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Who is going to defend the free internet agains Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? They are the very opposite of a free and open internet where everyone can "run a we

Who is going to defend the free internet agains Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? They are the very opposite of a free and open internet where everyone can "run a website" on her own machine. It pains me to see a great idea like the Interplanetary File System still not working. I had similar experiences with IPFS and yes, we do need a project like this, only without the broken incentive structure attached to it. Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. I've long believed that a browser itself should evolve to be both viewing visited websites but also to host said website for an x number of minutes/hour/days. A bit like webTorrent aims to work. This way a website that gets visitors gets decentralised hosters as well :-)

quickthrower2 7y ago
The middle ground might be to use a local hosting company that has it's own servers and racks. Pay a bit more, but boycott the big clouds for personal websites. You could probably host a few dozen static blogs on a physical machine for say $100/m. If 100 people do that it's affordable.
- x3ro 7y ago
  Uberspace [1] does something like this in Germany. You get to pay what you want, too. [1]: https://uberspace.de/en/ https://uberspace.de/en/ Edit: I'm not affiliated with them other than being a customer.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > You could probably host a few dozen static blogs on a physical machine for say $100/m. 100 bucks!? I host a dozen unique domains with static content (and a few other services) on a 1/1 VPS for 3 euros/month. At Hetzner, not at a hyperscaler.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    Yeah I was thinking a whole server not vm.
    - dspillett 7y ago
      Even a real-metal physical box can be had for far less than $100. Even excluding the ranges that are out of stock Kimsufi has a number of options that are more than capable of running "dozens of static blogs" with ease for <$20/month (the €8/month Atom based machine would do the job, as would the currently-out-of-stock €4/month ones). There are other providers with comparable offers, I mention Kimsufi because for some time I've had one of their low spec units running a couple of simple tasks. You are not going to be getting brand-new unused high-spec kit with that sort of deal, of course, but you pays your money, you takes your choice!
- dspillett 7y ago
  > If 100 people do that it's affordable. If one of those people doesn't mind running as sys-admin and help-desk for the rest... Though your $100/m is rather higher than it needs to be for that level of service so you won't need the same number of people for that cost/person, someone is still taking on a part-time job doing admin for others.
darthreid 7y ago
Sadly a lot of the mechanisms behind bitcoin make for it to be difficult to use in a vast transaction setting (millions/sec, similar to credit cards), which would be required for using its blockchain for proof of work purposes. That’s why alternatives exist in order to solve these “problems” that the BTC community either choose not to fix or simply won’t. It’ll be interesting to see what crypto people would intend to use for something like IPFS.
- davidgerard 7y ago
  IPFS is from the crypto people. This is what blockchain advocates put forward as the solution to mass storage for their blockchain dreams. IPFS is basically BitTorrent with magnet links - hashes to address content, if you want to be sure your obscure content will stay around then you have to seed it, etc. There's some fancier stuff on top, but if you know that's how it works, all else follows. You can tell how "blockchain" IPFS is from the way that advocates seem chronically unable to tell "could" from "does" - stuff that doesn't exist and/or doesn't work is routinely talked about as if it's here and working in the present. This leads to disappointed posts like the one linked.
  - autonome 7y ago
    IPFS is useful to blockchain projects because of the permanence of content hashes. That doesn’t mean it’s not also useful to many others. QRI is using it as the publishing medium and backing store for all kinds of data sets, for example. No blockchain, just shared storage across interested parties. You make a really good point about communicating readiness - the author of the post is expecting more from pre-alpha software than it is ready to provide.
    - acdha 7y ago
      IPFS has had public releases since 2015 with rhetoric implying general utility, not to mention $300M in funding. If it’s still “pre-alpha software” that’s not a mere communications problem.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rzzzt 7y ago
There is an alternative stack that works pretty much as you describe, its browser being Beaker: https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/tour/ https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/tour/ There is an option in there to seed visited content as well as to host your own stuff.
- zachsherman 7y ago
  Yeah I was so confused why the author didn't just use dat it's so easy
  - rzzzt 7y ago
    I'd like to read a comparison between the two hosting experiences; I'm not sure that eg. the linking-to-other-content part would be easier in dat-world, unless they run a pinning/re-hosting/gateway service tied to their current domain (which is doable, either standalone, or via Hashbase).
  - rkda 7y ago
    He also tried dat. https://macwright.org/2017/07/20/decentralize-your-website.html https://macwright.org/2017/07/20/decentralize-your-website.h... Hasnt written about it again though.
jeremyboom8 7y ago
> Who is going to defend the free internet agains Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? This is exactly what the http://metacurrency.org http://metacurrency.org project aims to bring to life: http://holo.host/learn/ http://holo.host/learn/ and http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org The distributed pattern they have created combines Git local source chains with cryptographic signing and BitTorrent’s DHT to create easily evolvable apps using http://holochain.org http://holochain.org. Peer validation enforces rules defined in the logic of each app. Apps run locally instead of on a corporate server. If the current tech ecosystem is Platform Capitalism, then this pattern is Protocol Cooperativism. I haven’t come across anything like this.
- jsilence 7y ago
  Why don't we go back to simple store and forward like mechanisms like net news, just with enhanced content formatting? Store and forward static websites.
  - ssb1 7y ago
    Something like https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/?
  - thulecitizen 7y ago
    Yeah I think we should, and storing and forwarding is exactly what Holochain does. I think there are different use cases for different tasks. I really like, and use, Scuttlebutt and DAT - which also store and forward data. Scuttlebutt has been awesome for me to see that a social network can be completely hosted by it’s users. I think Holochain and Ceptr are here to help us evolve how we work together and do our accounting. What I love about Holochain's pattern is that it essentially provides a fully distributed, immutable and peer-to-peer crypto accounting framework for barter transactions/sharing work and resources. It does not focus on creating and managing artificially scarce coins (as is the case in the current financial system, and also in Blockchain). It is trying to show us that we are using Industrial Age tools (interest-bearing-debt national currencies), and that instead we could focus on creating peer-to-peer Information Age currencies [1]. Holochain's pattern enables communities to make their own judgements on what value something holds and how they want to account for it. It allows us to build that into a flow language - a currency. This means instead of using a fiat 'medium of exchange' backed by US imperialism and it's military might/control [2] - we create, redeem and destroy currencies based on asset-backed mutual-credit principles that mimic the way Mother Nature works. I think I read somewhere that today over 90% of money in the money system is speculative, and interest-bearing monopoly debt-money has no roots in the real world. An example of a mutual credit currency could be a currency for seats on a train. When I buy a ticket, my ticket is tied to a certain seat on the train. If I went to Mars, my ticket would be worthless. The ticket is only valuable because the ticket is tied to the train system - to one of the seats available. This makes it asset-backed. Another example would be farmers being able to pre-sell their produce locally, without going through expensive middlemen. They can create currencies that represent their produce (the asset). The MetaCurrency Project is bringing us a into a world where we have more agency when interacting with the world, using evolve-able peer to peer protocols that can be forked and re-forked, again and again, to better meet the needs of it's users. They are giving us the tools to see the world with new eyes, and to allow multiple perspectives - instead of one rigid, centrally enforced truth. Moving towards using mutual credit systems, together with reputation currencies (imagine your ratings on Uber, eBay etc. was hosted by your peer-to-peer community), allows you to build trust together in a way, un-intermediated or hindered by a corporate app and UI. These reputation currencies already exist, yet are contained and held hostage by our current paradigm. Other examples of reputation currencies I can think of are ‘FairTrade’ or ‘Organic’ labeling. Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip [3] - making it agent centric instead of data centric. It is not anymore about the database in the middle, but about the relationships between peers and their balances/interactions, and the agreements we make together on what actions we are allowed to take in our different apps and networks. Together we can see and improve the app logic and I can bridge between my apps, as I now have complete control over my own data [4]. HoloREA is a project that is using Holochain to build a modular, cooperative and transparent economic supply chain framework. It uses the Resource Event Agent accounting model to enable users to steward and follow flows of economic actions. These relationships are today tightly controlled in corporations. HoloREA aims to create a cooperative web of interactive flows of people, actions and resources. Essentially, the vision is to reclaim The Commons and give us better tools to steward the world together more peacefully and compassionately. If you’re interested in this paradigm, a few keywords I've found useful: Protocol / Open Cooperativism (currently we have Platform / Surveillance Capitalism), mutual credit, myth of barter, buddhist economics, social darwinism. I also like the work of Elinor Ostrom, Bernard Lietaer, David Graeber, Douglas Rushkoff (Life Inc.), Charles Eisenstein, E.F. Schumacher, Silvia Federici, Mariana Mazzucato and Anand Giridharadas. For technical material: http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org Footnotes/links: [1] https://prezi.com/xmzld_-wayho/new-economy-new-wealth/ https://prezi.com/xmzld_-wayho/new-economy-new-wealth/ [2] “Nixon floated the dollar in order to pay for the cost of a war in which, during the period of 1970–1972 alone, he ordered more than four million tons of explosives and incendiaries dropped on cities and villages across Indochina—causing one senator to dub him “the greatest bomber of all time.”7 The debt crisis was a direct result of the need to pay for the bombs, or, to be more precise, the vast military infrastructure required to deliver them. This was what was causing such an enormous strain on the U.S. gold reserves. Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure “fiat money”—mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be. In that case, one could well argue that U.S. military power was now the only thing backing up the currency. In a certain sense this is true, but the notion of “fiat money” assumes that money really “was” gold in the first place. Really we are dealing with another variation of credit money.” — David Graeber: ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ [3] https://holo.host/faq/what-is-holochain/ https://holo.host/faq/what-is-holochain/ [4] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
tlrobinson 7y ago
> Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Because it’s a lot easier to raise $300 million on a bit of hype selling your own coin. (Also Bitcoin micropayments aren’t quite there yet, but I’m not sure any other truly decentralized cryptocurrency really is either)
- dpacmittal 7y ago
  I feel Nano is doing an outstanding job. It's what bitcoin was supposed to be.
  - ahelwer 7y ago
    The funny thing about every comment which positively mentions Nano is the writer invariably has zero idea what tradeoffs are made in the consensus protocol to make it faster. There are no free lunches in distributed systems which must contend with byzantine failures.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Pray enlighten us.
    - magnamerc 7y ago
      You've succinctly captured exactly how I feel when I hear people mention nano, so thank you for that.
- sharperguy 7y ago
  The problem with any alternative token transfer systems is that they either introduce additional points of centralization (hence attack vectors) or end up being significantly inferior to bitcoin in terms of scalability, reliability, testing and user base.
- ukd1 7y ago
  Also, why filecoin -at all- when siacoin exists and works already. Filecoin is vaporware.
StreamBright 7y ago
The real threat to free internet is not Azure or AWS but things like AMP. You can still host your website even on a server in your basement. IPFS is a great idea but it is very hard to implement something like this. It was tried before (hello Wuala) but no success. I am not sure if this idea can be implemented at all.
progval 7y ago
> Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Filecoin's promise is to be tightly coupled with file storage, to set up contracts that are automatically enforced by the network. Bitcoin does not do this. I don't know much about it, but maybe Ethereum could be used to do that, though
- ukd1 7y ago
  Or you could just use siacoin, which already does this for storage
jasode 7y ago
>Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Maybe the "proof" section of the FAQ will explain the difference: https://filecoin.io/faqs#what-s-the-difference-between-all-these-proofs https://filecoin.io/faqs#what-s-the-difference-between-all-t... If you've already read that FAQ and still disagree, are you saying you can embed the incentives to store terabytes of others' data and also the proof of that storage into existing Bitcoin blocks? (I'm not saying IPFS "proof-of-storage" scheme will work. I'm just saying Bitcoin's proof-of-(cpu)-work doesn't seem to easily map to verification that the peers' harddrives actually has the data they claim to have stored.)
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  In fact, Bitcoin's blockchain is not the right data structure for something like this.
dTal 7y ago
Filecoin isn't a currency. It's a token that proves "I replicated x amount of data, y reliably, for z amount of time", and (protocol-wise) can be exchanged for file storage services only. The market decides how much file storage is actually worth, by arbitrage. The same principle goes for Namecoin, incidentally. The token embodies the value of the resource. I actually think this kind of thing is a much more stable base for a currency than Bitcoin's "it's valuable because we say so" system.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ca98am79 7y ago
  It isn't valuable because "we" say so (whoever "we" is). One reason it is valuable is because millions of dollars of energy resource is put into it to ensure that it is decentralized
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    That's a ridiculous misunderstanding of value. Just because you waste valuable resources to produce something doesn't mean the thing you produce is now valuable. If I feed my dog millions of dollars worth of beluga caviar, it doesn't mean his dogshit is now worth millions. To the degree that bitcoin is valuable today, it's because speculators think somebody else will pay them more for it in the future.
    - ca98am79 7y ago
      Did you read the last part of my statement "to ensure that it is decentralized"? True decentralization at this level is why it is valuable
      - ForHackernews 7y ago
        The fact that you have to waste ever-escalating amounts of electricity to make bitcoins doesn't ensure that it's decentralized. If anything, it means that economies of scale will favor larger organizations. In fact, that's what we see, with a few large Chinese mining syndicates controlling a majority of the hashrate: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/ Compare bitcoin to a real decentralized system like bittorrent, or hell, email.
jota_rv 7y ago
> I've long believed that a browser itself should evolve to be both viewing visited websites but also to host said website for an x number of minutes/hour/days. A bit like webTorrent aims to work. As far as I can remember that's one of the features of https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
rohan1024 7y ago
Opera 11 could act as a server back in 2008 but nobody use it then so :/
acdha 7y ago
> We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Bitcoin manages low 6 figure transactions per day, using as much energy as the entire country of New Zealand to do so. That’s far from internet scale (or even “single Raspberry Pi”-scale) and, because it was designed around gold bug economics, the protocol says it can never improve because the whole point was to scale the overhead as a function of network size. Fundamentally, the reason why none of these have worked comes down to economics: if you’re storing things, you want provable access times and reliability but the costs of doing so in a decentralized system are much higher than in a centralized model because you need more copies to balance out the lack of trust. That also hurts on the other side of this: if you’re considering hosting, you need to charge more to cover your risk of getting involved in legal proceedings and there’s a fairly high threshold where that risk just isn’t worth it.
stdcli 7y ago
There happens to be a great solution for this known as gaia hubs: https://docs.blockstack.org/ https://docs.blockstack.org/ which you can learn about in these docs in conjunction with the immutable identities associated with them. I have also in more context spoken recently with someone and convinced them why they should use gaia over IPFS: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/cannot-find-ipfs-driver/6147 https://forum.blockstack.org/t/cannot-find-ipfs-driver/6147 and they brought up some other usability issues not mentioned in this critique, particularly about file pinning to keep files alive, and in general the waste behind the idea of data duplication by not separating out the auth of the user owned data with the duplication of the data itself in the DHT network, for which Blockstack has "Atlas".
_prometheus 7y ago
Decentralizing how we link, address, and move content is the basis of IPFS and Filecoin both. Both are solving different parts of moving our digital infrastructure to infrastructure that we control, that we govern, and that we are not held hostage by. While we still have a long road to go w/ IPFS usability, it’s worth pointing to what works today -- there are millions of end users benefiting from IPFS, 100Ks of libp2p nodes, we see PBs/mo of traffic in the infrastructure that we run, and millions of daily requests to our gateway. Look to fully decentralized applications and systems like OpenBazaar, Textile, Dtube which use IPFS and paving the way. New technology -- especially new technology that seeks to build new platforms from the ground up -- is hard and extensive to build, and to polish. We’re working on it, and though nowhere close to where we want to be yet, there’s a lot of utility already provided. Re Filecoin incentive structure -- this comes from recognizing that computers are not all the same -- there is huge utility to be had in dedicated infrastructure running 24/7, well maintained, high performance spread out around the world. P2P systems of the past have failed to match the reliability, uptime, and performance levels of centralized systems. Cryptocurrencies enable the creation of Open Services (like Bitcoin) that run public infrastructure w/ high uptime and reliability guarantees. With Filecoin, we aim to bring that to file storage and distribution. More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h2WNxEV8q4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h2WNxEV8q4

quickthrower2 7y ago

The middle ground might be to use a local hosting company that has it's own servers and racks. Pay a bit more, but boycott the big clouds for personal websites. You could probably host a few dozen static blogs on a physical machine for say $100/m. If 100 people do that it's affordable.

x3ro 7y ago
Uberspace [1] does something like this in Germany. You get to pay what you want, too. [1]: https://uberspace.de/en/ https://uberspace.de/en/ Edit: I'm not affiliated with them other than being a customer.
majewsky 7y ago
> You could probably host a few dozen static blogs on a physical machine for say $100/m. 100 bucks!? I host a dozen unique domains with static content (and a few other services) on a 1/1 VPS for 3 euros/month. At Hetzner, not at a hyperscaler.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Yeah I was thinking a whole server not vm.
  - dspillett 7y ago
    Even a real-metal physical box can be had for far less than $100. Even excluding the ranges that are out of stock Kimsufi has a number of options that are more than capable of running "dozens of static blogs" with ease for <$20/month (the €8/month Atom based machine would do the job, as would the currently-out-of-stock €4/month ones). There are other providers with comparable offers, I mention Kimsufi because for some time I've had one of their low spec units running a couple of simple tasks. You are not going to be getting brand-new unused high-spec kit with that sort of deal, of course, but you pays your money, you takes your choice!
dspillett 7y ago
> If 100 people do that it's affordable. If one of those people doesn't mind running as sys-admin and help-desk for the rest... Though your $100/m is rather higher than it needs to be for that level of service so you won't need the same number of people for that cost/person, someone is still taking on a part-time job doing admin for others.

darthreid 7y ago

Sadly a lot of the mechanisms behind bitcoin make for it to be difficult to use in a vast transaction setting (millions/sec, similar to credit cards), which would be required for using its blockchain for proof of work purposes. That’s why alternatives exist in order to solve these “problems” that the BTC community either choose not to fix or simply won’t. It’ll be interesting to see what crypto people would intend to use for something like IPFS.

davidgerard 7y ago
IPFS is from the crypto people. This is what blockchain advocates put forward as the solution to mass storage for their blockchain dreams. IPFS is basically BitTorrent with magnet links - hashes to address content, if you want to be sure your obscure content will stay around then you have to seed it, etc. There's some fancier stuff on top, but if you know that's how it works, all else follows. You can tell how "blockchain" IPFS is from the way that advocates seem chronically unable to tell "could" from "does" - stuff that doesn't exist and/or doesn't work is routinely talked about as if it's here and working in the present. This leads to disappointed posts like the one linked.
- autonome 7y ago
  IPFS is useful to blockchain projects because of the permanence of content hashes. That doesn’t mean it’s not also useful to many others. QRI is using it as the publishing medium and backing store for all kinds of data sets, for example. No blockchain, just shared storage across interested parties. You make a really good point about communicating readiness - the author of the post is expecting more from pre-alpha software than it is ready to provide.
  - acdha 7y ago
    IPFS has had public releases since 2015 with rhetoric implying general utility, not to mention $300M in funding. If it’s still “pre-alpha software” that’s not a mere communications problem.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rzzzt 7y ago

There is an alternative stack that works pretty much as you describe, its browser being Beaker: https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/tour/ https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/tour/ There is an option in there to seed visited content as well as to host your own stuff.

zachsherman 7y ago
Yeah I was so confused why the author didn't just use dat it's so easy
- rzzzt 7y ago
  I'd like to read a comparison between the two hosting experiences; I'm not sure that eg. the linking-to-other-content part would be easier in dat-world, unless they run a pinning/re-hosting/gateway service tied to their current domain (which is doable, either standalone, or via Hashbase).
- rkda 7y ago
  He also tried dat. https://macwright.org/2017/07/20/decentralize-your-website.html https://macwright.org/2017/07/20/decentralize-your-website.h... Hasnt written about it again though.

jeremyboom8 7y ago

> Who is going to defend the free internet agains Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? This is exactly what the http://metacurrency.org http://metacurrency.org project aims to bring to life: http://holo.host/learn/ http://holo.host/learn/ and http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org The distributed pattern they have created combines Git local source chains with cryptographic signing and BitTorrent’s DHT to create easily evolvable apps using http://holochain.org http://holochain.org. Peer validation enforces rules defined in the logic of each app. Apps run locally instead of on a corporate server. If the current tech ecosystem is Platform Capitalism, then this pattern is Protocol Cooperativism. I haven’t come across anything like this.

jsilence 7y ago
Why don't we go back to simple store and forward like mechanisms like net news, just with enhanced content formatting? Store and forward static websites.
- ssb1 7y ago
  Something like https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/?
- thulecitizen 7y ago
  Yeah I think we should, and storing and forwarding is exactly what Holochain does. I think there are different use cases for different tasks. I really like, and use, Scuttlebutt and DAT - which also store and forward data. Scuttlebutt has been awesome for me to see that a social network can be completely hosted by it’s users. I think Holochain and Ceptr are here to help us evolve how we work together and do our accounting. What I love about Holochain's pattern is that it essentially provides a fully distributed, immutable and peer-to-peer crypto accounting framework for barter transactions/sharing work and resources. It does not focus on creating and managing artificially scarce coins (as is the case in the current financial system, and also in Blockchain). It is trying to show us that we are using Industrial Age tools (interest-bearing-debt national currencies), and that instead we could focus on creating peer-to-peer Information Age currencies [1]. Holochain's pattern enables communities to make their own judgements on what value something holds and how they want to account for it. It allows us to build that into a flow language - a currency. This means instead of using a fiat 'medium of exchange' backed by US imperialism and it's military might/control [2] - we create, redeem and destroy currencies based on asset-backed mutual-credit principles that mimic the way Mother Nature works. I think I read somewhere that today over 90% of money in the money system is speculative, and interest-bearing monopoly debt-money has no roots in the real world. An example of a mutual credit currency could be a currency for seats on a train. When I buy a ticket, my ticket is tied to a certain seat on the train. If I went to Mars, my ticket would be worthless. The ticket is only valuable because the ticket is tied to the train system - to one of the seats available. This makes it asset-backed. Another example would be farmers being able to pre-sell their produce locally, without going through expensive middlemen. They can create currencies that represent their produce (the asset). The MetaCurrency Project is bringing us a into a world where we have more agency when interacting with the world, using evolve-able peer to peer protocols that can be forked and re-forked, again and again, to better meet the needs of it's users. They are giving us the tools to see the world with new eyes, and to allow multiple perspectives - instead of one rigid, centrally enforced truth. Moving towards using mutual credit systems, together with reputation currencies (imagine your ratings on Uber, eBay etc. was hosted by your peer-to-peer community), allows you to build trust together in a way, un-intermediated or hindered by a corporate app and UI. These reputation currencies already exist, yet are contained and held hostage by our current paradigm. Other examples of reputation currencies I can think of are ‘FairTrade’ or ‘Organic’ labeling. Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip [3] - making it agent centric instead of data centric. It is not anymore about the database in the middle, but about the relationships between peers and their balances/interactions, and the agreements we make together on what actions we are allowed to take in our different apps and networks. Together we can see and improve the app logic and I can bridge between my apps, as I now have complete control over my own data [4]. HoloREA is a project that is using Holochain to build a modular, cooperative and transparent economic supply chain framework. It uses the Resource Event Agent accounting model to enable users to steward and follow flows of economic actions. These relationships are today tightly controlled in corporations. HoloREA aims to create a cooperative web of interactive flows of people, actions and resources. Essentially, the vision is to reclaim The Commons and give us better tools to steward the world together more peacefully and compassionately. If you’re interested in this paradigm, a few keywords I've found useful: Protocol / Open Cooperativism (currently we have Platform / Surveillance Capitalism), mutual credit, myth of barter, buddhist economics, social darwinism. I also like the work of Elinor Ostrom, Bernard Lietaer, David Graeber, Douglas Rushkoff (Life Inc.), Charles Eisenstein, E.F. Schumacher, Silvia Federici, Mariana Mazzucato and Anand Giridharadas. For technical material: http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org Footnotes/links: [1] https://prezi.com/xmzld_-wayho/new-economy-new-wealth/ https://prezi.com/xmzld_-wayho/new-economy-new-wealth/ [2] “Nixon floated the dollar in order to pay for the cost of a war in which, during the period of 1970–1972 alone, he ordered more than four million tons of explosives and incendiaries dropped on cities and villages across Indochina—causing one senator to dub him “the greatest bomber of all time.”7 The debt crisis was a direct result of the need to pay for the bombs, or, to be more precise, the vast military infrastructure required to deliver them. This was what was causing such an enormous strain on the U.S. gold reserves. Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure “fiat money”—mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be. In that case, one could well argue that U.S. military power was now the only thing backing up the currency. In a certain sense this is true, but the notion of “fiat money” assumes that money really “was” gold in the first place. Really we are dealing with another variation of credit money.” — David Graeber: ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ [3] https://holo.host/faq/what-is-holochain/ https://holo.host/faq/what-is-holochain/ [4] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

tlrobinson 7y ago

> Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Because it’s a lot easier to raise $300 million on a bit of hype selling your own coin. (Also Bitcoin micropayments aren’t quite there yet, but I’m not sure any other truly decentralized cryptocurrency really is either)

dpacmittal 7y ago
I feel Nano is doing an outstanding job. It's what bitcoin was supposed to be.
- ahelwer 7y ago
  The funny thing about every comment which positively mentions Nano is the writer invariably has zero idea what tradeoffs are made in the consensus protocol to make it faster. There are no free lunches in distributed systems which must contend with byzantine failures.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Pray enlighten us.
  - magnamerc 7y ago
    You've succinctly captured exactly how I feel when I hear people mention nano, so thank you for that.
sharperguy 7y ago
The problem with any alternative token transfer systems is that they either introduce additional points of centralization (hence attack vectors) or end up being significantly inferior to bitcoin in terms of scalability, reliability, testing and user base.
ukd1 7y ago
Also, why filecoin -at all- when siacoin exists and works already. Filecoin is vaporware.

StreamBright 7y ago

The real threat to free internet is not Azure or AWS but things like AMP. You can still host your website even on a server in your basement. IPFS is a great idea but it is very hard to implement something like this. It was tried before (hello Wuala) but no success. I am not sure if this idea can be implemented at all.

progval 7y ago

> Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Filecoin's promise is to be tightly coupled with file storage, to set up contracts that are automatically enforced by the network. Bitcoin does not do this. I don't know much about it, but maybe Ethereum could be used to do that, though

ukd1 7y ago
Or you could just use siacoin, which already does this for storage

jasode 7y ago

>Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Maybe the "proof" section of the FAQ will explain the difference: https://filecoin.io/faqs#what-s-the-difference-between-all-these-proofs https://filecoin.io/faqs#what-s-the-difference-between-all-t... If you've already read that FAQ and still disagree, are you saying you can embed the incentives to store terabytes of others' data and also the proof of that storage into existing Bitcoin blocks? (I'm not saying IPFS "proof-of-storage" scheme will work. I'm just saying Bitcoin's proof-of-(cpu)-work doesn't seem to easily map to verification that the peers' harddrives actually has the data they claim to have stored.)

simonebrunozzi 7y ago
In fact, Bitcoin's blockchain is not the right data structure for something like this.

dTal 7y ago

Filecoin isn't a currency. It's a token that proves "I replicated x amount of data, y reliably, for z amount of time", and (protocol-wise) can be exchanged for file storage services only. The market decides how much file storage is actually worth, by arbitrage. The same principle goes for Namecoin, incidentally. The token embodies the value of the resource. I actually think this kind of thing is a much more stable base for a currency than Bitcoin's "it's valuable because we say so" system.

deleted 7y ago
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ca98am79 7y ago
It isn't valuable because "we" say so (whoever "we" is). One reason it is valuable is because millions of dollars of energy resource is put into it to ensure that it is decentralized
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  That's a ridiculous misunderstanding of value. Just because you waste valuable resources to produce something doesn't mean the thing you produce is now valuable. If I feed my dog millions of dollars worth of beluga caviar, it doesn't mean his dogshit is now worth millions. To the degree that bitcoin is valuable today, it's because speculators think somebody else will pay them more for it in the future.
  - ca98am79 7y ago
    Did you read the last part of my statement "to ensure that it is decentralized"? True decentralization at this level is why it is valuable
    - ForHackernews 7y ago
      The fact that you have to waste ever-escalating amounts of electricity to make bitcoins doesn't ensure that it's decentralized. If anything, it means that economies of scale will favor larger organizations. In fact, that's what we see, with a few large Chinese mining syndicates controlling a majority of the hashrate: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/ Compare bitcoin to a real decentralized system like bittorrent, or hell, email.

jota_rv 7y ago

> I've long believed that a browser itself should evolve to be both viewing visited websites but also to host said website for an x number of minutes/hour/days. A bit like webTorrent aims to work. As far as I can remember that's one of the features of https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/

rohan1024 7y ago

Opera 11 could act as a server back in 2008 but nobody use it then so :/

acdha 7y ago

> We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Bitcoin manages low 6 figure transactions per day, using as much energy as the entire country of New Zealand to do so. That’s far from internet scale (or even “single Raspberry Pi”-scale) and, because it was designed around gold bug economics, the protocol says it can never improve because the whole point was to scale the overhead as a function of network size. Fundamentally, the reason why none of these have worked comes down to economics: if you’re storing things, you want provable access times and reliability but the costs of doing so in a decentralized system are much higher than in a centralized model because you need more copies to balance out the lack of trust. That also hurts on the other side of this: if you’re considering hosting, you need to charge more to cover your risk of getting involved in legal proceedings and there’s a fairly high threshold where that risk just isn’t worth it.

stdcli 7y ago

There happens to be a great solution for this known as gaia hubs: https://docs.blockstack.org/ https://docs.blockstack.org/ which you can learn about in these docs in conjunction with the immutable identities associated with them. I have also in more context spoken recently with someone and convinced them why they should use gaia over IPFS: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/cannot-find-ipfs-driver/6147 https://forum.blockstack.org/t/cannot-find-ipfs-driver/6147 and they brought up some other usability issues not mentioned in this critique, particularly about file pinning to keep files alive, and in general the waste behind the idea of data duplication by not separating out the auth of the user owned data with the duplication of the data itself in the DHT network, for which Blockstack has "Atlas".

_prometheus 7y ago

Decentralizing how we link, address, and move content is the basis of IPFS and Filecoin both. Both are solving different parts of moving our digital infrastructure to infrastructure that we control, that we govern, and that we are not held hostage by. While we still have a long road to go w/ IPFS usability, it’s worth pointing to what works today -- there are millions of end users benefiting from IPFS, 100Ks of libp2p nodes, we see PBs/mo of traffic in the infrastructure that we run, and millions of daily requests to our gateway. Look to fully decentralized applications and systems like OpenBazaar, Textile, Dtube which use IPFS and paving the way. New technology -- especially new technology that seeks to build new platforms from the ground up -- is hard and extensive to build, and to polish. We’re working on it, and though nowhere close to where we want to be yet, there’s a lot of utility already provided. Re Filecoin incentive structure -- this comes from recognizing that computers are not all the same -- there is huge utility to be had in dedicated infrastructure running 24/7, well maintained, high performance spread out around the world. P2P systems of the past have failed to match the reliability, uptime, and performance levels of centralized systems. Cryptocurrencies enable the creation of Open Services (like Bitcoin) that run public infrastructure w/ high uptime and reliability guarantees. With Filecoin, we aim to bring that to file storage and distribution. More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h2WNxEV8q4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h2WNxEV8q4