Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)

I think I could get excited about FileCoin if it allowed me to pool storage with friends and colleagues. I've been wanting to have a distributed hacker-garage for a while [0].

Importantly, I want it to be independent of any cloud provider because (1) it's hard to freely experiment/prototype when you have to keep track of billing and (2) functional centralization makes the AWS/GCE admin de facto responsible for everything running under the account. This is great for large enterprises that want to virtualize their IT department, but it really goes against the grain for hackers, freelancers, and -- IMHO -- startup founders.

Returning to Filecoin, I feel like all the *coin ventures make the same fundamental mistake of over-estimating how much we care about money. I really don't care about pimping out my hard-drive for a couple of cents. I'm motivated by gains on the order of several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. The counter-argument I usually hear is that there will be more interest in developing nations, but then I don't want to store my data in e.g. Pakistan. I want data for pet projects in my own hacker-garage, and I want production data close to the end-user.

/rant

[0] Incidentally, I'm working on a project to do exactly this. It's a way of clustering a set of computers over the internet to produce a virtual cloud. It would be super cool to use FileCoin as a block storage layer in this context, but restricted to the hardware we own.

Let's say the entirety of YouTube was decentralized in a way that every internet connected device plugged in to the wall starts sharing watched content to other viewers who want to watch that content. If it's your neighbor, they'll download it straight from you, via the closest router/hub. Suddenly the company's hosting is more providing a "core archive" of data, and every user becomes a edge node of that content. Internet providers can, if they chose, pre-share content they think will be popular, in order to speed up their own infrastructure, and so on.

I'm not saying this is bullet proof or anything, I just think you're too quick to dismiss it without really saying why you think it's impossible (or "virtually certain").

though most of the punches land toward the end, it is a fascinating and short read, in which she dissects, with the sober disappointment of a former optimistic evangelist, exactly why structureless ("decentralized" before that term became vogue) movements are never what they claim to be, and indeed cannot be.

why? because structureless coordination of groups above a handful members doesn't scale beyond the achievement of the simplest kinds of goals, such as consciousness-raising (or, in crypto-promoter terms, spreading "adoption").

any group objective requiring specialization of labor, coordination of resources and responsibility inevitably succumbs to the insidious creep of informal, but officially disavaowed structural networks of insiders.

it is especially pernicious for newcomers, who have been heavily messaged about "decentralization" or "structurelessness" and engage themselves with the groups identity without any awareness of these cryptic back channel networks that actually govern its operation. only after they are committed do they slowly find out there really is a hierarchy and a command structure.

i highly recommend a quick read for anyone considering the merits of a given groups' claims of being decentralized.

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I assume all these decentralized storage systems are datacenter-based so I'm comparing random Chinese datacenters vs. FAANG datacenters.