15 ms·

Filecoin – A Cryptocurrency Operated File Storage Network

145 points by setra 10y ago

tyingq 10y ago
If it takes off, will be interesting to see how they deal with the inevitable questionable content and resulting DMCA takedown requests.
- Kinnard 10y ago
  Filecoin's actually been around for several years. I think Storj is based off of it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Ahh, thanks. Storj doesn't appear to support file sharing though, looks more like personal storage, which would make this less of an issue. Edit: Might want to put 2014 in the title.
    - Kinnard 10y ago
      I think filecoin's even older than that though this site appears to be from 2014.
      - Taek 10y ago
        I believe that Filecoin is from early 2014, same as Sia and Storj.
  - brador 10y ago
    In that case, how are they dealing with questionable content and resulting DMCA takedown requests?
  - super3 10y ago
    Filecoin whitepaper came out a few months before the Storj one. Filecoin however is not functional, while Storj has been functional for about 8 months.
- Taek 10y ago
  Takedown requests would need to be sent to the nodes holding the data or to servers holding links to the data. I don't think the dev teams or parent companies would have too much to worry about.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    At a high level, the idea seems to hinge on "incentive to hold the data". Dealing with DMCA becomes a disincentive.
Nutomic 10y ago
Seems to be the same as Sia [1]. Except that you can already use Sia today. [1] https://sia.tech/ https://sia.tech/
- iamgopal 10y ago
  What's your experience of it ?
infinisil 10y ago
I believe filecoin is going to be a part of IPFS [1] at some point in the future, but development hasn't started yet. I really hope all the decentralized technology is going to blow up. [1]: http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/
- api 10y ago
  I feel like it's approaching a tipping point. We have good decentralized networking, storage, currency, etc. A missing piece is decentralized compute at scale. That's hard, especially for security reasons. It's too bad Amazon branded "serverless" because lambda is not serverless. It's one big mainframe server. This stuff is serverless.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    There is https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
    - api 10y ago
      Yes, but I mean something more general purpose and developer friendly. If I'm writing a mobile app that needs heavy compute (too heavy for small mobile devices) can I distribute that compute across larger peers like desktops, NAS boxes, etc.? Not easily and not if it involves anything that anyone might ever want to attack or spy on.
      - saganus 10y ago
        Then that would require a breakthrough in FHE no? I believe current implementations would be way too slow for this. Or is there another way to outsource computation in a secure manner?
        hex-m 10y ago
        Another concept would be to slice your task it into small enough junks so that one would need many of them to extract meaningful information. That's not strictly secure, but nothing is. ;)
eptcyka 10y ago
This isn't anything novel. How are they different from https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/ ?
bogle 10y ago
Sia [http://sia.tech/]; http://sia.tech/]; filecoin; Storj [https://storj.io/]; https://storj.io/]; maidsafe [https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/]. Sounds like someone could do a good comparison article. Does anyone have any experience of using any of these? They do take quite a bit to set up compared to, say, Backblaze B2 or AWS S3.
- Taek 10y ago
  https://forum.sia.tech/topic/21/sia-vs-storj-vs-maidsafe https://forum.sia.tech/topic/21/sia-vs-storj-vs-maidsafe (I am the founder of Sia) Sia's key distinguishing feature is that it's the only platform today which is fully/properly decentralized. If the MaidSafe devs today disappear, I believe all the servers running MaidSafe go with them. If the Storj team disappears, payments stop entirely and anyone using the Storj bridge (most of their users) will not be able to access files. If the Sia devs disappear, everything will continue to work as it currently does (though, bugfixes and feature adds will stop) Sia distinguishes in two other major ways as well. First, we are the only platform that allows hosts to put up collateral - if a host loses your data, they don't just lose revenue they also lose collateral money that they put up as a promise to keep the data safe. Second, Sia is the only network that gives you full control over which machines your data ends up on. This is good if you want to run a CDN, need to comply with data laws, or have some other reason for favoring a particular region or set of hosts. I encourage you to dive deep in the technical details, I think you'll find that Sia is pretty far ahead of everyone else.
  - problems 10y ago
    Sia seems really cool - out of curiosity, is there a way to see the available storage prices on the network?
    - Taek 10y ago
      SiaPulse.com has some very rough estimates. The master branch client has a command 'siac renter prices' that will look at the network and estimate the costs. This feature hasn't been released yet because it's very recent. My client is saying $0.50 to create a set of contracts (needs to be done once every six weeks), $0.60 per TB to download from the network, $1 / TB / Mo to store data on the network, and $0.30 per TB to upload to the network. These prices include a redundancy of 3x in the upload and storage costs. Long term I expect prices to not be more than about 2x what they are today, though it really depends on how the supply-demand mechanics play out. It's a fully open and competitive marketplace.
INTPenis 10y ago
Isn't KBFS (keybase) also based on blockchain technology?
- mundo 10y ago
  I believe Keybase (the identity and key management tool) stores signatures on the BTC blockchain, but KBFS (the encrypted shared filesystem built on Keybase) does not, it is just S3 storage that they're offering as a freebie (10GB/user) to drive adoption.
jakeywankenobi 10y ago
I'm always curious about how things like this would do if an effort was made to market it to the general populace. The makers are all amped about the underlying tech (and rightfully so), but it's a hard thing to really care about outside that niche space. What if you hid all the underlying tech, layered on a good UX, and spoke to the value proposition?
homakov 10y ago
I know how hard it is to explain an outsider what your product does, but maybe you could try to explain to me who should be using it? Personally, I have enough space on my laptop.
- aiy4noh2eX 10y ago
  If you have "enough space" then you should technically be able to rent out some of the extra space to earn $
tromp 10y ago
I wonder how these proof-of-retrievabililty blockchains deal with the potential problem of miners injecting a ton of fake files (e.g. whose i'th block is H(secret||i)) into the system in order to boost their chances of being able to do a retrievabililty proof without actually needing storage. Is it simply a matter of mining rewards not being able to compensate for the cost of injection?
- Taek 10y ago
  Is there more than just Filecoin? Sia and Storj both only do file contracts, consensus is driven by other means (Proof of Work for Sia, Counterparty for Storj). As for Filecoin, I believe that it has several significant issues, both with the game theory (super linear returns when investing in hashrate and storage simultaneously - a massive centralization pressure), and with data withholding attacks (to mine on Filecoin, you need to have the Filecoin data. What if the existing miners decide not to give it to you?).
- tromp 10y ago
  I see this is answered in Section 2.7: "Altering the reward scheme must include careful analysis of the resulting market equilibria. For instance, if the currency is too inflationary, then attackers may benefit from adding large amounts of “dummy data” that they can easily reproduce without incurring the cost of storage (e.g., the outputs of a pseudorandom function for which they know the secret key), and thereby gain a net advantage in the challenge reward system over the long term."
xkxx 10y ago
Hmm, and their last activity on Twitter was 3 Nov 2015: https://twitter.com/MineFilecoin/with_replies https://twitter.com/MineFilecoin/with_replies. Why is it important? They provide Twitter and email newsletter as main ways to follow their news. If there was no activity for over a year, the project might be stalled.
lgierth 10y ago
The latest news on Filecoin is that it's being built on top of Ethereum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itb_2EMgBUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itb_2EMgBUI While Filecoin isn't available yet, IPFS and libp2p have been functional for more than two years, and can be used independently of Filecoin: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs && https://github.com/libp2p/libp2p https://github.com/libp2p/libp2p (IPFS dev here)
brilliantcode 10y ago
say you want to "sprinkle" cryptocurrency on a really bland idea. What is the fastest and cheapest way in doing so? Just so you can put "cryptocurrency" on your website to get marketing exposure. That's about the only value I see with the current crypto business. Hype.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
OJFord 10y ago
This looks really interesting, but the misuse of 'rent' all over the landing page is confusing at first, ("I get paid to use someone else's storage space?") and subsequently distracting.
vocatus_gate 10y ago
Prediction: Dead or abandoned in <= 2 years.
- verelo 10y ago
  I see you've heard of startups before... Seriously though, that is a likely outcome, but most good ideas do not sound like good ideas to begin with. My bigger concern here is the types of files people use this service for, and as distributed host of these files, what are the legal ramifications on me for doing this?
_prometheus 10y ago
Hey Everyone, thanks for the great discussion and excellent questions. Was surprised to see this rise up to FP, given we have not updated the site in ages. :] Thanks for the great discussion here! Unfortunately i can't give much in form of answers as time is super punishing right now :(. Good news is we're hard at work, and we'll have a big announcement within 2 mo. ;) See you then! --- Oh also, big shoutout to Sia, Storj, & Swarm. They're all doing solid work on this. One thing that we've been working on is how to increase collaboration, interop, and shared upside across our systems. Stay tuned! (I'm jbenet, of IPFS, Filecoin, & Protocol Labs)
- aiy4noh2eX 10y ago
  Is Filecoin going to have a token sale, and if so, any idea when? Will it be an ERC20 standard token?
vasili111 10y ago
Does anyone use one of the decentralized storage networks? Please tell us about your personal experience.

145 points by setra 10y ago

If it takes off, will be interesting to see how they deal with the inevitable questionable content and resulting DMCA takedown requests.

Kinnard 10y ago
Filecoin's actually been around for several years. I think Storj is based off of it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tyingq 10y ago
  Ahh, thanks. Storj doesn't appear to support file sharing though, looks more like personal storage, which would make this less of an issue. Edit: Might want to put 2014 in the title.
  - Kinnard 10y ago
    I think filecoin's even older than that though this site appears to be from 2014.
    - Taek 10y ago
      I believe that Filecoin is from early 2014, same as Sia and Storj.
- brador 10y ago
  In that case, how are they dealing with questionable content and resulting DMCA takedown requests?
- super3 10y ago
  Filecoin whitepaper came out a few months before the Storj one. Filecoin however is not functional, while Storj has been functional for about 8 months.
Taek 10y ago
Takedown requests would need to be sent to the nodes holding the data or to servers holding links to the data. I don't think the dev teams or parent companies would have too much to worry about.
- tyingq 10y ago
  At a high level, the idea seems to hinge on "incentive to hold the data". Dealing with DMCA becomes a disincentive.

Nutomic 10y ago

Seems to be the same as Sia [1]. Except that you can already use Sia today. [1] https://sia.tech/ https://sia.tech/

iamgopal 10y ago
What's your experience of it ?

infinisil 10y ago

I believe filecoin is going to be a part of IPFS [1] at some point in the future, but development hasn't started yet. I really hope all the decentralized technology is going to blow up. [1]: http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/

api 10y ago
I feel like it's approaching a tipping point. We have good decentralized networking, storage, currency, etc. A missing piece is decentralized compute at scale. That's hard, especially for security reasons. It's too bad Amazon branded "serverless" because lambda is not serverless. It's one big mainframe server. This stuff is serverless.
- adrianN 10y ago
  There is https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
  - api 10y ago
    Yes, but I mean something more general purpose and developer friendly. If I'm writing a mobile app that needs heavy compute (too heavy for small mobile devices) can I distribute that compute across larger peers like desktops, NAS boxes, etc.? Not easily and not if it involves anything that anyone might ever want to attack or spy on.
    - saganus 10y ago
      Then that would require a breakthrough in FHE no? I believe current implementations would be way too slow for this. Or is there another way to outsource computation in a secure manner?
      - hex-m 10y ago
        Another concept would be to slice your task it into small enough junks so that one would need many of them to extract meaningful information. That's not strictly secure, but nothing is. ;)

eptcyka 10y ago

This isn't anything novel. How are they different from https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/ ?

bogle 10y ago

Sia [http://sia.tech/]; http://sia.tech/]; filecoin; Storj [https://storj.io/]; https://storj.io/]; maidsafe [https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/]. Sounds like someone could do a good comparison article. Does anyone have any experience of using any of these? They do take quite a bit to set up compared to, say, Backblaze B2 or AWS S3.

Taek 10y ago
https://forum.sia.tech/topic/21/sia-vs-storj-vs-maidsafe https://forum.sia.tech/topic/21/sia-vs-storj-vs-maidsafe (I am the founder of Sia) Sia's key distinguishing feature is that it's the only platform today which is fully/properly decentralized. If the MaidSafe devs today disappear, I believe all the servers running MaidSafe go with them. If the Storj team disappears, payments stop entirely and anyone using the Storj bridge (most of their users) will not be able to access files. If the Sia devs disappear, everything will continue to work as it currently does (though, bugfixes and feature adds will stop) Sia distinguishes in two other major ways as well. First, we are the only platform that allows hosts to put up collateral - if a host loses your data, they don't just lose revenue they also lose collateral money that they put up as a promise to keep the data safe. Second, Sia is the only network that gives you full control over which machines your data ends up on. This is good if you want to run a CDN, need to comply with data laws, or have some other reason for favoring a particular region or set of hosts. I encourage you to dive deep in the technical details, I think you'll find that Sia is pretty far ahead of everyone else.
- problems 10y ago
  Sia seems really cool - out of curiosity, is there a way to see the available storage prices on the network?
  - Taek 10y ago
    SiaPulse.com has some very rough estimates. The master branch client has a command 'siac renter prices' that will look at the network and estimate the costs. This feature hasn't been released yet because it's very recent. My client is saying $0.50 to create a set of contracts (needs to be done once every six weeks), $0.60 per TB to download from the network, $1 / TB / Mo to store data on the network, and $0.30 per TB to upload to the network. These prices include a redundancy of 3x in the upload and storage costs. Long term I expect prices to not be more than about 2x what they are today, though it really depends on how the supply-demand mechanics play out. It's a fully open and competitive marketplace.

INTPenis 10y ago

Isn't KBFS (keybase) also based on blockchain technology?

mundo 10y ago
I believe Keybase (the identity and key management tool) stores signatures on the BTC blockchain, but KBFS (the encrypted shared filesystem built on Keybase) does not, it is just S3 storage that they're offering as a freebie (10GB/user) to drive adoption.

jakeywankenobi 10y ago

I'm always curious about how things like this would do if an effort was made to market it to the general populace. The makers are all amped about the underlying tech (and rightfully so), but it's a hard thing to really care about outside that niche space. What if you hid all the underlying tech, layered on a good UX, and spoke to the value proposition?

homakov 10y ago

I know how hard it is to explain an outsider what your product does, but maybe you could try to explain to me who should be using it? Personally, I have enough space on my laptop.

aiy4noh2eX 10y ago
If you have "enough space" then you should technically be able to rent out some of the extra space to earn $

tromp 10y ago

I wonder how these proof-of-retrievabililty blockchains deal with the potential problem of miners injecting a ton of fake files (e.g. whose i'th block is H(secret||i)) into the system in order to boost their chances of being able to do a retrievabililty proof without actually needing storage. Is it simply a matter of mining rewards not being able to compensate for the cost of injection?

Taek 10y ago
Is there more than just Filecoin? Sia and Storj both only do file contracts, consensus is driven by other means (Proof of Work for Sia, Counterparty for Storj). As for Filecoin, I believe that it has several significant issues, both with the game theory (super linear returns when investing in hashrate and storage simultaneously - a massive centralization pressure), and with data withholding attacks (to mine on Filecoin, you need to have the Filecoin data. What if the existing miners decide not to give it to you?).
tromp 10y ago
I see this is answered in Section 2.7: "Altering the reward scheme must include careful analysis of the resulting market equilibria. For instance, if the currency is too inflationary, then attackers may benefit from adding large amounts of “dummy data” that they can easily reproduce without incurring the cost of storage (e.g., the outputs of a pseudorandom function for which they know the secret key), and thereby gain a net advantage in the challenge reward system over the long term."

xkxx 10y ago

Hmm, and their last activity on Twitter was 3 Nov 2015: https://twitter.com/MineFilecoin/with_replies https://twitter.com/MineFilecoin/with_replies. Why is it important? They provide Twitter and email newsletter as main ways to follow their news. If there was no activity for over a year, the project might be stalled.

lgierth 10y ago

The latest news on Filecoin is that it's being built on top of Ethereum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itb_2EMgBUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itb_2EMgBUI While Filecoin isn't available yet, IPFS and libp2p have been functional for more than two years, and can be used independently of Filecoin: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs && https://github.com/libp2p/libp2p https://github.com/libp2p/libp2p (IPFS dev here)

brilliantcode 10y ago

say you want to "sprinkle" cryptocurrency on a really bland idea. What is the fastest and cheapest way in doing so? Just so you can put "cryptocurrency" on your website to get marketing exposure. That's about the only value I see with the current crypto business. Hype.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

OJFord 10y ago

This looks really interesting, but the misuse of 'rent' all over the landing page is confusing at first, ("I get paid to use someone else's storage space?") and subsequently distracting.

vocatus_gate 10y ago

Prediction: Dead or abandoned in <= 2 years.

verelo 10y ago
I see you've heard of startups before... Seriously though, that is a likely outcome, but most good ideas do not sound like good ideas to begin with. My bigger concern here is the types of files people use this service for, and as distributed host of these files, what are the legal ramifications on me for doing this?

_prometheus 10y ago

Hey Everyone, thanks for the great discussion and excellent questions. Was surprised to see this rise up to FP, given we have not updated the site in ages. :] Thanks for the great discussion here! Unfortunately i can't give much in form of answers as time is super punishing right now :(. Good news is we're hard at work, and we'll have a big announcement within 2 mo. ;) See you then! --- Oh also, big shoutout to Sia, Storj, & Swarm. They're all doing solid work on this. One thing that we've been working on is how to increase collaboration, interop, and shared upside across our systems. Stay tuned! (I'm jbenet, of IPFS, Filecoin, & Protocol Labs)

aiy4noh2eX 10y ago
Is Filecoin going to have a token sale, and if so, any idea when? Will it be an ERC20 standard token?

vasili111 10y ago

Does anyone use one of the decentralized storage networks? Please tell us about your personal experience.