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Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

filecoin.io

121–130 of 170 posts

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#121
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the CTO of any Fortune 100 company what they're doing to mitigate such an outage. What do you think they will answer? Option A: cross-region replication, regular backups, and secondary service provider failover plan Option B: decentralize everything on people's laptops

There's nothing I love more than a chicken or egg argument. Nobody is doing B because there isn't a company that has a scalable B option yet. But hey, your argument is totally valid, which is why everyone is still programming in Cobalt!

[deleted]

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#122
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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."

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#123
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the CTO of any Fortune 100 company what they're doing to mitigate such an outage. What do you think they will answer? Option A: cross-region replication, regular backups, and secondary service provider failover plan Option B: decentralize everything on people's laptops

There's nothing I love more than a chicken or egg argument. Nobody is doing B because there isn't a company that has a scalable B option yet. But hey, your argument is totally valid, which is why everyone is still programming in Cobalt!

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.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#124
post #117

Unfortunately, one of the important citations ([5], "Proof of Replication") does not appear to be available. (Or, at least, Google cannot find it.)

Citations 14 and 15 also seem to be unpublished, and are all by the same authors.

Seems like important sections of this paper were not ready in time for them to perform their ICO.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is there not room in the market for multiple solutions? Both Dropbox and a decentralized solution can co-exist.

What I'm saying is that these are not actually big selling points for a general audience.

I'm not saying it's not viable at all, but the distributed aspect alone requires a certain amount of popularity to sustain it.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#126

How is this different from Siacoin?

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.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#127
post #113
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1…

Siacoins calculator at http://sia.tech/ is claiming a price of $2/TB/month vs $23/TB/month for Amazon S3. However it neglects to include Backblaze's B2 storage which is only $5/TB/month - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html 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 cryptocurren…

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.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#128

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.

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.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#130
post #45

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.

How would a market driven solution not drive centralization? Datacenters are cheaper.
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