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Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]
- sktrdie 9y agoComing from academia, these sort of papers would not pass any sort of double-bind peer review process. Where's the actual science? Where are the experiments? It seems to be just a document describing the protocol of Filecoin, which is fine. The problem is that all these "whitepapers" coming from these cryptocurrency communities seem to be promoted as scientific papers, but in reality do not stand a chance in any science/academic-related setting. I'd wish they'd give more attention towards the science, if there's any. Otherwise, hey, sure it's just a PDF on some site - but don't call them "papers".
- gajeam 9y agoThe fact that this paper uses a very vanilla LaTeX format is almost taunting to academia. At least many other "whitepapers" (e.g. Gnosis) format theirs more like a corporate brochure.
- repomies6999 9y agoAlso satoshi nakamotos original bitcoin whitepaper wouldn't pass as academic paper. However it still is veey useful at explaining the basic idea behind bitcoin. In this context whitepaper means a little bit different thing than in scientific context.
- sktrdie 9y agoActually there were experiments in the original Bitcoin paper. And it would've probably passed a workshop-related setting for academia. More than the academic presentation though, I'm just baffled by the lack of science that these projects with huge followings have.
- product50 9y agoPlease be honest. When the original Bitcoin or Ethereum whitepapers came out, wouldn't your original comment, of these wp not passing any science/academia setting, still ring true then? Also, even if they don't pass an academia setting, what is your point? So many papers actually pass academia setting but does it do anything worthwhile? Filecoin is a project in existence for the past 3yrs working on top of IPFS, a popular file sharing protocol, and being built by a venture funded startup. Its founder has a vision of a decentralized future which makes intuitive sense.
- zdkl 9y agoCare to elaborate on the "intuitive sense" part?
- nerdponx 9y agoI don't think this or any paper like it pretends to be academic or scientific. don't call them papers This is ridiculous and elitist. Papers outside of peer reviewed academia can and do exist. If anything, academics ought to qualify what they mean when they say "paper".
- Xcelerate 9y ago> Coming from academia, these sort of papers would not pass any sort of double-bind peer review process. Where's the actual science? Where are the experiments? Also coming from academia, I'm surprised with the amount of crap that makes it through "peer review". And there's nothing wrong with concept papers as long as they don't purport to be more than that. Lastly, I don't think the review stage is ever truly double-blind. In a niche field, you almost always have some idea of who the paper's authors are.
- achileas 9y agoAlso coming from academia, experimentation is not necessary for publication - both reviews and observational studies exist and are published in peer reviewed journals quite often. In engineering (although I worked in neuroscience, I worked with many academic engineers and read way too many of their papers), whitepapers and concept papers are also often published - there's nothing to indicate here that this was a reviewed journal article. It's just a formatted PDF.
- BraveNewCurency 9y agoMeh. This article doesn't claim to be a scientific paper, so I don't see any reason to complain. I understand that some people will be confused because it has similar formatting to a "scientific" paper. But what are we going to do about it? Regulate LaTeX templates? On the other hand, this is massively better to what normal corporate types call a "whitepaper" (usually just a glossy brochure that tells you nothing new.) > Where are the experiments? The experiments are in the markets. :) I.e. "here's a new coin, will it make money?"
- wmf 9y agoIt's a math paper so I would expect proofs, not experiments. But interesting conjectures are still valuable even if they haven't been proven yet.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Goodlooking 9y agoSuggestion: implement a mandatory uploading fee (like a mandatory transaction fee), which is distributed among the miners who host the files. It should encourage people to dedicate more space to hosting files.
- binocarlos 9y agoso perhaps Ethereum miners will sell their graphics cards and buy disks?
- gremlinsinc 9y agoHow is this different from Siacoin?
- AlexCoventry 9y agoFileCoin is using proof of storage of client data for blockchain ledger security. That's a very tricky thing to get right (I didn't think it was possible.) Search the white paper for "Sybil attack, outsourcing attacks, generation attacks", and see section 7.4 of the SiaCoin whitepaper for contrast: https://www.sia.tech/whitepaper.pdf https://www.sia.tech/whitepaper.pdf
- lgierth 9y agoFilecoin and its underlying protocol IPFS assemble the world’s knowledge and data into one big content-addressed graph (Merkle DAG), and attempt to make it accessible to any device, anywhere. This is great because it allows for all kinds of use cases apart from just securely storing and sharing files. It’s much more than an app: it’s an underlying protocol, rather than Dropbox on a blockchain. > FileCoin is using proof of storage Yeah, Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime, to be precise.
- Taek 9y agoConsidering that they have three important citations of the paper unpublished, I think it's okay to continue to be skeptical that they have achieved their claims. This paper is not complete, and on it's own does not demonstrate that they have solved the problem. It is always trivial to simulate storing client data that you don't have. So you'd have to invent a system where simulating client data is equally expensive to storing real client data. But, simulating client data can always be done deterministically using a seed, which means you don't actually have to store the data. So you have to prove that generating client data is equally expensive to storing it, if not more expensive. Given that legitimate client data can literally be all zeros, I don't see how you can achieve this without some overhead. That overhead will make you less competitive than Sia, which doesn't have the overhead. I haven't yet gotten to the point where I fully understand proof-of-spacetime, but that is hard when the paper is literally referencing unpublished work. But I'm skeptical they have solved the generation / simulation attack.
- Kubuxu 9y agoThis whitepaper is the first overview of updated Filecoin protocol. More details about specific components of Filecoin (like Proof-of-Replication, Proof-of-Spacetime) will be released in future in their own publications. It is also accompanied by an announcement of the Filecoin Token Sale: https://protocol.ai/blog/ann-filecoin-token-sale-and-new-paper/ https://protocol.ai/blog/ann-filecoin-token-sale-and-new-pap... which will begin on July 27th.
- niahmiah 9y agostorj.io
- Veratyr 9y agoStorJ doesn't allow users to exchange coins for storage. Last I checked you had to buy storage from some kind of broker and conveniently, the only people running one were the StorJ devs themselves. That level of centralization is unacceptable.
- sharemywin 9y agoI still go back to this paper for questions about decentralized storage: http://blog.dshr.org/2017/07/is-decentralized-storage-sustainable.html http://blog.dshr.org/2017/07/is-decentralized-storage-sustai...
- immad 9y agoBasically the same reason that bitcoin mining is becoming centralized by a small set of miners in China. At least there is a benefit to being close to the requestor in terms of bandwidth/latency so as long as the network rewards that storage should be more decentralized than mining.
- also_on_sunday 9y agopfraze wrote a nice response to that post the other day: https://medium.com/blue-link-labs/in-response-to-is-decentralized-storage-sustainable-a5f797e7d1f0 https://medium.com/blue-link-labs/in-response-to-is-decentra...
- darawk 9y agoI think this argument fails even by its own standards. It applies equally well to Bitcoin mining, and while there is clearly some centralization there, it is still quite decentralized. At least, decentralized 'enough'. Secondly, storage is fundamentally different than other commodities. The decentralized storage market is more like AirBnB, where you're consuming the excess capacity of capital. Most people have tons of storage already that they're not using. Extracting rents from that space is found money, and therefore they have inherently lower costs than anyone supplying storage in a commercial way.
- zzzcpan 9y agoWhy do you think decentralized storage could ever work on excess capacity? I cannot imagine any incentive for it. It's either profitable enough to do it on a dedicated capacity, kind of like a hosting company, but without all the hassle and marketing. Or it's a burden.
- 9y ago
- strictnein 9y agoOpening up my hard drive to store unknown materials? Imagine trying to explain any of this to a cop, judge, or jury.
- stebalien 9y agoHow is this any different from what Amazon does? They don't manually inspect all uploaded files. Instead, they rely on legal protections given to service providers. Filecoin miners can do the same by (a) registering as service providers and (b) complying with blacklists and takedown notices as mandated by their legal jurisdiction. Note: Filecoin miners don't just store arbitrary files assigned by the network; they sign contracts with specific clients to store specific files. The only difference from Amazon is that the network itself enforces these contracts.
- strictnein 9y agoAmazon has an army of lawyers, a well written TOS, an identifiable customer, and a corporate shield. They also have the ability to take down offending material.
- doingmyting 9y agoNot to mention a near endless pile of cash to fight any legal challenge for eternity
- Zahlmeister 9y ago>> Filecoin miners can do the same by (a) registering as service providers and (b) complying with blacklists and takedown notices as mandated by their legal jurisdiction. That would be a huge overhead to be replicated across participants, driving out smaller players, lowering the "distributed" aspect of the system, creating larger points of failure and increasing the price.
- viraptor 9y ago> The only difference from Amazon is that the network itself enforces these contracts. No, the difference is that Amazon's contacts can identify the buyer and they're actual, legal contacts. They also have terms and conditions. Miners have contacts in terms of what the network is doing, which have nothing to do with contracts as understood by law. These are two meanings which just happen to use the same word.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoI'm still confused why I would want my storage to be decentralized. No I don't want my files spread on thousands or millions of computers no matter how encrypted etc.
- RobertoG 9y agoredundancy? storage of public assets? because is fun?
- alikoneko 9y agoThis is the reason I can't take Silicon Valley too seriously. It isn't the magic algorithm, it is that no sane person would want Pied Piper's storage because it does just what you said in the context of the show.
- strgrd 9y agoThe same reason I can't take Ethereum seriously. Do people seriously trust, or want an unproven hypervisor running code remotely on their hardware/network?
- easytiger 9y agoFrom 9 hours ago: https://etherscan.io/address/0xb3764761e297d6f121e79c32a65829cd1ddb4d32 https://etherscan.io/address/0xb3764761e297d6f121e79c32a6582...
- leshow 9y agoWhat do you think Apple or Google does with your files after they are uploaded? Do you think they aren't encrypted and spread out over several machines?
- _ar7 9y agoAll those machines are owned by Google or Apple though. They're not completely random machines.
- mtgx 9y agoHave they announced the ICO yet? Or has it already passed?
- lgierth 9y agoToken sale is gonna start on the 27th, here's more info: https://protocol.ai/blog/ann-filecoin-token-sale-and-new-paper/ https://protocol.ai/blog/ann-filecoin-token-sale-and-new-pap...
- eco 9y agoOne disappointing but also reassuring thing about the Filecoin ICO is that it's only open to accredited investors[1]. It shows they are doing it right and legal but that unfortunately locks out non-millionaires. 1. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp
- svara 9y agoThis sounds interesting academically, but what I don't understand (I have the same problem with Siacoin, StorJ and Swarm) is: You could build a Dropbox clone where users have the option of contributing storage to get rewarded with real currency. Why would anyone want to use the decentralized version instead, both as a user and as a contributor of storage? The decentralized version is going to be much harder to get right for the developers, and why should the users believe that the technology is trustworthy? I just don't see the advantage, but I would be truly interested in hearing what I may be missing.
- colordrops 9y agoBecause once they do get it right, it's open source and no one can take it away. A centralized system can and most likely will eventually degrade and disappear. Also, privacy.
- Zahlmeister 9y agoI believe the market right now tells you that people value neither redundancy (creating business for file recovery services) nor privacy all that much. They do value simplicity of use above all and they do trust large companies (for better or worse). What makes this system better than the other systems that fulfill essentially the same purpose? What does "getting it right" mean? Are they getting it right and how so?
- colordrops 9y agoIs there not room in the market for multiple solutions? Both Dropbox and a decentralized solution can co-exist.
- Zahlmeister 9y agoWhat I'm saying is that these are not actually big selling points for a general audience. I'm not saying it's not viable at all, but the distributed aspect alone requires a certain amount of popularity to sustain it.
- kleebeesh 9y agoHow does it compare to maidsafe? https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/ Maidsafe made some noise in early 2014 but I haven't heard much from them since.
- kadavero 9y agoSo, child porn that nobody can delete?
- agl 9y agoUnfortunately, one of the important citations ([5], "Proof of Replication") does not appear to be available. (Or, at least, Google cannot find it.)
- woah 9y agoTo my non expert eye it appears that the Sybil resistance and hence the entire novelty of the paper is rests on this currently inaccessible citation.
- Taek 9y agoCitations 14 and 15 also seem to be unpublished, and are all by the same authors. Seems like important sections of this paper were not ready in time for them to perform their ICO.
- Kubuxu 9y agoYes, citations 5, 14, 15 will be published latter. There is a possibility that some of them will be published next week.
- ardivekar 9y agoAt least upload a preprint to arXiv or something. What's the point of citing a paper that doesn't exist yet?
- _prometheus 9y agoIt's coming shortly (days), it's a WIP that needs significant polish, but the core result is there.
- sigmagerta 9y agois this expected to magically resolve the problem of storing raw data and computing proofs lazily?
- tscs37 9y agoQuite interesting. I do recommend anyone to also check out Swarm, similar but built entirely on top of Ethereum. http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/theswarm.eth/swarm http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/theswarm.eth/swarm
- LAMike 9y agoWhat is the current ICO valuation for Filecoin?
- vedanta 9y agoDecentralization bubble anyone?
- richardknop 9y agoI don't understand how decentralizing file storage and storing my files on people's laptops / desktops can come even close to efficiency and performance of a centralized storage service with powerful servers on fast network with 99.99 uptime. Can somebody explain to me how in theory could this decentralized storage beat something like AWS in efficiency, performance and uptime? I just think big beefy servers in dedicated data centers with fast and robust uplinks/downlinks should be better than consumer hardware on unreliable slow networks with shaky uptime?
- 3pt14159 9y agoIt's cheaper. Why? Because people have spare disk and spare bandwidth. It's also more likely to survive a major war if it's redundant enough. Is it better for serving hot assets, no. Is it better for storing a massive amount of raw data that you need occasional random, indexed access to? Maybe. Edit: Also, less regulatory concerns since in theory nobody knows who is paying for it. This is probably it's biggest weakness, to be honest, since it could be used to spread child porn.
- jaredklewis 9y ago> It's also more likely to survive a major war if it's redundant enough. If there is a major war, international Internet will be one of the first things to go. In that scenario, having your files spread out across the world is a major negative. If you want the data to survive a major war, bury an external hard drive.
- richardknop 9y agoYes I don't really understand the war argument. If there were a massive war (like a world war scale not some conflict in Middle East), the first thing Russia/China would do is cut underwater internet cables. Most nation states would probably block outside internet access to avoid propaganda during time of war. I think I would have bigger concerns than whether I could recover my files stored online. For cases like this I'd much rather trust just a simple USB stick or external drive which I could carry with me in my backpack and backup important files there so I don't have to rely on internet.
- mcnesium 9y agoThe very first sentence of the abstract seems a bit too optimistic to me
- solatic 9y agoAnybody with a better understanding of filecoin - can you explain how the protocol can tell the difference between a legitimate hardware failure and a storage miner who stores the uploaded file, signs proof of replication to the blockchain, then immediately deletes the file so that he can "store" more files, collecting more payment, and then refuse delivery upon download request, claiming hardware failure? Does the blockchain have some way to prevent miners from double-spending their storage space? Is payment only collected upon retrieval, allowing Filecoin to be abused for storing backups that are rarely retrieved?
- stebalien 9y ago> can you explain how the protocol can tell the difference between a legitimate hardware From the perspective of the network, there is no difference. When you agree to dedicate some storage to the network, you post a collateral in FIlecoin. If you lose something you've agreed to store (fail to prove that you're storing it when asked to do so by the network), you pay a penalty out of your collateral. > Is payment only collected upon retrieval No. Storage miners continuously prove (probabilistically) to the network that they're storing the files they've agreed to store.