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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]

#211

Post by product50 »

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…

Looking at my dropbox, Also, you started by warning against uninformed comments about BTC but your comment on FC seems uninformed itself - especially the last 2 paragraphs which go into hardcore speculation category.

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

#212

Post by Retra »

pavlov wrote: post #41
PetoU wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that jewelry should have a property of showing off, so hidden private key wouldn't work that well. You need to have some mechanism how to show status. And that nicety factor was driven mostly by women decorum.

That's just a question of recognizable design and enough marketing spend, i.e. branding. It's well known that people pay a major premium for things solely because they have words printed on them like "Calvin Klein", "Guess?" or "YSL". Jewelry branding is actually easier to make visually recognizable than clothes.

People don't pay a premium for the label, they pay a premium for the middlemen who host the label, because that is a presumably exclusive group and culture that they have access to.

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

#213

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

product50 wrote: post #211
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…

Looking at my dropbox, Also, you started by warning against uninformed comments about BTC but your comment on FC seems uninformed itself - especially the last 2 paragraphs which go into hardcore speculation category.

Feel free to tell me what I got wrong then. There's a difference between informed speculation and uninformed. Uninformed speculators draw conclusions from what they heard elsewhere. I tend to think I drew the conclusion as independently as I can.

I've thought a lot about this problem so I don't think I'm uninformed about this matter. This is not to say I'm right, and as I mentioned, I would love to be corrected, which was the reason why I posted the comment to begin with.

But just saying "you're uninformed yourself" doesn't help anyone.

Also I said:

> a lot of files DO change all the time, and people want to store and share files privately.

Unless you really think IPFS should be compared to Dropbox, your comment about your dropbox usage is irrelevant to this thread. I'll assume that you are aware IPFS is completely public by default and dropbox is for private usage by default (although you could use it for public sharing, it's not the intended usage for dropbox). The closest you can compare IPFS to is on S3 level, not dropbox level.

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

#214

Post by tomasien »

regulation_d wrote: post #160
throwawayico wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sophisticated private investors took bets on this with eyes wide open Bullshit.

So you're saying that Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Winklevoss Capital didn't know what they were getting into?

Yeah exactly. Anyone who has engaged with the protocol knows there are huge unknowns - they're acknowledged in the whitepaper. They have theoretical solutions which are often discussed in public on Github and Gitter, and they've gotten past many large hurdles already as a team. I think there's a chance.

Importantly, if Filecoin were usable right now to guarantee storage and retrievability of files, I have use cases I'd use that for right this second.

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

#215

Post by lgierth »

derefr wrote: post #208
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people don't want their own server. Yes and No. It is true people don't want their own server because it's too much hassle to set up and maintain, with not much upside. But we've never actually experienced this so nobody really knows whether people will want this or not. Nobody knew we needed a touch screen phone that works as a computer either. You can only tell AFTER such a thing becomes available. > No, bec…

> In case you're still thinking your iPhone is a crappy computer, No, the iPhone in your pocket is already performant enough to function as a full fledged server. It's the network that doesn't support it. A crappy computer, no; a crappy server , yes. The available network is part of a server. A URL that points to a machine that can't be accessed whenever the owner goes into a tunnel, is a URL nobody will link to. (An…

> A crappy computer, no; a crappy server, yes. The available network is part of a server. A URL that points to a machine that can't be accessed whenever the owner goes into a tunnel, is a URL nobody will link to.

This is one of the very points that IPFS tries to address: decoupling content from location, so that additional copies of the same content in different locations of the network can actually strengthen the content's availability, instead of being non-addressable and thus wasted.

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

#216

Post by api »

notahacker wrote: post #195
api wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bikeshedding this some more because HN is for bikeshedding... I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will evolve into socialism. It would be a form of socialism we haven't seen yet and that would have been technologically impossible in the past. Capitalism's role is to develop the technology, wealth, and infrastructure to enable it... as Marx said. Tech titans, start…

I'm trying to see how small numbers of bourgeois nerds running energy intensive get-rich-quick schemes - often with the help of billionaire backers - resembles the Marxian concept of the proleteriat fighting to gain the full benefit of their day's labour and struggling tbh...

You're right. I'm not talking about Bitcoin but about the technology and understanding that it represents. Bitcoin itself is a proof of concept project that's unfortunately become a silly bubble.

Forget about coins or even currency. Consider what these systems are doing. They are giving you trust and coherence without authority.

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

#217

Post by api »

kodablah wrote: post #197
api wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird to see Tor as a connectivity solution. I guess if you really don't care about performance.

At the least it's a good NAT buster for signalling. May be able to piggy back a direct connection off of it (using it for just STUN-like reasons) but of course the increased performance of a direct connection comes at the cost of anonymity.

There are lots of better NAT busters that are way faster and more versatile.

Of course I'm partial because I made one: https://www.zerotier.com/

There are others ways too like libp2p, webrtc, etc.

Tor is an anonymity layer. By definition this requires worst case routing and artificially added latency, since if latency is low you can triangulate. Anonymity and efficient direct connectivity are antagonistic goals in a system.

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

#218

Post by emmelaich »

okket wrote: post #191
api wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

> we could replace it for less than $500 27 Terabytes of spinning rust with NAS hardware for $500? Not yet.

The sweet spot for drives is the 4Tb at about $100[1].

Seven of those will give you 28 raw Tb with $300 left over for case and power supply.

So not impossible.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

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

#219

Post by chrishacken »

kodablah wrote: post #170
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…

> 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 I have a ton to say here, but I'll keep it to a few point. Tor onion services solve the setup-your-own-server issues, it's just not super easy yet. IPFS is needed regardless, because there is a need to distribute things when your m…

This is my first time discovering IPFS, so pardon if this my question is obvious/addressed elsewhere.

At what point does the "network" become too small. I.e. if your computer can only reach 10,000 devices... are those 10,000 devices supposed to be able to have access to all data for the entire world? (albeit out of date)

The scenario I'm thinking of here is similar to if Alaska suddenly got cut off from the rest of the world for a week, month, year.

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

#220

Post by _jal »

saas_co_de wrote: post #144
_jal wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If that is true for your security model, then encryption is always pointless for you I don't think that is true. If your first line of defense is physical security that doesn't mean you don't use crypto. The person who can break your physical security can't necessarily break your crypto. Even if the crypto isn't perfect it may be good enough. The point is that no one in the real world relies on crypto only. Everyon…

I think we have some conversational difficulties (using words differently, perhaps different understandings of what's going on) that is making it hard to have a decent discussion, so I'm going to conclude with where I think we agree.

Some system roughly like this has potential use cases, even if it may be unsuitable for others. While I wouldn't expect a public company to store their financials in it, there is a lot of data that is held less tightly out there.

And more speculatively, "The street finds its own uses for things." Who knows what obvious-in-restrospect thing emerges. Maybe after 10 years and some evolution, commercial software and data systems live in a system like this and purchases are ledger operations, so the user-base of a given product becomes the distribution platform.

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