6 ms·

What Sets Us Apart: Filecoin’s Proof System

53 points by Confiks 7y ago

lalaland1125 7y ago
Like so many cryptocurrency projects, Filecoin just seems like a solution in search of a problem more than anything else. What exact problem is Filecoin trying to solve that's not possible with current infrastructure? It seems like the decentralization adds a lot of overhead and complexity for no benefit. The main argument that I hear is that somehow Filecoin will be cheaper than centralized competitors. However, services such as Backblaze are already quite efficient. Why exactly would costs be cheaper and why can't Backblaze do those same things and overtake Filecoin?
- imglorp 7y ago
  They needed to compensate providers of storage for IPFS. The challenge is how to prove that a provider has your block and that they aren't double dipping, ie claiming redundancy when they only are storing one copy.
  - Ygg2 7y ago
    That's pretty neat. I wonder if similar could be achieved for processing power. Distribted hosting ftw.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      that's what https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/ is trying to do.
  - momack2 7y ago
    Exactly. IPFS has millions of end users and hundreds of apps storing data on the decentralized network, creating demand for decentralized persistence of that data. Current solution is to either run your own IPFS node or pay a pinning service to run a node persisting your IPFS data for you - but even better to have a highly resilient marketplace of storage nodes that can store redundant copies!
    - darkcha0s 7y ago
      Where are you getting “millions of end users” from? A quick google search doesn’t return anything, and that seems a lot for a relatively unknown project
      - NickBusey 7y ago
        IPFS is by no means 'relatively unknown'. It is used in dozens of projects. See: https://github.com/ipfs/awesome-ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/awesome-ipfs
        marknadal 7y ago
        I think parent was saying the projects using IPFS are relatively unknown, so where are the millions come from? I have the same question. In contrast, GUN, has 20M+ downloads/month from known sources: Internet Archive, HackerNoon, etc. (https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun see jsdelivr download stats).
        notthegunlobby 7y ago
        lol it's not a HN post about a decentralized project without marknadal shitting on it and shilling GUN. got a running bet it always happens, and you don't disappoint <3 -- keep it up!
        whyrusleeping 7y ago
        Yeah, Its pretty much a staple. Despite repeated attempts by the mods to get it to stop.
        marknadal 7y ago
        IPFS, a YC company, is trying to censor Open Source competitors? Interesting. What are you scared of?
- msvan 7y ago
  Presumably they think decentralization is a benefit in its own right.
- programmarchy 7y ago
  Technical complexity isn't the only dimension. Surveillance capitalism and privatized censorship are byproducts of data centralization. Cryptocurrency has a political aspect. Why view it only through a lens of technical complexity?
- wmf 7y ago
  If a decentralized system is using spare resources that are literally free it could theoretically be cheaper than a business that pays for hardware. It will be interesting to see if that works in practice.
  - lalaland1125 7y ago
    One issue is that you are always paying for power. Some back of the napkin calculations indicate that Backblaze's prices are low enough that it's not worth it to compete unless you are getting more than 1 terrabyte per 30 watts as otherwise the power costs alone would kill you. That's going to be a pretty hard target to hit with "spare free resources" (not to mention hardware degradation and capital costs).
    - p1necone 7y ago
      You're always paying for power regardless of whether you're offering your unused drive space on a distributed system.
      - klodolph 7y ago
        Hard drives consume less power when idle, like CPUs.
        p1necone 7y ago
        I imagine that extra power consumption has to be less than the combination of non idle HDDs and all of the other infrastructure at backblaze, no? And they're still going to be idle most of the time. And there's the added likelihood that people providing hdd space on filecoin are not going to even measure the impact of extra power consumption, they're just going to notice the revenue. (Not that this is a good thing, if someone was losing money, they should know)
    - klodolph 7y ago
      Agreed. Cloud storage is a commodity race to the bottom. Cloud providers want you to use their storage systems because it means that you’ll also use their more profitable associated services in order to save money on egress. Accumulate enough data, and you’re locked in because of the high cost to migrate. Because IO dominates so many workloads, you already get a bunch of bytes for cheap when you are running a cloud storage provider. It’s already dirt cheap and potentially a loss leader (I suspect). So, I have a hard time seeing how “spare free resources” are going to be competitive when you factor in the network, capital costs, power, etc. Then there’s some unknown legal risk that you are e.g. accepting money to distribute child porn to people, just like there’s a legal risk associated with running a Tor node (not commenting on whether this is just or not). Just my opinion. Not speaking on behalf of anyone here.
- ajhurliman 7y ago
  Storing and serving files a lot cheaper and more reliably than current cloud providers seems like something people actually want.
  - lalaland1125 7y ago
    Yes, but does Filecoin actually get you there? And if so, how and why?
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    Right but you actually have to be able to do that, and introducing inefficiency in the form of blockchain doesn't seem like a way to make anything cheaper.
- DennisP 7y ago
  I don't want to start a business that pays a cloud service for storage. I want to write an application and set it free on the internet to run all by itself.
- johnmarcus 7y ago
  Like other cryptos, Filecoins founders don't get rich off existing and usually better solutions.
- Taek 7y ago
  Founder of another decentralized storage product here: Decentralized storage is going to replace the cloud. We have a working platform today with thousands (and growing) of users which is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than the centralized alternative. One of the major challenges of the cloud today is deplatforming and loss of ownership, two things that are squarely handled by decentralization. It opens the door to innovation and allows builders a lot more freedom in how they approach solving modern problems. Decentralization also ends up being a huge element in cost reduction. Our platform uses dozens of hosts at one to store and serve data, which means any given host only needs about 95% uptime. The network is completely open and anyone with good infra can join at any time, making revenue, and competing, which drives prices down. We're currently at 1/10th of Amazon. Decentralization also makes it possible to build apps that don't shut down. Users today have to worry about the health of a parent company when choosing a product, with many people having been displayed by a "Google RSS Reader is shutting down" message. That problem disappears with decentralized infra. It may take some time for the rest of the world to catch on, but decentralization is just a better way to build apps.
  - carterehsmith 7y ago
    >> Our platform uses dozens of hosts >> We're currently at 1/10th of Amazon. Curious, where is the "1/10th of Amazon" coming from?
    - Taek 7y ago
      https://siastats.info/storage_pricing https://siastats.info/storage_pricing
- arcticbull 7y ago
  What sets us apart: Inefficiency and a higher cost basis than any cloud storage providers due to our devout adherence to blockchain.
thulecitizen 7y ago
Filecoin's Proof of Replication sounds similar to Valueflo.ws and Holochain's asset backed currencies. Let's go full distributed computing and use mutual credit while we're at it. Otherwise we're just going to carry forward the broken dynamics and assumptions of the current economy.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  What is "Mutual Credit"?
  - thulecitizen 7y ago
    Mutual credit means everybody can extend credit to another peer, and there is no centralized issuance of credit. The agreements themselves are fully p2p without any 3rd party. Using mutual credit (which the Holochain pattern/framework is specifically designed to do) [1] also means the mutual credit protocol/agreement itself can evolve without being bottlenecked by the developments of said 3rd party. "Check out, for example, mutual credit systems like Sardex, where small businesses get together to issue money as credit to each other. Everyone starts from zero in the system, and then goes into and out of short-term debt to one another by either receiving goods and services — which creates a future obligation owed — or by being prepared to offer goods and services to people on the system, which earns you positive claims on others—otherwise known as money." [2] [1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati... [2] https://howwegettonext.com/the-future-of-money-depends-on-busting-the-fairy-tales-you-believe-about-its-past-30cbd90619e0 https://howwegettonext.com/the-future-of-money-depends-on-bu...
paulproteus 7y ago
It seems that Filecoin fundamentally relies on a proof-of-work type system called "sealing." The article calls it "an intense amount of work" that you must do in order to host a file. Does anyone have any estimates or comparisons for the CPU/energy consumed?
- whyrusleeping 7y ago
  Its currently looking at about 4 hours of single core CPU time, plus 2-3 hours more of using many cores for a 32GB sector. The difference between sealing and an actual proof of work based network here is that once you've sealed a sector, you don't have to keep computing anything that expensive. If you seal 1TB and thats 1% of the network, you should win 1% of the blocks (ignoring network growth) without further sealing work required. I tend to think about it like a (calculus) derivative of PoW.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    What's the purpose of sealing?
    - ajhurliman 7y ago
      If I'm understanding it correctly, it's to ensure that you've actually set aside that disk space for the Filecoin network (instead of using it yourself).
    - whyrusleeping 7y ago
      Sealing ensures that miners have a unique replica of a given piece of data on their disk. Since we're basing block producer power on storage, we need to protect against a number of attacks such as people generating the data on the fly, or deduplicating data on disk (claiming to have 100TB but only having a single 1TB file 100 times).
  - paulproteus 7y ago
    Cool! So then, dumb question. Can I delete the file, keep the "seal", and keep winning 1% of the blocks? If yes, then that seems bad for the system. If not (hopefully), I'd like to also understand what's the ongoing compute cost of using the seal plus file together. I understood from the article that sealing is something you do if you are publishing a mirror of a file. Is that right? Feel free to get bored of this conversation and link me to a paper or something. :) I'm grateful for the reply you gave above already.
aakilfernandes 7y ago
Whats missing is proof of delivery, and thats the most important thing. I'm not just paying AWS to store my files, I'm paying them to deliver my files. Maybe this could work as an alternative to glacier. But even then, I doubt it. I'd take Amazon with an SLA any day of the week.
- marknadal 7y ago
  Correct, this is what we solved for. I gave a presentation at Berkeley a few years back, right before Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) presented his Chia proof, Proofs of Space and Time (before IPFS ripped the name from Bram). https://www.facebook.com/BlockchainatBerkeley/videos/2006069823011271/ https://www.facebook.com/BlockchainatBerkeley/videos/2006069...
  - aakilfernandes 7y ago
    Sorry, who is "we"? And got a writeup anywhere?
    - marknadal 7y ago
      https://web.stanford.edu/~nadal/A-Decentralized-Data-Synchronization-Protocol.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~nadal/A-Decentralized-Data-Synchro... https://era.eco/ https://era.eco/ http://axe.eco/ http://axe.eco/
- ajhurliman 7y ago
  That's the other way you get paid in Filecoin, payment channels for retrieving files. Although it's not technically "mining" it's easier to think about Filecoin having two types of miners: Storage and retrieval. Since it's incentivized there's a good chance you'll get your files back quickly if you're willing to pay more or if it's a common file.
  - johnmarcus 7y ago
    As long as Filecoins is traded on a market, and not tied to actual cpu/bandwidth/storage costs, then if will ALWAYS be more expensive then AWS (and alternatives).
ThrowAwayGlen 7y ago
I'm very glad I didn't buy into the ICO hype. Filecoin raised $257m selling their Filecoin tokens and now, more than 2 years later, they still have yet to ship a product.
johnmarcus 7y ago
If the market trades Filecoins too high, won't it become a cost burden to those wanting the service? And so then I will leave Filecoin, and there won't much data to store. Until you fix price Filecoin, the technical market will be sullied by the financial markets. As an example, if my ec2 prices went up in line with Amazon stock, I would be paying 5x the cost compared to z few years ago - which means I would have left to digital ocean, and AWS would lack customers. Lagged hype would falsely bolster the stock price. It's why this decentralized bullshit doesn't work - in the end the greed of it's founders/majority holders destroy it.
- whyrusleeping 7y ago
  Its not like 1 filecoin == 1 gigabyte of storage. Its a market, people pay what they want to pay. I think you have an incorrect picture of the system in your head and havent actually gone and done the research needed to back up your angry sounding claims.
  - johnmarcus 7y ago
    They pay in Filecoin, which is a fluctuating asset based on financial market conditions which have nothing to do with actual cost of services. Do your research, else your just anther naive investor, or worse, con man. https://tokeneconomy.co/the-analysis-filecoin-doesnt-want-you-to-read-e60d5243f17c https://tokeneconomy.co/the-analysis-filecoin-doesnt-want-yo...
    - capnwally14 7y ago
      Lol, whyrusleeping is one of the core contributors to Filecoin. Also if the price externally is changing, you could just... reduce the amount of FIL you pay per GB. So if in t=0, the price of FIL is $1, and I choose to pay 1 FIL for 1 GB, and in t=1 the price of FIL goes to $2, I could just pay 0.5 FIL. Sounds like a miner (whose cost basis denominated in fiat) would be happy to accept either deal if its net profitable.
thesausageking 7y ago
I hadn't heard much from Filecoin since their ICO years ago. How does Filecoin compare to Sia and Arweave?

53 points by Confiks 7y ago

Like so many cryptocurrency projects, Filecoin just seems like a solution in search of a problem more than anything else. What exact problem is Filecoin trying to solve that's not possible with current infrastructure? It seems like the decentralization adds a lot of overhead and complexity for no benefit. The main argument that I hear is that somehow Filecoin will be cheaper than centralized competitors. However, services such as Backblaze are already quite efficient. Why exactly would costs be cheaper and why can't Backblaze do those same things and overtake Filecoin?

imglorp 7y ago
They needed to compensate providers of storage for IPFS. The challenge is how to prove that a provider has your block and that they aren't double dipping, ie claiming redundancy when they only are storing one copy.
- Ygg2 7y ago
  That's pretty neat. I wonder if similar could be achieved for processing power. Distribted hosting ftw.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    that's what https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/ is trying to do.
- momack2 7y ago
  Exactly. IPFS has millions of end users and hundreds of apps storing data on the decentralized network, creating demand for decentralized persistence of that data. Current solution is to either run your own IPFS node or pay a pinning service to run a node persisting your IPFS data for you - but even better to have a highly resilient marketplace of storage nodes that can store redundant copies!
  - darkcha0s 7y ago
    Where are you getting “millions of end users” from? A quick google search doesn’t return anything, and that seems a lot for a relatively unknown project
    - NickBusey 7y ago
      IPFS is by no means 'relatively unknown'. It is used in dozens of projects. See: https://github.com/ipfs/awesome-ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/awesome-ipfs
      - marknadal 7y ago
        I think parent was saying the projects using IPFS are relatively unknown, so where are the millions come from? I have the same question. In contrast, GUN, has 20M+ downloads/month from known sources: Internet Archive, HackerNoon, etc. (https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun see jsdelivr download stats).
        notthegunlobby 7y ago
        lol it's not a HN post about a decentralized project without marknadal shitting on it and shilling GUN. got a running bet it always happens, and you don't disappoint <3 -- keep it up!
        whyrusleeping 7y ago
        Yeah, Its pretty much a staple. Despite repeated attempts by the mods to get it to stop.
        marknadal 7y ago
        IPFS, a YC company, is trying to censor Open Source competitors? Interesting. What are you scared of?
msvan 7y ago
Presumably they think decentralization is a benefit in its own right.
programmarchy 7y ago
Technical complexity isn't the only dimension. Surveillance capitalism and privatized censorship are byproducts of data centralization. Cryptocurrency has a political aspect. Why view it only through a lens of technical complexity?
wmf 7y ago
If a decentralized system is using spare resources that are literally free it could theoretically be cheaper than a business that pays for hardware. It will be interesting to see if that works in practice.
- lalaland1125 7y ago
  One issue is that you are always paying for power. Some back of the napkin calculations indicate that Backblaze's prices are low enough that it's not worth it to compete unless you are getting more than 1 terrabyte per 30 watts as otherwise the power costs alone would kill you. That's going to be a pretty hard target to hit with "spare free resources" (not to mention hardware degradation and capital costs).
  - p1necone 7y ago
    You're always paying for power regardless of whether you're offering your unused drive space on a distributed system.
    - klodolph 7y ago
      Hard drives consume less power when idle, like CPUs.
      - p1necone 7y ago
        I imagine that extra power consumption has to be less than the combination of non idle HDDs and all of the other infrastructure at backblaze, no? And they're still going to be idle most of the time. And there's the added likelihood that people providing hdd space on filecoin are not going to even measure the impact of extra power consumption, they're just going to notice the revenue. (Not that this is a good thing, if someone was losing money, they should know)
  - klodolph 7y ago
    Agreed. Cloud storage is a commodity race to the bottom. Cloud providers want you to use their storage systems because it means that you’ll also use their more profitable associated services in order to save money on egress. Accumulate enough data, and you’re locked in because of the high cost to migrate. Because IO dominates so many workloads, you already get a bunch of bytes for cheap when you are running a cloud storage provider. It’s already dirt cheap and potentially a loss leader (I suspect). So, I have a hard time seeing how “spare free resources” are going to be competitive when you factor in the network, capital costs, power, etc. Then there’s some unknown legal risk that you are e.g. accepting money to distribute child porn to people, just like there’s a legal risk associated with running a Tor node (not commenting on whether this is just or not). Just my opinion. Not speaking on behalf of anyone here.
ajhurliman 7y ago
Storing and serving files a lot cheaper and more reliably than current cloud providers seems like something people actually want.
- lalaland1125 7y ago
  Yes, but does Filecoin actually get you there? And if so, how and why?
- arcticbull 7y ago
  Right but you actually have to be able to do that, and introducing inefficiency in the form of blockchain doesn't seem like a way to make anything cheaper.
DennisP 7y ago
I don't want to start a business that pays a cloud service for storage. I want to write an application and set it free on the internet to run all by itself.
johnmarcus 7y ago
Like other cryptos, Filecoins founders don't get rich off existing and usually better solutions.
Taek 7y ago
Founder of another decentralized storage product here: Decentralized storage is going to replace the cloud. We have a working platform today with thousands (and growing) of users which is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than the centralized alternative. One of the major challenges of the cloud today is deplatforming and loss of ownership, two things that are squarely handled by decentralization. It opens the door to innovation and allows builders a lot more freedom in how they approach solving modern problems. Decentralization also ends up being a huge element in cost reduction. Our platform uses dozens of hosts at one to store and serve data, which means any given host only needs about 95% uptime. The network is completely open and anyone with good infra can join at any time, making revenue, and competing, which drives prices down. We're currently at 1/10th of Amazon. Decentralization also makes it possible to build apps that don't shut down. Users today have to worry about the health of a parent company when choosing a product, with many people having been displayed by a "Google RSS Reader is shutting down" message. That problem disappears with decentralized infra. It may take some time for the rest of the world to catch on, but decentralization is just a better way to build apps.
- carterehsmith 7y ago
  >> Our platform uses dozens of hosts >> We're currently at 1/10th of Amazon. Curious, where is the "1/10th of Amazon" coming from?
  - Taek 7y ago
    https://siastats.info/storage_pricing https://siastats.info/storage_pricing
arcticbull 7y ago
What sets us apart: Inefficiency and a higher cost basis than any cloud storage providers due to our devout adherence to blockchain.

thulecitizen 7y ago

Filecoin's Proof of Replication sounds similar to Valueflo.ws and Holochain's asset backed currencies. Let's go full distributed computing and use mutual credit while we're at it. Otherwise we're just going to carry forward the broken dynamics and assumptions of the current economy.

chrisco255 7y ago
What is "Mutual Credit"?
- thulecitizen 7y ago
  Mutual credit means everybody can extend credit to another peer, and there is no centralized issuance of credit. The agreements themselves are fully p2p without any 3rd party. Using mutual credit (which the Holochain pattern/framework is specifically designed to do) [1] also means the mutual credit protocol/agreement itself can evolve without being bottlenecked by the developments of said 3rd party. "Check out, for example, mutual credit systems like Sardex, where small businesses get together to issue money as credit to each other. Everyone starts from zero in the system, and then goes into and out of short-term debt to one another by either receiving goods and services — which creates a future obligation owed — or by being prepared to offer goods and services to people on the system, which earns you positive claims on others—otherwise known as money." [2] [1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati... [2] https://howwegettonext.com/the-future-of-money-depends-on-busting-the-fairy-tales-you-believe-about-its-past-30cbd90619e0 https://howwegettonext.com/the-future-of-money-depends-on-bu...

paulproteus 7y ago

It seems that Filecoin fundamentally relies on a proof-of-work type system called "sealing." The article calls it "an intense amount of work" that you must do in order to host a file. Does anyone have any estimates or comparisons for the CPU/energy consumed?

whyrusleeping 7y ago
Its currently looking at about 4 hours of single core CPU time, plus 2-3 hours more of using many cores for a 32GB sector. The difference between sealing and an actual proof of work based network here is that once you've sealed a sector, you don't have to keep computing anything that expensive. If you seal 1TB and thats 1% of the network, you should win 1% of the blocks (ignoring network growth) without further sealing work required. I tend to think about it like a (calculus) derivative of PoW.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  What's the purpose of sealing?
  - ajhurliman 7y ago
    If I'm understanding it correctly, it's to ensure that you've actually set aside that disk space for the Filecoin network (instead of using it yourself).
  - whyrusleeping 7y ago
    Sealing ensures that miners have a unique replica of a given piece of data on their disk. Since we're basing block producer power on storage, we need to protect against a number of attacks such as people generating the data on the fly, or deduplicating data on disk (claiming to have 100TB but only having a single 1TB file 100 times).
- paulproteus 7y ago
  Cool! So then, dumb question. Can I delete the file, keep the "seal", and keep winning 1% of the blocks? If yes, then that seems bad for the system. If not (hopefully), I'd like to also understand what's the ongoing compute cost of using the seal plus file together. I understood from the article that sealing is something you do if you are publishing a mirror of a file. Is that right? Feel free to get bored of this conversation and link me to a paper or something. :) I'm grateful for the reply you gave above already.

aakilfernandes 7y ago

Whats missing is proof of delivery, and thats the most important thing. I'm not just paying AWS to store my files, I'm paying them to deliver my files. Maybe this could work as an alternative to glacier. But even then, I doubt it. I'd take Amazon with an SLA any day of the week.

marknadal 7y ago
Correct, this is what we solved for. I gave a presentation at Berkeley a few years back, right before Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) presented his Chia proof, Proofs of Space and Time (before IPFS ripped the name from Bram). https://www.facebook.com/BlockchainatBerkeley/videos/2006069823011271/ https://www.facebook.com/BlockchainatBerkeley/videos/2006069...
- aakilfernandes 7y ago
  Sorry, who is "we"? And got a writeup anywhere?
  - marknadal 7y ago
    https://web.stanford.edu/~nadal/A-Decentralized-Data-Synchronization-Protocol.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~nadal/A-Decentralized-Data-Synchro... https://era.eco/ https://era.eco/ http://axe.eco/ http://axe.eco/
ajhurliman 7y ago
That's the other way you get paid in Filecoin, payment channels for retrieving files. Although it's not technically "mining" it's easier to think about Filecoin having two types of miners: Storage and retrieval. Since it's incentivized there's a good chance you'll get your files back quickly if you're willing to pay more or if it's a common file.
- johnmarcus 7y ago
  As long as Filecoins is traded on a market, and not tied to actual cpu/bandwidth/storage costs, then if will ALWAYS be more expensive then AWS (and alternatives).

ThrowAwayGlen 7y ago

I'm very glad I didn't buy into the ICO hype. Filecoin raised $257m selling their Filecoin tokens and now, more than 2 years later, they still have yet to ship a product.

johnmarcus 7y ago

If the market trades Filecoins too high, won't it become a cost burden to those wanting the service? And so then I will leave Filecoin, and there won't much data to store. Until you fix price Filecoin, the technical market will be sullied by the financial markets. As an example, if my ec2 prices went up in line with Amazon stock, I would be paying 5x the cost compared to z few years ago - which means I would have left to digital ocean, and AWS would lack customers. Lagged hype would falsely bolster the stock price. It's why this decentralized bullshit doesn't work - in the end the greed of it's founders/majority holders destroy it.

whyrusleeping 7y ago
Its not like 1 filecoin == 1 gigabyte of storage. Its a market, people pay what they want to pay. I think you have an incorrect picture of the system in your head and havent actually gone and done the research needed to back up your angry sounding claims.
- johnmarcus 7y ago
  They pay in Filecoin, which is a fluctuating asset based on financial market conditions which have nothing to do with actual cost of services. Do your research, else your just anther naive investor, or worse, con man. https://tokeneconomy.co/the-analysis-filecoin-doesnt-want-you-to-read-e60d5243f17c https://tokeneconomy.co/the-analysis-filecoin-doesnt-want-yo...
  - capnwally14 7y ago
    Lol, whyrusleeping is one of the core contributors to Filecoin. Also if the price externally is changing, you could just... reduce the amount of FIL you pay per GB. So if in t=0, the price of FIL is $1, and I choose to pay 1 FIL for 1 GB, and in t=1 the price of FIL goes to $2, I could just pay 0.5 FIL. Sounds like a miner (whose cost basis denominated in fiat) would be happy to accept either deal if its net profitable.

thesausageking 7y ago

I hadn't heard much from Filecoin since their ICO years ago. How does Filecoin compare to Sia and Arweave?