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I listened to this YC podcast[1] twice with Juan Benet. Listening to Juan talk about a lot of historical information and the correlations he drew was fascinati

I listened to this YC podcast[1] twice with Juan Benet. Listening to Juan talk about a lot of historical information and the correlations he drew was fascinating. When he tried to explain the need for Filecoin to Dalton, I just didn't hear it. Dalton kept asking him over and over what the point was and he kept giving non-answers (at least in my opinion which doesn't mean much to be honest). I understand the goal of the protocol and the incentive structure behind the protocol, but I don't see a clear vision with the product. [1] - https://blog.ycombinator.com/ipfs-coinlist-and-the-filecoin-ico-with-juan-benet-and-dalton-caldwell/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/ipfs-coinlist-and-the-filecoin-...

fccc 9y ago
> When he tried to explain the need for Filecoin to Dalton, I just didn't hear it. Dalton kept asking him over and over what the point was and he kept giving non-answers His favorite response was "...and a whole bunch of other things". On a more serious note, it's very early days for the filecoin and related group of projects that they intend to fund, so the answer to Dalton's question is : "we don't have the answers yet. There are a whole bunch of theoretical use cases and the most promising seems to be decentralized storage. The reason we are raising money through this ICO is simple : people are ready to invest dumb money and we are more than happy to take it. We have legitimacy because we are backed by the most well known VCs who are eager to 10X their money within 3 years and we have a whole bunch of protocol design/specs." It's kind of self fulfilling : promise a grand vision, take hundreds of millions and hopefully deliver any working product sometime in the future.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jboggan 9y ago
  But seriously, what are they going to do with that much money? How many developers do they actually need to scale up and what milestones are they trying to hit?
- tarr11 9y ago
  When people say "its early days" I mentally replace it with "I don't know" https://www.google.com/search?q="its+still+early+days" https://www.google.com/search?q="its+still+early+days"
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Based on your post I went and looked up that question/answer portion, and I think the back and forth is illuminating in it's lack of either communication or actual capability: TL;DR: It's a solution in search of a problem, like so much good, early technology. Dalton Caldwell [31:07] – What is the burning, and it’s okay if it’s not consumers, but what is the thing that, with Filecoin, that is gonna make, whether it’s business or consumers, people get really excited about using it? Juan Benet [31:19] – Filecoin is not representative of the entire industry. Filecoin is one example. With Filecoin, the point is being able to, this is a whole different argument that I think makes sense with or without a peer-to-peer winter or summer. The thoughts around Filecoin are about thinking about the massive latent storage that’s out there and putting it to good use. There’s exabytes of storage that are not in use right now, and that if you were to add them to the market, you would drive the price down significantly......That’s, I think, fundamentally different about this type of thing than normal consumer products. They solve a lotta problems for a lotta people. Dalton Caldwell [33:41] – You said financial, though. Again, they’re doing it for financial reasons. Again, what I’m looking for is what is the incentive for someone to get involved, whether it’s a business or a consumer, the reason you would put a miner on the network? Juan Benet [33:53] – For Filecoin specifically, the reason why somebody would add storage to the network, the primary motivator will be money....
- onli 9y ago
  That's a bit convoluted, but it isn't so bad, is it? Lots of unused storage, bitcoin showed you can use cryptocurrency to create a network of capabilities (there: hashing stuff, here: of storage), additional uses are possible when getting the mechanism right.
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    I don't see how a new blockchain is necessary in order to utilise unused storage space. Protocols like this work just fine without them, especially if having a centralised orchestrator (filecoin themselves) isn't an issue. Which in this case, I can't see why it would be.
gtrubetskoy 9y ago
I like what Juan had to say, it's good stuff and IPFS has the potential of being very disruptive. With Filecoin I think what happened in that conversation was that to Juan it wasn't a big deal, it's just one of the things possible in the IPFS paradigm. But since crypto currency is all the rage these days, and this being YC, he was being lead to talk about the money side of it, but I don't think he really gave it much thought, other than that Filecoin is a neat way to trade storage without any paper/fiat currency, across country borders, etc. To put it another way - IPFS is the thing. Filecoin is just a side-effect. But in our present times, Filecoin is worth actual millions, while IPFS is just a protocol. But it's clearly a fluke, the most important technology/idea here is IPFS.
- kbody 9y ago
  Filecoin is a completely different beast than IPFS. Based on the Filecoin whitepaper, it requires the creation of 2 new proof mechanisms "Proof-of-Replication" and "Proof-of-Spacetime" which are not well-defined at all on the whitepaper. It's like saying you achieved Byzantine fault tolerance but not say how, which is a big deal. That's one of the core challenges. It seems to me that their team has underestimated those challenges and were more busy on designing a big ICO than actually thinking about those problems and the feasibility of their claims. Most probably it will take much more than 6-18 months that they claim or it will be launched with centralized components of the system ("compromises") until they figure things out.
  - nicpottier 9y ago
    I think you are absolutely right, that there are huge problems still left to solve. But even so, then how is this different than a very large VC round that is (slightly) more open to the public? Plenty of businesses get money to build out technology with only the belief that the team raising it have what it takes to make it happen.
    - dmix 9y ago
      That's not quite true. The vast majority of VC money is to scale up a company. Only a small minority of investments, aka a portion of seed rounds, are done with the technology (and subsequent business model) merely in a hypothetical whitepaper stage. This company might be different because they demonstrated their ability as IPFS is fleshed out but as others pointed out Filecoin is a different beast entirely and they are basically starting from scratch again. The higher end of 6-18 months of pure dev time is a long risk range to get an untested product out. But I guess they have plenty of runway now to work on it with this massive ICO. Let's just hope they don't spin their wheels forever in research mode and spend their time and money wisely. It's entirely possible someone else figures it out before them and this play will be a game of scale. I've heard this idea from more than one person well before Filecoin was around.
api 9y ago
There's a bunch of projects trying to solve the distributed mass storage problem. I am not convinced this problem exists. (1) Hard drives are dirt f'ing cheap. Buying more than one and putting them at different locations (home and office etc.) is not hard. Storage is still experiencing a Moore's Law type geometric increase in density so this is going to get easier not harder in the future. (2) Cloud storage is cheap too. S3 is cheap. S3 reduced redundancy is really cheap. Backblaze B2 is stupid cheap. There's no privacy problem here if you encrypt your data on your end. (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive. They go together nicely. Keep your data local and then back it up encrypted to cheap cloud storage. Many very affordable NAS devices will do this for you. (3) Enterprise users categorically don't want a system where they don't know who's running their infrastructure. In some cases such a thing would be prohibited by data residency regulations. You will never ever ever convince a CIO to use this. In some cases it might be illegal for them to use this. (4) The real problem for end users is data handling UX, not actual storage. (1) and (2) are adequate for virtually all users. (5) The web does have an ephemerality problem but I fail to see how this will solve it. (6) These systems are mostly too heavy for mobile and don't cope well enough with node ephemerality for laptops. They only work well on desktops and servers and those already have mega-cheap storage and backup options in the form of (1) and (2). Look into how much disk you can cram in a desktop these days for under $500. (7) The anonymous/uncensorable niche is already filled by Tor, I2P, and Freenet. This really looks like a solution to a non-existent problem. Am I missing something? Not trying to hate, just questioning.
- stale2002 9y ago
  Think about all the extra space on all the harddrives in the world that isn't being used. For example, when you buy a new computer, with a 500 GB drive, 400GB of it isn't going to be used for a while. Hard drives may be cheap, s3 may be cheap, but that extra 400 GB of hard disk space? That space is literally FREE. Hard disk space is weird, because there is so much completely unused space out there, that would be literally free to use. Filecoin will allow this free space to be put on the market.
  - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
gritzko 9y ago
Well, at least a storage-backed crypto currency can offer some intrinsic value. That's much less stupid than burning electricity purposelessly. On the technical side, I find it doable. Unless they actually try to implement it "on the blockchain". Given blockchain transaction rates, by the time you'll download your porn, you will not need it anymore. Of course we can ask, how big is the market for cold storage? On the other hand, how big is the market for gold?
- Zarath 9y ago
  Electricity is already burned purposelessly. It's called heat. In the future you will see that the only profitable miners are ones who can "sell" their heat, i.e. using it for greenhouses or other applications.
fragsworth 9y ago
One advantage I see is that you can automate/script/code the whole process, from top to bottom, including the means of payment, without needing individuals to sign up with credit cards or bank accounts, and without needing to trust third parties. If costs and functionality are equivalent to our current solutions (like S3), then the cryptocurrency ecosystem is certainly better, but how much better is it? That is arguable and I would expect the developers to be inflating its value quite a bit.
tylersmith 9y ago
Our decentralized marketplace, OpenBazaar, uses IPFS for storing stores' content. Visitors to the store seed the content so other users can interact with the store when the vendor is offline. But that means you have to wait for people to visit your store before you can shutdown the software. If Filecoin is successful they'd be able to pay to ensure their store stays available on the network without actively running the software.
aqsheehy 9y ago
The need for file coin is that early investors need to get rich quick

fccc 9y ago

> When he tried to explain the need for Filecoin to Dalton, I just didn't hear it. Dalton kept asking him over and over what the point was and he kept giving non-answers His favorite response was "...and a whole bunch of other things". On a more serious note, it's very early days for the filecoin and related group of projects that they intend to fund, so the answer to Dalton's question is : "we don't have the answers yet. There are a whole bunch of theoretical use cases and the most promising seems to be decentralized storage. The reason we are raising money through this ICO is simple : people are ready to invest dumb money and we are more than happy to take it. We have legitimacy because we are backed by the most well known VCs who are eager to 10X their money within 3 years and we have a whole bunch of protocol design/specs." It's kind of self fulfilling : promise a grand vision, take hundreds of millions and hopefully deliver any working product sometime in the future.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jboggan 9y ago
But seriously, what are they going to do with that much money? How many developers do they actually need to scale up and what milestones are they trying to hit?
tarr11 9y ago
When people say "its early days" I mentally replace it with "I don't know" https://www.google.com/search?q="its+still+early+days" https://www.google.com/search?q="its+still+early+days"

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Based on your post I went and looked up that question/answer portion, and I think the back and forth is illuminating in it's lack of either communication or actual capability: TL;DR: It's a solution in search of a problem, like so much good, early technology. Dalton Caldwell [31:07] – What is the burning, and it’s okay if it’s not consumers, but what is the thing that, with Filecoin, that is gonna make, whether it’s business or consumers, people get really excited about using it? Juan Benet [31:19] – Filecoin is not representative of the entire industry. Filecoin is one example. With Filecoin, the point is being able to, this is a whole different argument that I think makes sense with or without a peer-to-peer winter or summer. The thoughts around Filecoin are about thinking about the massive latent storage that’s out there and putting it to good use. There’s exabytes of storage that are not in use right now, and that if you were to add them to the market, you would drive the price down significantly......That’s, I think, fundamentally different about this type of thing than normal consumer products. They solve a lotta problems for a lotta people. Dalton Caldwell [33:41] – You said financial, though. Again, they’re doing it for financial reasons. Again, what I’m looking for is what is the incentive for someone to get involved, whether it’s a business or a consumer, the reason you would put a miner on the network? Juan Benet [33:53] – For Filecoin specifically, the reason why somebody would add storage to the network, the primary motivator will be money....

onli 9y ago
That's a bit convoluted, but it isn't so bad, is it? Lots of unused storage, bitcoin showed you can use cryptocurrency to create a network of capabilities (there: hashing stuff, here: of storage), additional uses are possible when getting the mechanism right.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  I don't see how a new blockchain is necessary in order to utilise unused storage space. Protocols like this work just fine without them, especially if having a centralised orchestrator (filecoin themselves) isn't an issue. Which in this case, I can't see why it would be.

gtrubetskoy 9y ago

I like what Juan had to say, it's good stuff and IPFS has the potential of being very disruptive. With Filecoin I think what happened in that conversation was that to Juan it wasn't a big deal, it's just one of the things possible in the IPFS paradigm. But since crypto currency is all the rage these days, and this being YC, he was being lead to talk about the money side of it, but I don't think he really gave it much thought, other than that Filecoin is a neat way to trade storage without any paper/fiat currency, across country borders, etc. To put it another way - IPFS is the thing. Filecoin is just a side-effect. But in our present times, Filecoin is worth actual millions, while IPFS is just a protocol. But it's clearly a fluke, the most important technology/idea here is IPFS.

kbody 9y ago
Filecoin is a completely different beast than IPFS. Based on the Filecoin whitepaper, it requires the creation of 2 new proof mechanisms "Proof-of-Replication" and "Proof-of-Spacetime" which are not well-defined at all on the whitepaper. It's like saying you achieved Byzantine fault tolerance but not say how, which is a big deal. That's one of the core challenges. It seems to me that their team has underestimated those challenges and were more busy on designing a big ICO than actually thinking about those problems and the feasibility of their claims. Most probably it will take much more than 6-18 months that they claim or it will be launched with centralized components of the system ("compromises") until they figure things out.
- nicpottier 9y ago
  I think you are absolutely right, that there are huge problems still left to solve. But even so, then how is this different than a very large VC round that is (slightly) more open to the public? Plenty of businesses get money to build out technology with only the belief that the team raising it have what it takes to make it happen.
  - dmix 9y ago
    That's not quite true. The vast majority of VC money is to scale up a company. Only a small minority of investments, aka a portion of seed rounds, are done with the technology (and subsequent business model) merely in a hypothetical whitepaper stage. This company might be different because they demonstrated their ability as IPFS is fleshed out but as others pointed out Filecoin is a different beast entirely and they are basically starting from scratch again. The higher end of 6-18 months of pure dev time is a long risk range to get an untested product out. But I guess they have plenty of runway now to work on it with this massive ICO. Let's just hope they don't spin their wheels forever in research mode and spend their time and money wisely. It's entirely possible someone else figures it out before them and this play will be a game of scale. I've heard this idea from more than one person well before Filecoin was around.

api 9y ago

There's a bunch of projects trying to solve the distributed mass storage problem. I am not convinced this problem exists. (1) Hard drives are dirt f'ing cheap. Buying more than one and putting them at different locations (home and office etc.) is not hard. Storage is still experiencing a Moore's Law type geometric increase in density so this is going to get easier not harder in the future. (2) Cloud storage is cheap too. S3 is cheap. S3 reduced redundancy is really cheap. Backblaze B2 is stupid cheap. There's no privacy problem here if you encrypt your data on your end. (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive. They go together nicely. Keep your data local and then back it up encrypted to cheap cloud storage. Many very affordable NAS devices will do this for you. (3) Enterprise users categorically don't want a system where they don't know who's running their infrastructure. In some cases such a thing would be prohibited by data residency regulations. You will never ever ever convince a CIO to use this. In some cases it might be illegal for them to use this. (4) The real problem for end users is data handling UX, not actual storage. (1) and (2) are adequate for virtually all users. (5) The web does have an ephemerality problem but I fail to see how this will solve it. (6) These systems are mostly too heavy for mobile and don't cope well enough with node ephemerality for laptops. They only work well on desktops and servers and those already have mega-cheap storage and backup options in the form of (1) and (2). Look into how much disk you can cram in a desktop these days for under $500. (7) The anonymous/uncensorable niche is already filled by Tor, I2P, and Freenet. This really looks like a solution to a non-existent problem. Am I missing something? Not trying to hate, just questioning.

stale2002 9y ago
Think about all the extra space on all the harddrives in the world that isn't being used. For example, when you buy a new computer, with a 500 GB drive, 400GB of it isn't going to be used for a while. Hard drives may be cheap, s3 may be cheap, but that extra 400 GB of hard disk space? That space is literally FREE. Hard disk space is weird, because there is so much completely unused space out there, that would be literally free to use. Filecoin will allow this free space to be put on the market.
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago

gritzko 9y ago

Well, at least a storage-backed crypto currency can offer some intrinsic value. That's much less stupid than burning electricity purposelessly. On the technical side, I find it doable. Unless they actually try to implement it "on the blockchain". Given blockchain transaction rates, by the time you'll download your porn, you will not need it anymore. Of course we can ask, how big is the market for cold storage? On the other hand, how big is the market for gold?

Zarath 9y ago
Electricity is already burned purposelessly. It's called heat. In the future you will see that the only profitable miners are ones who can "sell" their heat, i.e. using it for greenhouses or other applications.

fragsworth 9y ago

One advantage I see is that you can automate/script/code the whole process, from top to bottom, including the means of payment, without needing individuals to sign up with credit cards or bank accounts, and without needing to trust third parties. If costs and functionality are equivalent to our current solutions (like S3), then the cryptocurrency ecosystem is certainly better, but how much better is it? That is arguable and I would expect the developers to be inflating its value quite a bit.

tylersmith 9y ago

Our decentralized marketplace, OpenBazaar, uses IPFS for storing stores' content. Visitors to the store seed the content so other users can interact with the store when the vendor is offline. But that means you have to wait for people to visit your store before you can shutdown the software. If Filecoin is successful they'd be able to pay to ensure their store stays available on the network without actively running the software.

aqsheehy 9y ago

The need for file coin is that early investors need to get rich quick