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IPFS 0.5

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Re: IPFS 0.5

#61

Post by rglullis »

anchpop wrote: post #60
rglullis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am yet to write more about this, but one thing that bothers me with Filecoin: the economics don't add up. The price per GB stored will tend to reach an equilibrium around the commodity price - i.e, costs of disks+computers+electricity+internet. Unless I am missing something, if the price gets higher, more people would buy disks and put them online, bringing the price down. If that is true, it means that a node can…

That is actually the intent of filecoin. In perfect competition, which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. The reason Amazon and other companies are able to make a profit selling cloud storage is because there is not yet perfect competition. Right now if I wanted to compete with Amazon, I could buy 2 or 3 petabytes of storage space and some bandwidth. But nobody would trust me not to lose…

Your arguments do not follow:

> which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit.

No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded)

> While it is very hard to make an economic profit selling grain, many people do farm grain and many enough money.

The analogy here would be to get people to (a) "farm" disks (and electricity/internet) and (b) with some profit to justify their work. (a) is impossible (except for freeloaders) and you agree with me that (b) seems to be unlikely.

So the question is: who would be interested in taking the supply side of the filecoin network, when there is no profit to be made?

Re: IPFS 0.5

#63

Post by AgentME »

rglullis wrote: post #56
fg6hr wrote: post #46

IPFS is really just a mix of a torrent tracker with a torrent client, but once IPFS VMs start paying for themselves, people will sign-up in masses. I guess that's what Filecoin is about. Edit: The way I see filecoin working is anyone can post a reward for a file and once the file is provided, the reward is paid. In other words, it's bit like a brokerage that connects downloaders with uploaders. The difficultly is tha…

I am yet to write more about this, but one thing that bothers me with Filecoin: the economics don't add up. The price per GB stored will tend to reach an equilibrium around the commodity price - i.e, costs of disks+computers+electricity+internet. Unless I am missing something, if the price gets higher, more people would buy disks and put them online, bringing the price down. If that is true, it means that a node can…

If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks at home to offer enough disk capacity for everyone, then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts. If all that capacity gets used up, then supply and demand will cause the price to go up until more people add capacity. If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts, so the price of cloud hosting will be the upper bound on Filecoin hosting prices. Then anyone that can undercut the cloud hosts will be free to run their own Filecoin nodes, and the price will be pushed down as people do this.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#64

Post by rglullis »

AgentME wrote: post #63
rglullis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am yet to write more about this, but one thing that bothers me with Filecoin: the economics don't add up. The price per GB stored will tend to reach an equilibrium around the commodity price - i.e, costs of disks+computers+electricity+internet. Unless I am missing something, if the price gets higher, more people would buy disks and put them online, bringing the price down. If that is true, it means that a node can…

If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks at home to offer enough disk capacity for everyone, then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts. If all that capacity gets used up, then supply and demand will cause the price to go up until more people add capacity. If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts, so the price o…

> If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks (...) then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts

Ok. Agreed.

> If all that capacity gets used up, then supply and demand will cause the price to go up until more people add capacity.

Agreed.

> If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts.

Not necessarily. I can just buy more disks and run locally, whether for hosting my data or to sell the space on the network, which brings the price back to people-selling-spare-disk-space-for-cheap level.

> Then anyone that can undercut the cloud hosts will be free to run their own Filecoin nodes, and the price will be pushed down as people do this.

Yeah, but that is kind of my point. Everyone will undercut each other until the price hits the bottom. The equilibrium will be at most the commodity price.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#65

Post by AgentME »

jude- wrote: post #53
willscott wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship / availability is the issue. As you lay out, Sybils can be used to target a specific address / piece of content in an attempt to prevent it from being found. The good news is that there are some pretty mechanical things - like maintaining a consensus of known-trusted nodes that can be used to validate a node/piece of content isn't under attack - that should be sufficient until IFPS is quite a bit larger th…

> The good news is that there are some pretty mechanical things - like maintaining a consensus of known-trusted nodes that can be used to validate a node/piece of content isn't under attack - that should be sufficient until IFPS is quite a bit larger than it is today What would I be trusting the nodes for? If I'm trusting them to just keep my data available, then why not just put it into S3? What role is IPFS playing…

IPNS names are based on public keys. A sybil attack can't make an IPNS name resolve to an arbitrary attacker-chosen value because the attacker can't make signatures for the public key.

A sybil attack could be used to cause part of the network to see a recent old value for an IPNS name, but clients keeping recent values cached for a while is already something that happens naturally, so it just seems like a more minor example of the general problem that a sybil attack could do a denial-of-service.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#66

Post by scoopertrooper »

rglullis wrote: post #61
anchpop wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually the intent of filecoin. In perfect competition, which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. The reason Amazon and other companies are able to make a profit selling cloud storage is because there is not yet perfect competition. Right now if I wanted to compete with Amazon, I could buy 2 or 3 petabytes of storage space and some bandwidth. But nobody would trust me not to lose…

Your arguments do not follow: > which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded) > While it is very hard to make an economic profit selling grain, many people do farm grain and m…

> No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded)

You could hardly say a market dominated by a giant state-sanctioned cartel was a good example of a commodity market in the state of perfect competition.

> So the question is: who would be interested in taking the supply side of the filecoin network, when there is no profit to be made?

There would likely be some short term economic profits at the beginning, which would attract market entrants. The economic profit would tend to zero over time, but keep in mind economic profit as a concept incorporates the notion of the entrepreneur paying themselves a competitive wage for their time.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#67

Post by rglullis »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #66
rglullis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your arguments do not follow: > which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded) > While it is very hard to make an economic profit selling grain, many people do farm grain and m…

> No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded) You could hardly say a market dominated by a giant state-sanctioned cartel was a good example of a commodity market in the state of perfect competition. > So the question is: who would be interested…

> giant state-sanctioned cartel...

Point still stands. All else being equal, oil from Saudi Arabia is the same as the oil from Canada or Denmark. If you don't want to use oil as an example, use coffee, milk, chicken meat, soy, cotton, oranges, electricity, potable water...

> There would likely be some short term economic profits at the beginning, which would attract market entrants.

The first market entrants are the ones selling extra capacity they have. For those that already have sunk costs of the disks, sure, they can make a profit on this. My point is that once that capacity is gone and there is more demand for data, people will have to actually go and buy disks and let them run 24/7, and this would cost more per GB stored than they will be able to sell.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#68

Post by tribler »

carapace wrote: post #42

I really really want to use this, I have used it in the past. It works great as far as I could tell except for one thing: bandwidth limits[1]. Now I can do this myself, because I'm all "+337" and what not. (I used trickle as described in the comment[2]. Seemed to work fine. Nice and stable.) But I can't recommend Joe and Jane Consumer to install IPFS and some other thing with a straight face, because they'll say, "We…

plus IPFS wants to enforce copyrights worldwide: [1,2] Businesses principles plus monthly bandwidth usage matter for real people.

[1] https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/code-of-conduc...

[2] https://discuss.ipfs.io/tos#8

Re: IPFS 0.5

#69

Post by johntash »

tribler wrote: post #68
carapace wrote: post #42

I really really want to use this, I have used it in the past. It works great as far as I could tell except for one thing: bandwidth limits[1]. Now I can do this myself, because I'm all "+337" and what not. (I used trickle as described in the comment[2]. Seemed to work fine. Nice and stable.) But I can't recommend Joe and Jane Consumer to install IPFS and some other thing with a straight face, because they'll say, "We…

plus IPFS wants to enforce copyrights worldwide: [1,2] Businesses principles plus monthly bandwidth usage matter for real people. [1] https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/code-of-conduc... [2] https://discuss.ipfs.io/tos#8

I'm not sure if I understand the complaint around this.. If you put a file (that you do not have permission to distribute) on the internet in a public-accessible location, you should expect that someone will want it removed.

IPFS is not trying to be an anonymous file-sharing service afaik.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#70

Post by keeganpoppen »

ncmncm wrote: post #55
echelon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware. The creator occasionally pokes fun at the Rust folks for arguing that Envoy should have been written in Rust. And rightly so--Rust wasn't mature at the time Envoy was written. If we revisit that now, C++ is the wrong language to start Envoy in today.

Citation needed.

a citation is most definitely not needed. it's obviously a fucking opinion. and they are under absolutely no obligation to meet your standard of proof to demonstrate anything to you. clearly citations are not a necessary condition to posting-- this comment has no citations, but yet... hey look-- it's been posted! the horror!

classic HN obnoxious "citation needed" commentary strikes again. i swear i'm just gonna keep doing this every time i see this... until i get bored and give up, i guess.

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