Run LLMs at home, BitTorrent‑style

Large storage systems already do this. RAID is a type of erasure coding. Various enterprise storage systems use hashing for data integrity.

Distributing the data over a larger number of systems can actually be more efficient because the percentage of erasure blocks you need goes down as the number of independent devices increases. For example, if you only have two devices and want redundancy, you need a mirror and lose 50% of your capacity. If you spread the data across 200 devices you might achieve an even higher level of resilience by sacrificing only 25% of capacity so you can lose any 50 devices without data loss. You may get this down even further by periodically checking if a device is still available and replacing it, so the number of devices you can lose can be as low as the maximum number of devices you expect to lose simultaneously.

> That only works if the attacker cannot make big gains from a single cheat after a period of building reputation. There's a reason why this isn't being used in the wild by blockchains...

Blockchains are a different thing.

If you have a GPU and to start out with everything you produce is checked, you get 50% of what the customer pays. If you have a good reputation then only e.g. 1 in 10 of your output is checked, so you get ~90% of what the customer pays, but to do that you have to accept 50% for e.g. 100 transactions.

You can now defect, but you have a 10% chance of being detected each time, so you can expect to only get to do it 10 times. So you get a 90% payment ten times without doing work, then have to go back to getting a 50% payment 100 times. 10 times 90% is way less than 100 times 40%, so if you do this you lose money.

> Yes, it costs too much to operate, and it's too cheap as a product so operators are losing money.

Do you know what the overhead of the network actually is? Trying to put it together from multiple sources seems to imply that miners get paid ~$8/TB/year but storage costs ~$2/TB/year. Which I assume I'm doing wrong somehow, because it would imply negative overhead and therefore a huge arbitrage opportunity.

I'm guessing the real number is less than 50% overhead, because there are obvious ways to do it at least that efficiently, but even that isn't huge when you can avoid expenses for marketing and customer support. Which implies that the problem is this:

> The only reason why there's an offering at all is that some people invested lots of money on hardware in 2021 when the token price was 50 times higher (but then the storage cost was prohibitive).

Which is a self-solving problem. The unprofitable providers go out of business until the price makes it profitable. But that seems like it should happen quicker than this if the profitability isn't there, because storage is fungible. Even if you bought a bunch of drives to do this when the price was higher, you could sell them and go put the money in a traditional investment. Or if you're speculating on the value of Filecoin going up, sell your storage and use the money to buy Filecoin. So the people still doing it are presumably turning a profit even at current prices, whether through economies of scale or because they had "free" storage to use.

> Barely anyone using it despite a price so low that it doesn't even allow operators to break even, how is that supposed to be a success?

It causes very inexpensive storage to be available, which is useful.

You don't expect to lose "almost all of them" at the same time. Even if the price crashes, you would expect capacity to go down over a period of days or weeks, not minutes. And then if a fraction of the data is lost but is less than the number of erasure blocks, you promptly reconstruct it and put it on a different node.

Meanwhile you would expect an equilibrium here. The price going down forces some providers out of the market, but providers leaving the market brings the price back up. As long as the customer is offering as much as some providers need to stay in the market, somebody is hosting the data. That only stops if the customer won't bid what the providers need to get, at which point the customer transfers their data out of the system so they can stop paying more than they're willing to.

Now, you can screw this up if you make your system sufficiently convoluted so the price signal doesn't make it from the customer to the provider or vice versa, and I'm not familiar enough with the specific implementation in Filecoin to comment, but screwing that up isn't inherently necessary for this category of system.

> the problem is that a node could voluntarily fuck up the calculations when/if it advantages them.

Which is why you duplicate some of them at random, and don't tell them when you're going to do it. The calculations are deterministic. If you distribute one to two random nodes and they don't get the same result, but they've each signed their own result, now you know one of them defected and can prove which one by doing that calculation yourself or doing some other potentially expensive operation that only happens when there is an inconsistency. At which point the defector is found out, you can prove it, and their reputation is in ashes.

> Yet barely anyone uses it, which empirically question its “usefulness”.

It seems to be storing more than a exabyte of data for someone.

> their capital is essentially illiquid[1]

> [1] and I don't get were you got the idea that storage was “fungible”, the failure rate going up exponentially over time makes storage a poor fit for the second-hand market, especially if people know that you've been running stressful proof of space-time on it, and if you're trying to fire-sale a Petabyte of storage, chances are high that people will figure that out

It's fungible because a used hard drive is a commodity product with a wide customer base. That new ones cost more than the used ones doesn't make it not a commodity; you could have bought the used ones to begin if you're content to continue running them at their current age.

Let me know if you're aware of some place you can buy working >=16TB drives, used or otherwise, for less than ~$100 each in 2023.

Bringing the XIXth century equilibrium economics here is kind of hilarious, when it has been far out of the equilibrium price for the past two years. Node runners are already losing money, and have been doing so since the end of the bull run. The value of the FIL token isn't so much derived from an equilibrium in the supply and demand for storage, it's driven by the supply and demands of the coin on the crypto market, and if nodes start to give up in any meaningful fashion over the course of a few days or weeks, the crypto market will likely negatively react, driving the price of the token even lower. In the crypto markets, Keynes' animal spirit is in charge, nobody makes rational utility calculation.

> At which point the defector is found out, you can prove it, and their reputation is in ashes.

If I can make more money out of a single adversarial attack than it costs me to build up reputation, then who cares, I'll be doing it over and over again any day.

> It seems to be storing more than a exabyte of data for someone.

It is in fact storing a exabyte of “data” for “someone”. Compare that with BitTorrent, that was used by everyone and their mom before governments started to fight it. BitTorrent was voluntary only and was a massive success. Filecoin is for profit and a failure.

> It's fungible because a used hard drive is a commodity product with a wide customer base.

Try and sell 10PB of PoST-worn-out hard drives and see how long it takes. It's far from liquid.