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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 any

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.
  - synctext 9y ago
    Hi, Tribler dev here. awesome to see everybody here.. Do Sia and Filecoin take into account the "oversupply problem"? Filecoin devs nicely explain their sybil-attack strategy with growing your identity. However, how can you earn credits if nobody likes you and you happen to have a low-performance node? Is this a real problem or are we missing something? For details, see our journal article on a macroeconomic sharing model from 2012, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_et_al-2013-Concurrency_and_Computation__Practice_and_Experience.pdf https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_...
    - iamnotnicola 9y ago
      Hey, great question! (i am filecoin/ipfs/etc employee) I am going to give some definitions (please chip in case of my misunderstanding) - “nobody likes you”: reputation is not central to Filecoin, so I guess you cannot be “not liked”. Whether you are trusted or not, the clients will pay you only if you have provided a proof of having offered a service. Note: Filecoin has pseudonyms, if for some reasons your address is not liked, you can create a new Filecoin address. So every “not liked” case eventually reduces to being a new user. TL;DR I will assume you mean “a new user”. - “low-performance node”: Filecoin does not require special hardware, but off-the-shelf CPUs, and whether you have 1 or 1000, it should not matter in practice (all the operations are sequential). I wouldn’t consider the amount of storage as “performance”, your node can always participate as a small miner. If by low performance you mean faulty hardware, then you are really not contributing to the network. So I am going to consider “low-performance” to mean slow network connection. Now, if you are a new node without much track record and with a bad internet connection, you could: - participate as a Storage Miner in the Storage Market (your job will be mainly storing the file and generate proofs offline that you have stored the file, you will need just enough internet connection to be updated with the head of the chain) and every now and then (even with a bad network connection), submit the proofs to the chain. In addition, if you are happy listening to new transactions and have enough storage (unless you consider yourself REALLY lucky), then you can participate to mining Filecoin and earn tokens from transaction fees and mining rewards. My strategy would be to start with lower prices than the rest of the network, if you are also mining, block reward could cover for your lower prices - participate as a Retrieval Miner, you might not be that successful in comparison to fast speed super connected nodes that have incredible amount of storage, BUT you could try to store and serve “rare” files or serve to nodes that are closer to you (since you could become their node of preference) I took advantage to explain my reasoning so that others could find this helpful too :) I will take a look at the paper, thanks for sharing, there is a lot the community can learn from the first wave of p2p file sharing.
hobofan 9y ago
> I guess because it's by the IPFS developers And is intended to run on an IPFS network. After reading the replies to this comment, I started looking into Sia, and wanted to try it out, but it seems that I first have to buy some Sia before even being able to become a host (!), which is an instant turnoff. At the same time, I am already able to try out IPFS and have been able to develop apps using it for quite some time. I am not sure what the plans are with Filecoin, but IPFS also has a default-public (hosting) use case, while as of now Siacoin has private-only.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  If you just want enough siacoin to become a host I can probably send some over. I already have some and haven't gotten around to hosting yet.
  - hobofan 9y ago
    Thanks for the offer, but from what I've read over the last hours I'm not really too eager to try it out anymore.
    - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
      Fair enough, I'd like to hear what you think/read if you'd like to share.
- rightos 9y ago
  The reason you need to buy some Siacoin in order to become a host is simple - you need collateral in case you fail to fulfill your hosting contracts - collateral of more than the value of those hosting contacts themselves. Turn off or not, that seems to be the only reasonable way to achieve private hosting contracts to me
  - hobofan 9y ago
    Sure, I realize that it is for collateral. Nonetheless, that is why I spend my time doing stuff with IPFS rather than Siacoin. I tried to answer your question about why people are hyped for IPFS/Filecoin (some only for one of the two) rather than the alternatives. It is not only because IPFS/Filecoin are "flashy", but because contrary to your claim developers _did_ have something working to play with from the same developers for quite some time which is also superior in some regards (public hosting).

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.
- synctext 9y ago
  Hi, Tribler dev here. awesome to see everybody here.. Do Sia and Filecoin take into account the "oversupply problem"? Filecoin devs nicely explain their sybil-attack strategy with growing your identity. However, how can you earn credits if nobody likes you and you happen to have a low-performance node? Is this a real problem or are we missing something? For details, see our journal article on a macroeconomic sharing model from 2012, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_et_al-2013-Concurrency_and_Computation__Practice_and_Experience.pdf https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_...
  - iamnotnicola 9y ago
    Hey, great question! (i am filecoin/ipfs/etc employee) I am going to give some definitions (please chip in case of my misunderstanding) - “nobody likes you”: reputation is not central to Filecoin, so I guess you cannot be “not liked”. Whether you are trusted or not, the clients will pay you only if you have provided a proof of having offered a service. Note: Filecoin has pseudonyms, if for some reasons your address is not liked, you can create a new Filecoin address. So every “not liked” case eventually reduces to being a new user. TL;DR I will assume you mean “a new user”. - “low-performance node”: Filecoin does not require special hardware, but off-the-shelf CPUs, and whether you have 1 or 1000, it should not matter in practice (all the operations are sequential). I wouldn’t consider the amount of storage as “performance”, your node can always participate as a small miner. If by low performance you mean faulty hardware, then you are really not contributing to the network. So I am going to consider “low-performance” to mean slow network connection. Now, if you are a new node without much track record and with a bad internet connection, you could: - participate as a Storage Miner in the Storage Market (your job will be mainly storing the file and generate proofs offline that you have stored the file, you will need just enough internet connection to be updated with the head of the chain) and every now and then (even with a bad network connection), submit the proofs to the chain. In addition, if you are happy listening to new transactions and have enough storage (unless you consider yourself REALLY lucky), then you can participate to mining Filecoin and earn tokens from transaction fees and mining rewards. My strategy would be to start with lower prices than the rest of the network, if you are also mining, block reward could cover for your lower prices - participate as a Retrieval Miner, you might not be that successful in comparison to fast speed super connected nodes that have incredible amount of storage, BUT you could try to store and serve “rare” files or serve to nodes that are closer to you (since you could become their node of preference) I took advantage to explain my reasoning so that others could find this helpful too :) I will take a look at the paper, thanks for sharing, there is a lot the community can learn from the first wave of p2p file sharing.

hobofan 9y ago

> I guess because it's by the IPFS developers And is intended to run on an IPFS network. After reading the replies to this comment, I started looking into Sia, and wanted to try it out, but it seems that I first have to buy some Sia before even being able to become a host (!), which is an instant turnoff. At the same time, I am already able to try out IPFS and have been able to develop apps using it for quite some time. I am not sure what the plans are with Filecoin, but IPFS also has a default-public (hosting) use case, while as of now Siacoin has private-only.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
If you just want enough siacoin to become a host I can probably send some over. I already have some and haven't gotten around to hosting yet.
- hobofan 9y ago
  Thanks for the offer, but from what I've read over the last hours I'm not really too eager to try it out anymore.
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    Fair enough, I'd like to hear what you think/read if you'd like to share.
rightos 9y ago
The reason you need to buy some Siacoin in order to become a host is simple - you need collateral in case you fail to fulfill your hosting contracts - collateral of more than the value of those hosting contacts themselves. Turn off or not, that seems to be the only reasonable way to achieve private hosting contracts to me
- hobofan 9y ago
  Sure, I realize that it is for collateral. Nonetheless, that is why I spend my time doing stuff with IPFS rather than Siacoin. I tried to answer your question about why people are hyped for IPFS/Filecoin (some only for one of the two) rather than the alternatives. It is not only because IPFS/Filecoin are "flashy", but because contrary to your claim developers _did_ have something working to play with from the same developers for quite some time which is also superior in some regards (public hosting).