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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"

by 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.
  - ScottBurson 9y ago
    > 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. There are occasional exceptions [0]. [0] https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/25/khosla-ventures-leads-50-million-investment-in-vicarious-ai-tech/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/25/khosla-ventures-leads-50-...
rmorey 9y ago
Here's a more in-depth look at Proof of Replication: https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf
- deleted 9y ago
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by kbody 9y ago

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.
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  > 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. There are occasional exceptions [0]. [0] https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/25/khosla-ventures-leads-50-million-investment-in-vicarious-ai-tech/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/25/khosla-ventures-leads-50-...

rmorey 9y ago

Here's a more in-depth look at Proof of Replication: https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf

deleted 9y ago
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