Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 243 posts

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#61

Post by kaminokura »

dumbfounder wrote: post #51
pavlov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bad news is that Diamond was able to correlate to status, a strong (if subjective) value that is part of humanity since always. BTC only appeal is its value as money ... Startup idea: Bitcoin wedding rings. A beautiful gold ring with a private key engraved on the inside. Give your loved one the gift of BTC! Your commitment to each other, eternalized on the global blockchain. Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but the…

I had this idea a few weeks ago. I think it would sell, but how do you tie the ring to the bitcoin effectively?

Maybe like Rare Pepes and PepeCash.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#62

Post by ghostly_s »

soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

I'm confused. Are you talking about diamonds, the precious gemstone? Why are you capitalizing it?

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#63

Post by [deleted] »

keymone wrote: post #58
pcwalton wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is a poor solution to the problem of transferring money: it's slow, power-inefficient, controlled by an oligopoly of miners, and vulnerable to scams.

Because it’s not a primarily solution to transferring money, it’s primarily decentralized, trustless and censorship-resistant solution to that. Of course centralized solutions are cheaper and more efficient.

[deleted]

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#64

Post by api »

eco wrote: post #56
synctext wrote: post #11

[Author here] short answer taken from our .PDF file: "Considering that Dropbox [53] currently holds around 500 petabytes of user data [54], one could argue that Filecoin is overvalued." Study we conducted with a master student at Delft University of Technology. Open lab notes when writing this paper: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/3097 Note TUDelft has currently 8 professors in their http://blockchain-lab.…

Dropbox feels like the wrong thing to compare it to. IPFS isn't really for storing files privately. Public S3 buckets would be closer. I don't have any numbers to say if it's overvalued based on how much public cloud storage there is (I wouldn't be surprised if it were though).

Storage costs are hyper-deflationary. We have a NAS on a desk with 27 terabytes of storage and it cost under $1000 (with drives) and consumes about 40 watts of power. Ten years ago this would have cost closer to $5000-$10000 and consumed hundreds of watts of power. We bought it about a year and a half ago and already we could replace it for less than $500.

The idea of distributed storage at the edge is interesting but it's not something that would cost $250 million to build. We could probably build a friendly system for doing this for under $500k in developer time.

It's also a mystery how efforts like MaidSafe or whatever it's called this week have never managed to ship anything after getting multiple multi-million-dollar golden showers. Distributed storage of immutable content-addressable blobs is not that hard of a problem. BitTorrent kind of solved it long ago, albeit with a different UI/UX metaphor and use case. Just take those ideas and pivot them a little and wrap them around the S3 UI/UX metaphor and add payment channels or some other accounting mechanism and you're done. You don't necessarily need the sexiest tech. In fact sexy tech probably makes it more fragile and harder to use. DHT + hashing + RAID-type redundancy techniques + wallets will do it.

Everyone over-thinks and over-engineers things these days and it drives me crazy. Stop it. Intelligence is for the things you can't do, not for doing the things you can already do in more baroque ways. Intelligence is also for simplification. Complexification is stupidity.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#65

Post by nemo1618 »

saas_co_de wrote: post #22
jstanley wrote: post #2

Filecoin is a huge disappointment to me. IPFS is fantastic technology, but the main developers getting sidetracked with yet another scammy ICO is the last thing we need.

I see two drawbacks to the technology: 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 assumptio…

Sia addresses both of these.

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.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#66

Post by _jal »

saas_co_de wrote: post #38
_jal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) Is true. For data worth less than the risk of your cloud vendor doing something you don't like with it, well, economics, as always, applies. For (2), there's nothing preventing nested encryption, if your threat model dictates.

Nested encryption doesn't change anything. The nested encryption scheme would have to be perfect as well, which is also a bad assumption. 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 t…

> The nested encryption scheme would have to be perfect as well, which is also a bad assumption.

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.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#67

Post by SippinLean »

chvid wrote: post #13

Are they not all (bitcoin, eth etc.) ponzi schemes?

You're aware that a Ponzi has a very specific definition, more specific than "scam," correct?

Neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum have a central operator generating returns for older investors by disproportionately funneling revenue paid by new investors to them. When the price rises, new and old investors profit equally. You could use BTC as a currency in a Ponzi, Bitcoin being a Ponzi would be impossible by definition.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#68

Post by [deleted] »

pcwalton wrote: post #53
keymone wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, bitcoin is actually solving a real world problem, unlike diamond. Seems way too much effort and thinking for a ponzi, I mean the result is actually groundbreaking work.

Bitcoin is a poor solution to the problem of transferring money: it's slow, power-inefficient, controlled by an oligopoly of miners, and vulnerable to scams.

[deleted]

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#69

Post by loceng »

qubex wrote: post #44
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

I agree with everything you say, except the idea that it is zero-sum. It is very nonzero-sum insofar as the bulk of the purported value of the system derived from revaluation and windfall: much of the $158 billion market cap of bitcoin derives not from outright transactions at market value (and thus conversion of assets from one form to another with face-value liquidity) but from revaluation of coins purchased at low…

Should we say instead that it has benefit all sellers, no benefit simply for holding? That misappropriation or mischaracterization will of course comfort everyone holding - until everyone tries to liquidate too quickly or investor money runs out.

The scary part is that because it is global and decentralized, it could take a long time for investor money to run out - allowing enough time for manipulation through marketing et al to bring this more and more mainstream, potentially forcing the unreasonable wealth transfer weighted towards the earlier adopters; simply the idea of lobbying and bribing politicians is enough to understand how society could be forced to adopt crypto-assets that are incentivized this way. The solution, if blockchain's core values end up being legitimate, is to have the State/government require its use, in a version that has a fixed price or at least not incentivized in the way that the most popular brands are - Bitcoin, Ethereum's Ether, etc.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#70

Post by superbrama »

keymone wrote: post #60
superbrama wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, early computer pioneers also engaged in groundbreaking work. A huge mainframe filled with vacuum tubes seems to fit here. That’s bitcoin, currently, but for “magic internet money”. The bandwidth, throughout, and power utilization are what you might expect from such a first generation technology experiment. The benefits of bitcoin are eclipsed by the meteoric rise, and this price increase is the basis for most ne…

1) those mainframes got people to the moon 2) nothing in bitcoin protocol precludes it from adopting more efficient solutions when such appear, what people seem to miss is that proof of work itself and energy spent securing the ledger will always correlate with value stored

1) So, a worldwide payment solution requires a spaceship, but we have first generation mainframes currently. Bitcoin is the biggest of those mainframes, uses the most energy, etc.

2) You touched upon two independent considerations.

Yes, bitcoin can evolve technologically, but it’s not assured.

Energy spent is based on incentive. Value stored isn’t directly correlated, that’s a result of price which results from buyers and sellers, which results from sentiment. Now we get into disparate supply and demand based on information advantage.

Energy utilization as it correlates to some incentive to expend such energy for monetary gain is indirectly coupled to the stored value. Other factors affect this. The market is not efficient, it behaves, pricewise, like many markets before it.

Greatest bubble of our generation, but admittedly quite the clever one. The truth is that some Silicon Valley insiders amongst other movers and shakers saw bitcoin’s potential early on for such a rise to where we are now (and possibly way more), by design and precisely because they control the narrative. It’s been exploited by smart folks. If you had the means, foresight, and motivation, you were in a privileged position to transfer wealth to yourself. Now, this is not the case.

Real people get hurt by the economic cycles we’ve seen and bitcoin is, for some, a way to be robin hood in that long time narrative.

Post reply on HN