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

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

#111

Post by hobofan »

rightos wrote: post #12
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.

It's interesting to see many of Filecoins promises realized already in alternatives like Sia or Storj, but Filecoin still takes the hype, despite not having anything released, let alone anything superior... I guess because it's by the IPFS developers and had a big flashy ICO?

> I guess because it's by the IPFS developers

And is intended to run on an IPFS network. After reading the replies to this comment, I started looking into Sia, and wanted to try it out, but it seems that I first have to buy some Sia before even being able to become a host (!), which is an instant turnoff.

At the same time, I am already able to try out IPFS and have been able to develop apps using it for quite some time. I am not sure what the plans are with Filecoin, but IPFS also has a default-public (hosting) use case, while as of now Siacoin has private-only.

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

#112

Post by mswiss »

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.

This and that there is a hard upper limit on the amount of bitcoin available. There will be no QE of bitcoin.

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

#113

Post by tfha »

dheera wrote: post #86
whyrusleeping wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, ipfs dev here. The amount of work being done on ipfs has been increasing continually. Work on filecoin is not detracting from ipfs development, and we are bringing on more people for ipfs, libp2p and filecoin.

Just a thought here, but perhaps the ICO wasted them less time than months of meetings trying to raise funds with angels and VCs. You could say Filecoin is a distraction, but in trying to raise seed money, 50 VCs arranging 100 meetings, 5 verbally committing to you a measly $1M each and negotiate over investment terms while you try to live on ramen, and then 3 out of the 5 backing out in the process, is arguably a MU…

If you think doing traditional fundraising is bad, you should try doing an ICO. Easily 5x worse.

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

#114

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

I think the top comment for this should be about Filecoin, instead of just another uninformed comments about Bitcoin that we see here every day.

That said, one thing most people don't talk about is: I think most people think IPFS is disruptive, but I think IPFS itself is susceptible to disruption.

The main reason why IPFS is useful is because there's not an easy way to do NAT traversal therefore it's super hard for people to run their own server on their laptop or mobile devices.

IPFS introduces all kinds of technologies to get around this, but in my opinion the ability to freely set up your own server on your device is the core problem.

You don't really need a globally addressable immutable file storage, because unless you're dealing with static images, a lot of files DO change all the time, and people want to store and share files privately.

Which means, if there's a new type of technology that lets people do just that--set up their own server anywhere and make it accessible via HTTP--then I don't see why we really need IPFS. This could be done by startups or other protocols, but even by some innovative ISPs, which decide to change their business model to compete against edge nodes that capture most of the value (such as Google, Facebook, etc.)

In my opinion, the reason IPFS is so hot nowadays is because it's riding the DApps wave where people want to build Ethereum apps with IPFS as a file storage. But after playing around with it a bit I think it's much better at this point to just use Github to host your file and use Ethereum as database because the whole point of immutable apps is in the data and transactions, not in the static files.

But I would love to be corrected. If anyone actually think IPFS is essential to DApps, feel free to correct me and educate me.

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

#115

Post by xapata »

weddpros wrote: post #73
santoshalper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but I think we all can say with some certainty that "a token intended to be used as currency should not regularly increase or decrease in value by 20% or more in a matter of days or weeks". Who on earth would actually spend any Bitcoins right now? If you'd bought a Pizza with BTC back in 2010, you could have bought a car (or house?) instead only several years later. This type of volatility makes it totally unsu…

"Who on earth would actually sell any Bitcoins right now" (spend and sell have the same effect)... yet in the market, there's a seller in front of every buyer. Regarding stuff being priced in BTC, prices are falling when BTC is rising. Who doesn't like lower and lower prices? That pizza used to cost 50,000 BTC, it's only 0.0003 BTC today! Bitcoin is a deflationary currency.

> a seller

I'm curious how many sellers. When someone quotes a dramatic increase in housing prices in a city, that's not just a single house.

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

#116

Post by yanivtal »

whyrusleeping wrote: post #43
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.

Hey, ipfs dev here. The amount of work being done on ipfs has been increasing continually. Work on filecoin is not detracting from ipfs development, and we are bringing on more people for ipfs, libp2p and filecoin.

Hey I've been reading a lot of your code in libp2p. Thanks for your amazing contributions to opensource!

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

#117

Post by api »

synctext wrote: post #98
jacquesm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to see this downvoted, if this were reddit there'd be some reddit gold right here.

> never managed to ship anything after getting multiple multi-million-dollar golden showers. It's more then just linking hard-disks. It is really hard to build the incentives and market part. Read for instance about our operational prototype from 2014, "Towards a Peer-to-Peer Bandwidth Marketplace", https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-45249-9_...

So ship the first thing then do the second thing. You get two things from this. First, your storage system gets battle tested. Second, you get the credibility of joining the ranks of those who can actually ship quality software.

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

#118

Post by rklaehn »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #114

I think the top comment for this should be about Filecoin, instead of just another uninformed comments about Bitcoin that we see here every day. That said, one thing most people don't talk about is: I think most people think IPFS is disruptive, but I think IPFS itself is susceptible to disruption. The main reason why IPFS is useful is because there's not an easy way to do NAT traversal therefore it's super hard for p…

If your app is hosted on github, it is not really distributed. And Ethereum is extremely limited as a database.

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

#119

Post by 0x4f3759df »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #114

I think the top comment for this should be about Filecoin, instead of just another uninformed comments about Bitcoin that we see here every day. That said, one thing most people don't talk about is: I think most people think IPFS is disruptive, but I think IPFS itself is susceptible to disruption. The main reason why IPFS is useful is because there's not an easy way to do NAT traversal therefore it's super hard for p…

More of an addendum than a correction, the Akasha project is an ETH & IPFS project that looks interesting https://akasha.world/

What can you do with Akasha from the FAQ "You can publish, share and vote for entries, similar to Medium and other modern publishing platforms, with the difference that your content is actually published over a decentralized network rather than on our servers."

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

#120

Post by whyrusleeping »

yanivtal wrote: post #116
whyrusleeping wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, ipfs dev here. The amount of work being done on ipfs has been increasing continually. Work on filecoin is not detracting from ipfs development, and we are bringing on more people for ipfs, libp2p and filecoin.

Hey I've been reading a lot of your code in libp2p. Thanks for your amazing contributions to opensource!

Thank you! that means a lot :)
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