Live data from Hacker News

What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

filecoin.io

31–40 of 66 posts

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

#31

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.

That's the other way you get paid in Filecoin, payment channels for retrieving files. Although it's not technically "mining" it's easier to think about Filecoin having two types of miners: Storage and retrieval. Since it's incentivized there's a good chance you'll get your files back quickly if you're willing to pay more or if it's a common file.

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

#32

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…

What's the purpose of sealing?

If I'm understanding it correctly, it's to ensure that you've actually set aside that disk space for the Filecoin network (instead of using it yourself).

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

#33

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…

What's the purpose of sealing?

Sealing ensures that miners have a unique replica of a given piece of data on their disk. Since we're basing block producer power on storage, we need to protect against a number of attacks such as people generating the data on the fly, or deduplicating data on disk (claiming to have 100TB but only having a single 1TB file 100 times).

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

#34

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 went through that list and can’t recognize any of those names. Most of them seem clones of “ but on ipfs”.

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

#35

Like so many cryptocurrency projects, Filecoin just seems like a solution in search of a problem more than anything else. What exact problem is Filecoin trying to solve that's not possible with current infrastructure? It seems like the decentralization adds a lot of overhead and complexity for no benefit. The main argument that I hear is that somehow Filecoin will be cheaper than centralized competitors. However, ser…

I don't want to start a business that pays a cloud service for storage. I want to write an application and set it free on the internet to run all by itself.

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

#37

Like so many cryptocurrency projects, Filecoin just seems like a solution in search of a problem more than anything else. What exact problem is Filecoin trying to solve that's not possible with current infrastructure? It seems like the decentralization adds a lot of overhead and complexity for no benefit. The main argument that I hear is that somehow Filecoin will be cheaper than centralized competitors. However, ser…

Like other cryptos, Filecoins founders don't get rich off existing and usually better solutions.

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

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So I guess for 32GB, it's:

- Sealing: Done once. 3-4h compute on one CPU initially, plus 2-3 hours on a few CPUs.

- Proof of space time: 10 minutes of GPU time per day.

What are the latency expectations within the system when my node is asked for a Proof of SpaceTime? Is it feasible to keep the sealing data, delete the file itself, then spend ~5 minutes downloading the 32GB on my 1 gigabit/sec home Internet connection when someone asks me to do the Proof of SpaceTime, and return the Proof of SpaceTime in 15 minutes (5 min to download, 10 min to compute)?

Thanks again for engaging with me here! It seems the compute time itself isn't a constant enormous cost necessarily.

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

#39

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).

Gun is currently a pile of shit. Anyone saying otherwise hasn't used it. The sole founder and developer is a very nice person, but it's the reality of Gun tech right now.

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

#40

Like so many cryptocurrency projects, Filecoin just seems like a solution in search of a problem more than anything else. What exact problem is Filecoin trying to solve that's not possible with current infrastructure? It seems like the decentralization adds a lot of overhead and complexity for no benefit. The main argument that I hear is that somehow Filecoin will be cheaper than centralized competitors. However, ser…

Storing and serving files a lot cheaper and more reliably than current cloud providers seems like something people actually want.

Yes, but does Filecoin actually get you there? And if so, how and why?
Post reply on HN