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What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

filecoin.io

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Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#21

Post by p1necone »

klodolph wrote: post #15
p1necone wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're always paying for power regardless of whether you're offering your unused drive space on a distributed system.

Hard drives consume less power when idle, like CPUs.

I imagine that extra power consumption has to be less than the combination of non idle HDDs and all of the other infrastructure at backblaze, no? And they're still going to be idle most of the time.

And there's the added likelihood that people providing hdd space on filecoin are not going to even measure the impact of extra power consumption, they're just going to notice the revenue. (Not that this is a good thing, if someone was losing money, they should know)

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#22

Post by marknadal »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #18

Whats missing is proof of delivery, and thats the most important thing. I'm not just paying AWS to store my files, I'm paying them to deliver my files. Maybe this could work as an alternative to glacier. But even then, I doubt it. I'd take Amazon with an SLA any day of the week.

Correct, this is what we solved for.

I gave a presentation at Berkeley a few years back, right before Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) presented his Chia proof, Proofs of Space and Time (before IPFS ripped the name from Bram).

https://www.facebook.com/BlockchainatBerkeley/videos/2006069...

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#23

Post by marknadal »

NickBusey wrote: post #17
darkcha0s wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting “millions of end users” from? A quick google search doesn’t return anything, and that seems a lot for a relatively unknown project

IPFS is by no means 'relatively unknown'. It is used in dozens of projects. See: https://github.com/ipfs/awesome-ipfs

I think parent was saying the projects using IPFS are relatively unknown, so where are the millions come from?

I have the same question.

In contrast, GUN, has 20M+ downloads/month from known sources: Internet Archive, HackerNoon, etc. (https://github.com/amark/gun see jsdelivr download stats).

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#24

Post by aakilfernandes »

marknadal wrote: post #22
aakilfernandes wrote: post #18

Whats missing is proof of delivery, and thats the most important thing. I'm not just paying AWS to store my files, I'm paying them to deliver my files. Maybe this could work as an alternative to glacier. But even then, I doubt it. I'd take Amazon with an SLA any day of the week.

Correct, this is what we solved for. I gave a presentation at Berkeley a few years back, right before Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) presented his Chia proof, Proofs of Space and Time (before IPFS ripped the name from Bram). https://www.facebook.com/BlockchainatBerkeley/videos/2006069...

Sorry, who is "we"? And got a writeup anywhere?

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#25

Post by chrisco255 »

thulecitizen wrote: post #10

Filecoin's Proof of Replication sounds similar to Valueflo.ws and Holochain's asset backed currencies. Let's go full distributed computing and use mutual credit while we're at it. Otherwise we're just going to carry forward the broken dynamics and assumptions of the current economy.

What is "Mutual Credit"?

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#26

Post by chrisco255 »

whyrusleeping wrote: post #20
paulproteus wrote: post #16

It seems that Filecoin fundamentally relies on a proof-of-work type system called "sealing." The article calls it "an intense amount of work" that you must do in order to host a file. Does anyone have any estimates or comparisons for the CPU/energy consumed?

Its currently looking at about 4 hours of single core CPU time, plus 2-3 hours more of using many cores for a 32GB sector. The difference between sealing and an actual proof of work based network here is that once you've sealed a sector, you don't have to keep computing anything that expensive. If you seal 1TB and thats 1% of the network, you should win 1% of the blocks (ignoring network growth) without further seali…

What's the purpose of sealing?

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#27

Post by marknadal »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #24
marknadal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, this is what we solved for. I gave a presentation at Berkeley a few years back, right before Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) presented his Chia proof, Proofs of Space and Time (before IPFS ripped the name from Bram). https://www.facebook.com/BlockchainatBerkeley/videos/2006069...

Sorry, who is "we"? And got a writeup anywhere?

https://web.stanford.edu/~nadal/A-Decentralized-Data-Synchro...

https://era.eco/

http://axe.eco/

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#28

Post by paulproteus »

whyrusleeping wrote: post #20
paulproteus wrote: post #16

It seems that Filecoin fundamentally relies on a proof-of-work type system called "sealing." The article calls it "an intense amount of work" that you must do in order to host a file. Does anyone have any estimates or comparisons for the CPU/energy consumed?

Its currently looking at about 4 hours of single core CPU time, plus 2-3 hours more of using many cores for a 32GB sector. The difference between sealing and an actual proof of work based network here is that once you've sealed a sector, you don't have to keep computing anything that expensive. If you seal 1TB and thats 1% of the network, you should win 1% of the blocks (ignoring network growth) without further seali…

Cool!

So then, dumb question. Can I delete the file, keep the "seal", and keep winning 1% of the blocks?

If yes, then that seems bad for the system.

If not (hopefully), I'd like to also understand what's the ongoing compute cost of using the seal plus file together.

I understood from the article that sealing is something you do if you are publishing a mirror of a file. Is that right?

Feel free to get bored of this conversation and link me to a paper or something. :) I'm grateful for the reply you gave above already.

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#29

Post by notthegunlobby »

marknadal wrote: post #23
NickBusey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS is by no means 'relatively unknown'. It is used in dozens of projects. See: https://github.com/ipfs/awesome-ipfs

I think parent was saying the projects using IPFS are relatively unknown, so where are the millions come from? I have the same question. In contrast, GUN, has 20M+ downloads/month from known sources: Internet Archive, HackerNoon, etc. ( https://github.com/amark/gun see jsdelivr download stats).

lol it's not a HN post about a decentralized project without marknadal shitting on it and shilling GUN. got a running bet it always happens, and you don't disappoint <3 -- keep it up!

Re: What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

#30

Post by whyrusleeping »

paulproteus wrote: post #28
whyrusleeping wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its currently looking at about 4 hours of single core CPU time, plus 2-3 hours more of using many cores for a 32GB sector. The difference between sealing and an actual proof of work based network here is that once you've sealed a sector, you don't have to keep computing anything that expensive. If you seal 1TB and thats 1% of the network, you should win 1% of the blocks (ignoring network growth) without further seali…

Cool! So then, dumb question. Can I delete the file, keep the "seal", and keep winning 1% of the blocks? If yes, then that seems bad for the system. If not (hopefully), I'd like to also understand what's the ongoing compute cost of using the seal plus file together. I understood from the article that sealing is something you do if you are publishing a mirror of a file. Is that right? Feel free to get bored of this co…

Nope, thats where the second Proof comes in. PoSt (Proof of SpaceTime) periodically challenges miners to verify that they have the data they claim to. Since replicas are expensive (slow) to compute, and the challenge window is short, this verifies that the miners in question have not deleted their sealed replicas.

The ongoing compute cost for these PoSts are quite small, I think the current numbers (obviously subject to change) are that you have to do one PoSt per day, which is a single 100M constraint zkSNARK proof, which should take about 10 minutes of machine-with-decent-GPU time to compute.

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