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.
Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
71–80 of 170 posts
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
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/
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#75Opening up my hard drive to store unknown materials? Imagine trying to explain any of this to a cop, judge, or jury.
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 si…
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.
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
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.
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#77Opening up my hard drive to store unknown materials? Imagine trying to explain any of this to a cop, judge, or jury.
No need to imagine. There's an enormous amount of case law here. It has repeatedly been upheld that hosts are not liable for hosted content published by others (at least in the US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
And when you tell the judge that you don't even have the ability to take down the offending material, what then?
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
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.
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
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.
Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
#80I still go back to this paper for questions about decentralized storage: http://blog.dshr.org/2017/07/is-decentralized-storage-sustai...
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.