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Filecoin is a huge disappointment to me. IPFS is fantastic technology, but the main developers getting sidetracked with yet another scammy ICO is the last thin

Filecoin is a huge disappointment to me. IPFS is fantastic technology, but the main developers getting sidetracked with yet another scammy ICO is the last thing we need.

tomasien 9y ago
Something like Filecoin is necessary to make IPFS what it could become, I recognize there are huge unsolved problems with it but it's not legitimately so that they can't be solved. It's worth a shot and sophisticated private investors took bets on this with eyes wide open, followed by the public of course which many consider problematic (I don't). There are complaints about the discounts private investors got etc but at the end of the day I'm glad this is research getting funded and I think calling it a scam is straight up wrong. We'll see I guess.
- throwawayico 9y ago
  > sophisticated private investors took bets on this with eyes wide open Bullshit.
  - regulation_d 9y ago
    So you're saying that Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Winklevoss Capital didn't know what they were getting into?
    - tomasien 9y ago
      Yeah exactly. Anyone who has engaged with the protocol knows there are huge unknowns - they're acknowledged in the whitepaper. They have theoretical solutions which are often discussed in public on Github and Gitter, and they've gotten past many large hurdles already as a team. I think there's a chance. Importantly, if Filecoin were usable right now to guarantee storage and retrievability of files, I have use cases I'd use that for right this second.
      - regulation_d 9y ago
        I'm not understanding how this is categorically different than your standard VC deal.
        tomasien 9y ago
        It's a little different I guess since the public invested too. I think that's a good thing though but I may regret this comment if crypto (specifically Filecoin) goes totally sideways. The public should be allowed to take risks though!
        regulation_d 9y ago
        The public did invest under the same rules as a standard VC deal, i.e. Reg D. Though I guess with additional accredited investor verification on account of the general solicitation rules, which don't typically apply in VC deals. > The public should be allowed to take risks though! I have complex feelings about this. For example, I wanted to participate in the Filecoin ICO, and I could not because I don't meet the accredited investor requirements. On the micro level, I was a bit disappointed. It's my money, if I want to give it to a charlatan, I should be able to. On the macro level, I understand that it makes sense that most people like me shouldn't be investing in companies that aren't required to make any disclosures, financials or otherwise, particularly when people like me aren't really in a position to negotiate for that information. In my mind, protecting mom and pop is still a worthwhile goal. So while I definitely agree that the public should be allowed to take risks, it's relevant that there are quite a few markets that they have unimpeded access to. And I'm generally sympathetic to the SEC's desire to shield the least sophisticated investors from the riskiest investments.
rightos 9y ago
It's interesting to see many of Filecoins promises realized already in alternatives like Sia or Storj, but Filecoin still takes the hype, despite not having anything released, let alone anything superior... I guess because it's by the IPFS developers and had a big flashy ICO?
- shepardrtc 9y ago
  The Sia team has really impressed me with their approach. They're the type of devs that keep quiet and just get the work done. No hype, no grandiose promises, just hard work and solving hard problems. I think that in the end they'll be the ones that come out ahead when it comes to decentralized storage.
  - api 9y ago
    You're making me want to actually try Sia for real stuff.
    - shepardrtc 9y ago
      I like them because they're really trying to solve the problems around decentralized storage. Storage will be a very valuable resource for a long time to come, so anyone who can make it cheap and make it work well will have solved a valuable problem. Take a look at the companies that have invested money in them (Google is one), and you'll see that they have strong interest in what the team is doing. And I'm not talking about millions, but more like normal investment money to fund hiring of people. Here's an article about them: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EEAsgVuL2aGCeqEJ/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EE...
  - nemo1618 9y ago
    Hey, Sia core dev here. From the beginning, we've prided ourselves writing code instead of pushing PR pieces and designing flashy websites. So I'm glad that you (and others) picked up on those values. By keeping our heads down, we've built the only truly distributed and decentralized marketplace for storage, and we did it with a team and a budget far smaller than our competitors. Thanks for your support -- posts like this motivate me more than almost anything else.
saas_co_de 9y ago
I see two drawbacks to the technology: 1) data storage with trusted centrally controlled infrastructure will always be cheaper (probably much cheaper) because you need far more redundancy in an untrusted network and the centralized infrastructure has superior economies of scale. 2) Your (encrypted) data is public so you are relying on the platform having zero exploitable bugs ever, which is just not a smart assumption. For this reason alone I can't really see any serious person being willing to store their data on this network.
- _jal 9y ago
  (1) Is true. For data worth less than the risk of your cloud vendor doing something you don't like with it, well, economics, as always, applies. For (2), there's nothing preventing nested encryption, if your threat model dictates.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    Nested encryption doesn't change anything. The nested encryption scheme would have to be perfect as well, which is also a bad assumption. Even if you assume your crypto scheme is perfect you are still giving adversaries unlimited access to brute force your key. For security conscious parties (corp, gov, mostly) encryption is a failsafe when other layers of physical security fail. No one is trusting encryption to be their sole means of securing their data. Not to mention that if you put data on an untrusted system you lose the ability to track break attempts and detect breaches if they do occur.
    - _jal 9y ago
      > The nested encryption scheme would have to be perfect as well, which is also a bad assumption. If that is true for your security model, then encryption is always pointless for you[1]. Later on, you mention "security conscious" parties, which means you understand that security is a cost gradient, meaning one size doesn't fit all, and less-than-perfect assurance has value in some contexts. Do I think the DoD is going to move all their storage to this? That would be idiotic. Do I think there is an achievable scheme like this that is "good enough" for a variety of use cases? I think the answer is pretty clearly yes; the difficulties of actually realizing it are elsewhere. [1] Yes, OTPs exist. They don't count.
aw3c2 9y ago
Filecoin ICO was when I lost interest in IPFS because I realised its developers were not as like-minded to me as I had hoped.
- crankylinuxuser 9y ago
  Well, yeah. They saw dollar signs and got bit by the ICO bug. Truth be told, I still like the idea of Filecoin as a method to get around the problem of Tragedy of the Commons. But overvalued and overhyped indeed.
  - lgierth 9y ago
    There's only so many different ways of funding open source software development, and we selected one that wouldn't have us struggle for grants or VC money every other year. The funding of open source infrastructure is a huge problem. @jbenet did a great in-depth podcast with YC: 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-... (transcript included)
    - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
      But you can't help if others put a high value on it. It's kind of the definition of the market that others put a value on it. If anything, you did the ICO the "right" way, even if I didn't like the fact that you excluded it to official investors. But that's an issue with the SEC laws as the way they're written - not you or jbenet. My biggest hope is that you all continue working on both, IPFS core, and Filecoin. And secondarily, reduce memory footprint with IPFS itself. It's still gobbley - cause I'd like to be able to get a /bt/mac/ node available for serving locally via BTLE.
whyrusleeping 9y ago
Hey, ipfs dev here. The amount of work being done on ipfs has been increasing continually. Work on filecoin is not detracting from ipfs development, and we are bringing on more people for ipfs, libp2p and filecoin.
- throwawayico 9y ago
  That doesn't discount the fact you are involved in yet another ICO. Cryptocurency integration and identity within IPFS could have been done without a new coin. I know you know this, yet you choose to do it anyway. That means we should question your intentions, across all your projects. And, just for the record, a cryptocurrency fund raise is simply selling access to given private/public key pairs which contain values, like a database. Even hardened by mining, these values and keys are intrinsically worthless until they are used widely for something valuable. It's when convincing someone it's "valuable because you think it is" that it gets "tricky".
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - whyrusleeping 9y ago
    > Cryptocurency integration and identity within IPFS could have been done without a new coin I don't think thats a fair claim to make. There are many attacks on 'pay for distributed storage' that Filecoin addresses. Take a look at [the paper](https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf), in particular section 3.1 where we discuss sybil attacks, Outsourcing attacks, and generation attacks. We cover a lot of cases, and build in incentives to continually increase the amount of available storage and push down the price-per-byte. If we thought it was possible to properly incentivize data storage on ipfs without building a blockchain, we would have done so.
  - rklaehn 9y ago
    I don't get all the hatred for ICOs. Nobody is forcing anybody to invest in them, and for something like filecoin there is at least a chance of something extremely useful coming out of it. Many other ICOs seem pretty strange to me, but as long as I am not forced to invest in them, what's the problem?
rklaehn 9y ago
I am using ipfs at work for something unrelated to filecoin. From our experience in the last months, the speed of ipfs development and the responsiveness of the developers has picked up markedly since the filecoin ICO. Since filecoin is going to be built on top of ipfs, there is a pretty big incentive to make it solid.

Filecoin is a huge disappointment to me. IPFS is fantastic technology, but the main developers getting sidetracked with yet another scammy ICO is the last thing we need.

tomasien 9y ago

Something like Filecoin is necessary to make IPFS what it could become, I recognize there are huge unsolved problems with it but it's not legitimately so that they can't be solved. It's worth a shot and sophisticated private investors took bets on this with eyes wide open, followed by the public of course which many consider problematic (I don't). There are complaints about the discounts private investors got etc but at the end of the day I'm glad this is research getting funded and I think calling it a scam is straight up wrong. We'll see I guess.

throwawayico 9y ago
> sophisticated private investors took bets on this with eyes wide open Bullshit.
- regulation_d 9y ago
  So you're saying that Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Winklevoss Capital didn't know what they were getting into?
  - tomasien 9y ago
    Yeah exactly. Anyone who has engaged with the protocol knows there are huge unknowns - they're acknowledged in the whitepaper. They have theoretical solutions which are often discussed in public on Github and Gitter, and they've gotten past many large hurdles already as a team. I think there's a chance. Importantly, if Filecoin were usable right now to guarantee storage and retrievability of files, I have use cases I'd use that for right this second.
    - regulation_d 9y ago
      I'm not understanding how this is categorically different than your standard VC deal.
      - tomasien 9y ago
        It's a little different I guess since the public invested too. I think that's a good thing though but I may regret this comment if crypto (specifically Filecoin) goes totally sideways. The public should be allowed to take risks though!
        regulation_d 9y ago
        The public did invest under the same rules as a standard VC deal, i.e. Reg D. Though I guess with additional accredited investor verification on account of the general solicitation rules, which don't typically apply in VC deals. > The public should be allowed to take risks though! I have complex feelings about this. For example, I wanted to participate in the Filecoin ICO, and I could not because I don't meet the accredited investor requirements. On the micro level, I was a bit disappointed. It's my money, if I want to give it to a charlatan, I should be able to. On the macro level, I understand that it makes sense that most people like me shouldn't be investing in companies that aren't required to make any disclosures, financials or otherwise, particularly when people like me aren't really in a position to negotiate for that information. In my mind, protecting mom and pop is still a worthwhile goal. So while I definitely agree that the public should be allowed to take risks, it's relevant that there are quite a few markets that they have unimpeded access to. And I'm generally sympathetic to the SEC's desire to shield the least sophisticated investors from the riskiest investments.

rightos 9y ago

It's interesting to see many of Filecoins promises realized already in alternatives like Sia or Storj, but Filecoin still takes the hype, despite not having anything released, let alone anything superior... I guess because it's by the IPFS developers and had a big flashy ICO?

shepardrtc 9y ago
The Sia team has really impressed me with their approach. They're the type of devs that keep quiet and just get the work done. No hype, no grandiose promises, just hard work and solving hard problems. I think that in the end they'll be the ones that come out ahead when it comes to decentralized storage.
- api 9y ago
  You're making me want to actually try Sia for real stuff.
  - shepardrtc 9y ago
    I like them because they're really trying to solve the problems around decentralized storage. Storage will be a very valuable resource for a long time to come, so anyone who can make it cheap and make it work well will have solved a valuable problem. Take a look at the companies that have invested money in them (Google is one), and you'll see that they have strong interest in what the team is doing. And I'm not talking about millions, but more like normal investment money to fund hiring of people. Here's an article about them: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EEAsgVuL2aGCeqEJ/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EE...
- nemo1618 9y ago
  Hey, Sia core dev here. From the beginning, we've prided ourselves writing code instead of pushing PR pieces and designing flashy websites. So I'm glad that you (and others) picked up on those values. By keeping our heads down, we've built the only truly distributed and decentralized marketplace for storage, and we did it with a team and a budget far smaller than our competitors. Thanks for your support -- posts like this motivate me more than almost anything else.

saas_co_de 9y ago

I see two drawbacks to the technology: 1) data storage with trusted centrally controlled infrastructure will always be cheaper (probably much cheaper) because you need far more redundancy in an untrusted network and the centralized infrastructure has superior economies of scale. 2) Your (encrypted) data is public so you are relying on the platform having zero exploitable bugs ever, which is just not a smart assumption. For this reason alone I can't really see any serious person being willing to store their data on this network.

_jal 9y ago
(1) Is true. For data worth less than the risk of your cloud vendor doing something you don't like with it, well, economics, as always, applies. For (2), there's nothing preventing nested encryption, if your threat model dictates.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  Nested encryption doesn't change anything. The nested encryption scheme would have to be perfect as well, which is also a bad assumption. Even if you assume your crypto scheme is perfect you are still giving adversaries unlimited access to brute force your key. For security conscious parties (corp, gov, mostly) encryption is a failsafe when other layers of physical security fail. No one is trusting encryption to be their sole means of securing their data. Not to mention that if you put data on an untrusted system you lose the ability to track break attempts and detect breaches if they do occur.
  - _jal 9y ago
    > The nested encryption scheme would have to be perfect as well, which is also a bad assumption. If that is true for your security model, then encryption is always pointless for you[1]. Later on, you mention "security conscious" parties, which means you understand that security is a cost gradient, meaning one size doesn't fit all, and less-than-perfect assurance has value in some contexts. Do I think the DoD is going to move all their storage to this? That would be idiotic. Do I think there is an achievable scheme like this that is "good enough" for a variety of use cases? I think the answer is pretty clearly yes; the difficulties of actually realizing it are elsewhere. [1] Yes, OTPs exist. They don't count.

aw3c2 9y ago

Filecoin ICO was when I lost interest in IPFS because I realised its developers were not as like-minded to me as I had hoped.

crankylinuxuser 9y ago
Well, yeah. They saw dollar signs and got bit by the ICO bug. Truth be told, I still like the idea of Filecoin as a method to get around the problem of Tragedy of the Commons. But overvalued and overhyped indeed.
- lgierth 9y ago
  There's only so many different ways of funding open source software development, and we selected one that wouldn't have us struggle for grants or VC money every other year. The funding of open source infrastructure is a huge problem. @jbenet did a great in-depth podcast with YC: 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-... (transcript included)
  - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
    But you can't help if others put a high value on it. It's kind of the definition of the market that others put a value on it. If anything, you did the ICO the "right" way, even if I didn't like the fact that you excluded it to official investors. But that's an issue with the SEC laws as the way they're written - not you or jbenet. My biggest hope is that you all continue working on both, IPFS core, and Filecoin. And secondarily, reduce memory footprint with IPFS itself. It's still gobbley - cause I'd like to be able to get a /bt/mac/ node available for serving locally via BTLE.

whyrusleeping 9y ago

Hey, ipfs dev here. The amount of work being done on ipfs has been increasing continually. Work on filecoin is not detracting from ipfs development, and we are bringing on more people for ipfs, libp2p and filecoin.

throwawayico 9y ago
That doesn't discount the fact you are involved in yet another ICO. Cryptocurency integration and identity within IPFS could have been done without a new coin. I know you know this, yet you choose to do it anyway. That means we should question your intentions, across all your projects. And, just for the record, a cryptocurrency fund raise is simply selling access to given private/public key pairs which contain values, like a database. Even hardened by mining, these values and keys are intrinsically worthless until they are used widely for something valuable. It's when convincing someone it's "valuable because you think it is" that it gets "tricky".
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- whyrusleeping 9y ago
  > Cryptocurency integration and identity within IPFS could have been done without a new coin I don't think thats a fair claim to make. There are many attacks on 'pay for distributed storage' that Filecoin addresses. Take a look at [the paper](https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf), in particular section 3.1 where we discuss sybil attacks, Outsourcing attacks, and generation attacks. We cover a lot of cases, and build in incentives to continually increase the amount of available storage and push down the price-per-byte. If we thought it was possible to properly incentivize data storage on ipfs without building a blockchain, we would have done so.
- rklaehn 9y ago
  I don't get all the hatred for ICOs. Nobody is forcing anybody to invest in them, and for something like filecoin there is at least a chance of something extremely useful coming out of it. Many other ICOs seem pretty strange to me, but as long as I am not forced to invest in them, what's the problem?

rklaehn 9y ago

I am using ipfs at work for something unrelated to filecoin. From our experience in the last months, the speed of ipfs development and the responsiveness of the developers has picked up markedly since the filecoin ICO. Since filecoin is going to be built on top of ipfs, there is a pretty big incentive to make it solid.