinsinc - 4 hours ago
How is this different from Siacoin?
AlexCoventry - 3 hours ago
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
lgierth - 3 hours ago
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
storageYeah, Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime, to be
precise.
Kubuxu - 4 hours ago
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.It is also accompanied by an announcement of
the Filecoin Token Sale: https://protocol.ai/blog/ann-filecoin-
token-sale-and-new-pap... which will begin on July 27th.