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Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

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Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#41

Post by xur17 »

olah_1 wrote: post #11
Sargos wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sia seems like a Dropbox/OneDrive replacement whereas Filecoin is an incentivized storage layer infrastructure for apps to use, especially dapps. If you wanted to build a decentralized SoundCloud you couldn't use Sia but IPFS/Filecoin is the primary building block of such a dapp.

Sia released a new version of their product called Skynet[1] which provides exactly the functionality of IPFS+Filecoin today. Part of Skynet is a group of SDKs[2] which you can use to integrate skynet storage as part of your application. I believe that they are even adding the ability for developers to get kickbacks if they build on Sia[3]. If you do want something like Dropbox that is built on Sia, there is Filebase…

I'm curious to look at filecoin - last time I tried to use sia, it was still fairly rough around the edge (minimum file size, seed based recovery isn't automatic, etc).

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#42

Post by hndamien »

cgb223 wrote: post #5

How is Filecoin different from Sia coin? I remember a while ago hearing about both trying to decentralize storage but never kept up with it enough to really suss out the difference

Filecoin is secured by a proof of storage algorithm, Sia is secured by a proof of work algorithm. For a storage solution it arguably makes more sense to use storage.

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#43

Post by zepearl »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #29
zepearl wrote: post #24

General question: when somebody will push into Filecoin some "bad" files (anything, from docs needed by the mafia to children being sexually abused, to fake videos/claims/whatever about you, to any other bad things you can think of), how can that be detected and then deleted? (ignoring here the theme related to accountability) Question based on https://docs.filecoin.io/introduction/why-filecoin/ : Filecoin resists ce…

I think this is a serious problem - but probably not for the exact use case you list (mafia, sexually abused kids). It should be solved by allowing an "expensive" (a) "vote" (b) to override, or delete, or hide for a number of years. (a): expensive should discourage the option in general (b): proof-of-stake, proof-of-ownership, proof-of-work are some of the many ways in which you can define voting rights. Unfortunatel…

Thanks a lot for your brainstorming - some remarks are interesting.

But overall the root problem would still exist and the solutions would have to gather a majority - e.g. asking a "pool" to remove a video would mean for the "pool" to watch that video (to ensure that the claim is valid) and after the first experience (if it's child porn) we would all probably have to call a psychiatrist to help us overcome what we've seen => not feasible, it would actually destroy the pool's mental stability which is, in this concept, needed to evaluate the contents (videos in this example).

Edit:

Being ignored by some search engine would still be a no-go for me. Knowing that some personal data (general files, pics, videos, whatever) exists somewhere would make me feel absolutely NOK.

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#44

Post by acdha »

rudolph9 wrote: post #40
acdha wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider the Apple Photos app. It's on your phone, it's on your desktop, it's on the cloud (iCloud storage). Say you have so many photos they don't fit on your phone. When you try to access a photo that is not on your phone it gets it from icloud (these are literally features that are currently offered by photos/iCloud). Now suppose your desktop has lots of storage, you usually look at your photos while connected t…

> Working on things like this is really interesting but it involves a lot of work to handle unreliable clients or networks and bitrot (hashes don't solve this if your client helpfully replicates the bad sector from your desktop over the pristine copy on your phone). That overhead makes it a lot harder to beat conventional services, especially in cases where the time investment is greater than the possible savings. Th…

Can you expand that interoperability thought? It’s unclear to me how this could change the main obstruction of vendors choosing not to encourage interoperability - anyone who keeps their API locked down is unlikely to adopt standard IPFS.

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#45

Post by Proven »

thefounder wrote: post #38
filleokus wrote: post #31

I don't really get the point of decentralised _storage_ solutions, where the stated goal is to compete with ≈ S3 [0]. S3 storage pricing, for most users is just a rounding error compared to e.g egress or compute cost. And it has proven to be tremendously reliable, both in durability and access. No sane person would point a CDN against a Filecoin backed origin, right? For kinda-censorship resistant distribution of stu…

Fuck S3 and all the lords gating the internet. I think that's what decentralised web wants to say and I'm pretty much on its side.

You can run S3 at home and mirror data to encrypted container running the same in public cloud, genius.

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#46

Post by Dylan16807 »

filleokus wrote: post #31

I don't really get the point of decentralised _storage_ solutions, where the stated goal is to compete with ≈ S3 [0]. S3 storage pricing, for most users is just a rounding error compared to e.g egress or compute cost. And it has proven to be tremendously reliable, both in durability and access. No sane person would point a CDN against a Filecoin backed origin, right? For kinda-censorship resistant distribution of stu…

I understand your overall point, but when it comes to

> S3 storage pricing, for most users is just a rounding error compared to e.g egress or compute cost. And it has proven to be tremendously reliable, both in durability and access.

It's not like you can separate S3 storage costs from egress costs, though. I wish I could use S3 for storage but pay for my own bandwidth.

Even if you'll to go all the way to their network and plug a network cable in, well... They charge $7.40 a day for a gigabit port, and $54 a day for 10gig. That's on par with what many companies charge for transit to the actual internet, but fair enough. Oh, wait, I neglected the per-byte cost on top. The per byte cost that, for a mostly saturated port, is $210 or $2100 per day respectively.

And that's the cheap option.

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#47

Post by opportune »

One thing I'd like to see decentralized storage protocols guarantee is that not only does the data exist on the backend, but is it available enough to be useful, and if so, are the latency and bandwidth good. PoST might be able to solve this if it enforces a strict deadline on the answer and tests availability sufficiently frequently.

The other is some sort of authentication. Encryption of the data itself, IMO, is not good enough. In 10 years time I don't want a nation state or megacorporation with enough entangled qubits to be able to pwn all of my data. But distributed authentication as I understand it is a hard problem, because you probably need to make your authentication proof public, which creates a similar set of problems on the authentication itself.

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#48

Post by rudolph9 »

acdha wrote: post #44
rudolph9 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working on things like this is really interesting but it involves a lot of work to handle unreliable clients or networks and bitrot (hashes don't solve this if your client helpfully replicates the bad sector from your desktop over the pristine copy on your phone). That overhead makes it a lot harder to beat conventional services, especially in cases where the time investment is greater than the possible savings. Th…

Can you expand that interoperability thought? It’s unclear to me how this could change the main obstruction of vendors choosing not to encourage interoperability - anyone who keeps their API locked down is unlikely to adopt standard IPFS.

Essentially it's a separation of concerns. The content "address" (i.e. how we specify the content that is desired) and the content "location" (i.e. the connections which serve the content associated with an "address") are distinct.

An "address" is also self validating. Hash addressing, where a hash of the data is the address of the data, are use to accomplish this. This is useful in many contexts and an [extra few bits][1] on the the front allow an address to represent much much more.

"location" is by default a distributed hash table enabling the fulling distributed routing of content and by uses [Kademlia][0]. But the software could easily be configured to with fixed values for the hash table mapping any "address" to the same location which happens to be a cloud provider.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "anyone who keeps their API locked down is unlikely to adopt standard IPFS."?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia [2]: https://github.com/multiformats/cid#how-does-it-work

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#49

Post by foota »

opportune wrote: post #47

One thing I'd like to see decentralized storage protocols guarantee is that not only does the data exist on the backend, but is it available enough to be useful, and if so, are the latency and bandwidth good. PoST might be able to solve this if it enforces a strict deadline on the answer and tests availability sufficiently frequently. The other is some sort of authentication. Encryption of the data itself, IMO, is no…

Two thoughts:

One is that frequently verifying availability is going to get expensive quick with iops for coldish storage systems.

Secondly, iirc symmetric encryption isn't really vulnerable to quantum algorithms, as far as we know (and maybe even proven not to be?). It's asymmetric crypto that's at risk.

Re: Filecoin: Proof of Storage Systems

#50

Post by tgbugs »

filleokus wrote: post #31

I don't really get the point of decentralised _storage_ solutions, where the stated goal is to compete with ≈ S3 [0]. S3 storage pricing, for most users is just a rounding error compared to e.g egress or compute cost. And it has proven to be tremendously reliable, both in durability and access. No sane person would point a CDN against a Filecoin backed origin, right? For kinda-censorship resistant distribution of stu…

Thanks for the pointer to Gwern's writeup of timestamping. I have mentioned the idea on a number of occasions as a reasonable way to guard against investigator misconduct around tampering with data files and now have an excellent review article to point to!
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