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Investor revolt and legal dispute delay Filecoin plans

87 points by ilamont 6y ago

thesausageking 6y ago
Filecoin is a great example of raising a lot of money slowing a project down. They did a $200m ICO in 2017 and they still haven't shipped a 1.0, while smaller, much less well funded projects (Sia, Arweave, ...) have made a lot more progress.
- neckardt 6y ago
  Are any of these projects ready for personal backup use, or still experimental?
  - RL_Quine 6y ago
    The chance of "filecoin" or whatever else existing 12 months into the future is astonishingly low. The "completion" rate on ICOs is close to zero. > "Obviously it could fail and become worthless. But if it works it could be huge, like Google-scale huge, which is why this became so contentious," a different investor explains. That anybody put money into such a bleak concept is still beyond me.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      > But if it works it could be huge, like Google-scale huge Or tulip-huge, the first shitcoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
    - cjbprime 6y ago
      I can generally agree about random ICOs, but for what it's worth the Filecoin team is world-class distributed systems talent. I wouldn't say this about any other ICO. (I don't own Filecoin tokens and have nothing to gain by the project being successful, I'm just a fan of that team.)
      - kevingadd 6y ago
        If you're investing in a business venture, the distributed systems talent doesn't matter nearly as much as their ability to build and maintain a successful business without it falling over. If they've got millions USD worth of cash in the bank, they can hire talented engineers, but if they don't have any idea how to run a business no algorithm is going to fix that.
        cjbprime 6y ago
        I'm responding to: > The chance of "filecoin" or whatever else existing 12 months into the future is astonishingly low. I actually think the chance of Filecoin existing in a year is close to 1. It's not due to a prediction of a wildly successful corporate structure. It's mainly about the tech.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Seems roughly in like with most startups
  - koeng 6y ago
    I’ve found Sia to be quite good. Their “skynet” system is really cool.
    - really3452 6y ago
      ScPrime has been looking really good too!
      - fishbed4 6y ago
        i'll look into SCP. thanks. love all the storage coins. always looking for another to add to the portfolio.
      - koeng 6y ago
        Any reason the fork is better than the main project?
  - yupyup54133 6y ago
    Sia (and its Skynet product) have been working great for me for the last 6 months!
  - shakezula 6y ago
    Storj, Sia, and a few others minor players are in production. Each have their tradeoffs.
  - companyhen 6y ago
    Arweave has a pay once, store forever model where after the initial payment to upload (~$0.005/MB) the file is stored forever on the permaweb. You can get started with some free tokens to play with arweave here: http://tokens.arweave.org/ http://tokens.arweave.org/ I also suggest you check out the latest Arweave x Gitcoin Open Web Incubator Demo Day from last week to see the latest stuff being built. Looking forward to ArDrive, Verto, WeaveID and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slzyw1w5Ric&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slzyw1w5Ric&feature=youtu.be One further advantage of decentralized UI hosting on Arweave is simply resilience to website outages: https://twitter.com/rleshner/status/1278444807011139585 https://twitter.com/rleshner/status/1278444807011139585
    - wmf 6y ago
      Interesting that this is 1,000 times the price of B2 per month, so if you're willing to pre-pay for 1,000 months (83 years) of service you get the "rest" for free.
      - lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
        You're not paying for storage. You're paying for permanent, guaranteed immutable, community-programmable storage immune to seizures, platform changes, manipulation, and censorship. For the right use cases, that's a bargain.
        theamk 6y ago
        It is only immutable and immune to manipulation while there are enough miners, and there are no hard forks. While it may look good now, there is a non-zero chance it will disappear within 5 years for some reason or other. So if your data is really important, better make a backup copy of it somewhere safe, like in B2.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > Filecoin is a great example of raising a lot of money slowing a project down. I wouldn't assume the money was the cause of the slowdown. More likely, raising huge amounts of money was the goal in the first place. From the article: > But multiple sources say that a large percentage of those tokens had been unilaterally distributed by CEO Juan Batiz-Benet to himself and early employees for less than a penny each, and that he has continued to make such distributions in the years since. > Sources also say that no tokens were distributed to shareholders and that it often was difficult to get questions answered.
  - shakezula 6y ago
    There's a good argument to be made that the money made it slower. They hired a TON of engineers at once and after looking at their code, you can tell it's a too-many-cooks situation. Raising huge amounts of money certainly was the goal but that doesn't mean it couldn't have detrimental effects past their bank accounts.
- john_moscow 6y ago
  It is unsurprising given that the raison d'etre for Filecoin was never the demand for decentralized storage, or backup, or anything else. It was started with the sole purpose of raising money, because of the overwhelming demand for hype-driven investment opportunities that tick the typical checkboxes. And that was delivered perfectly. Releasing an actual product is more of a side product. If you don't develop or release anything, and just buy yourself Porsches, it's textbook embezzlement. But if you spend the money in a plausible way, you're mostly safe, even if the product turns out a major flop. Unless you get greedy and start doing too shady stuff, like issuing yourself tokens under the table, that the founders apparently did.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    This isn't true of Protocol Labs. They have already shipped IPFS, which is already in substantial use. Filecoin's testnet is live now, they have not shipped mainnet yet, but it's pretty imminent at this point. There are certainly some ICO scams out there, but I do not believe Filecoin was one of them. I still think $200m was too much, too soon. However, they didn't issue the tokens to themselves under the table. They issued a SAFT agreement for tokens to accredited investors in the United States, abiding by SEC regulations. They allocated 10 percent to investors, 15 percent to themselves, 5 percent to the Filecoin foundation, and 70 percent for Filecoin miners. That was all part of the upfront ICO. It could turn out to be a flop, but the only people that would lose would be accredited investors who, according to regulations, should know better. I would say Filecoin has at least as good of a chance of succeeding as any ordinary VC investment.
    - john_moscow 6y ago
      What is the actual IPFS user base besides curiosity traffic and crypto speculators?
      - chrisco255 6y ago
        IPFS is an independent protocol from Filecoin. It is not a cryptocoin in and of itself. It is an alternative addressing system for content on the web. The idea is that files are organized by their contents (using a cryptographic hash of those contents) rather than by IP address. You can pin content with your own independently run IPFS node using any tech stack of your choosing. You can spin up a website powered by IPFS today and many people are already doing that. https://ipfs.io/images/ipfs-applications-diagram.png https://ipfs.io/images/ipfs-applications-diagram.png for some examples of applications using IPFS. Visit https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ for more info.
- vagab0nd 6y ago
  It would be interesting to know what life is like for a developer on such a team. Is it like a full time job? A demanding one? Less?
- rasz 6y ago
  ? raising a lot of money WAS the project
tempsy 6y ago
This project has always felt DOA to me - I can't think of any other possibility than the first adopters for this product being distributers of child porn over just about anything else.
- lifty 6y ago
  Of course, you don't like it because it's blockchain, so it must be for child porn and criminals.
  - tempsy 6y ago
    nope I like some projects, actually, but if you spin up a node you have no control over the content that is stored on your computer. if you really think the first adopters are going to be sharing cat pics you're being incredibly naive.
    - lifty 6y ago
      I don't have the expectation that it will be used only for sharing cat pics. Do you only think in extremes? Of course that any permission-less technology will be used for nefarious purposes, among other, but trumpeting the child porn argument immediately shuts down any nuanced discussion.
      - tempsy 6y ago
        every file storage system has to deal with child porn eg dropbox, google drive, amazon, fb, etc etc. the advantage is they can easily convert files to hashes and delete and remove content at scale + work with law enforcement to find and arrest distributors. can filecoin do that? obviously not. the whole point of being decentralized is that that kind of action is not possible. why wouldn't that be incredibly beneficial to any distributor of any type of illegal content that would otherwise be removed from the centralized storage systems?
        leotaku 6y ago
elliekelly 6y ago
> But multiple sources say that a large percentage of those tokens had been unilaterally distributed by CEO Juan Batiz-Benet to himself and early employees for less than a penny each, and that he has continued to make such distributions in the years since. > Sources also say that no tokens were distributed to shareholders and that it often was difficult to get questions answered. I think this highlights where it's really difficult to be a young founder. Giving your investors news you know they won't want to hear isn't a fun conversation but it's necessary. And the longer you avoid those difficult conversations the harder it is to recover the relationship and the closer you get to running afoul of your duties.
- duxup 6y ago
  And the more it looks less niave / akward as it does something else.
gruez 6y ago
So how are the economics of decentralized storage solutions supposed to work? They don't have the economy of scale that big providers (eg. aws, google, backblaze) have, but yet they're somehow able to offer the service at a cheaper price?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The idea is that it's a technology to unlock the free space on the hard drives you and I own, which we're currently not monetizing at all. I'm not sure that even that ends up working, but it's not meant to scale indefinitely.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >The idea is that it's a technology to unlock the free space on the hard drives you and I own, which we're currently not monetizing at all Right now backblaze b2 charges $0.005 (half cent) per GB. This is probably an upper bound on what decentralized storage services can charge. I sampled some computers on bestbuy and found that most of them come with 1TB storage (this excludes computer with SSDs, which have less). This probably translates into 500GB of free space that the average person can rent out, which works out to... $2.5/month. If we factor in a modest electricity consumption of 30W for 24hrs/day, 30 days/month, that's 21.6kWh, or $2.16 in monthly electricity costs (assuming 10 cents per kWh). So best case, you're going to be making $2.84 per month per computer, which doesn't seem worth it. In reality it's probably worse because sia's currently paying $3.68/TB, which works out to a loss of $0.32/month.
    - 7373737373 6y ago
      This line of thought needs to noticed be much more. While I was initially also very excited about distributed/decentralized processing/filesharing systems, this exact type of economic calculation seems to make the existence of many small, personal nodes in such networks unlikely. Even ignoring the electricity and network cost, if the setup and maintenance of such systems takes more than a few minutes per month, it just won't be worth it for the majority of potential providers. They would have to be zero-click installs, daemons in the background, unnoticeable, without requiring any attention from the user, despite issues like moderation. Makes me wonder how the distribution on other filesharing/torrent networks looks like. Another line of questioning I have is about the possible effects of this system should it become popular. Cryptocurrency mining caused huge spikes in graphics card prices - will the same apply to high-capacity harddisks, due to people trying to run mini-datacenters for profit? How much storage will the Filecoin network be able to provide? How would a hypothetical large storage supply interact with pricing models of other providers? And on a more optimistic note, will it enable individuals to develop a new class of programs using lots of storage which aren't possible currently, technically or economically?
ahnick 6y ago
What I don't understand about Filecoin is that they advertise it is for "Private data" too, but there are no access control mechanisms and no ability to delete data from the network. (You can "unpin" it, but there's no mechanism in the clients to compel nodes to actively remove content afaik) If I put private data on the Filecoin network, I would like to be able to largely prevent most people from even pulling down the encrypted files. What happens when the encryption guarding those files is found to contain a flaw and gets compromised? If someone has an old copy of the encrypted files, then that data can now be unencrypted. These issues seem to go largely ignored by Filecoin as best as I can tell.
- jluxenberg 6y ago
  I'm not sure how you would implement this, since there's no way to provide a proof of deletion. Proof of storage is possible since you can do some operation on the stored data and then provide the result. However, I assume when a file is "unpinned" in IPFS you stop earning Filecoin for storing it? I'm not sure but I can't imagine why it would be any other way.
  - ahnick 6y ago
    So I have read this is why they didn't implement deletion support before. With that said, I would still think that 1) It should be possible to guarantee that a particular object is not being actively served by a node on the network at any particular point in time and 2) If all the node software supports deletion, then even if you couldn't provide a 100% guarantee at least it would provide some mitigation.
    - derefr 6y ago
      Keep in mind also that Filecoin's storage layer is IPFS; and IPFS nodes don't have incentives that are perfectly aligned with those of Filecoin. There's maybe a reason for the owner of a "Filecoin node" to want to delete data "on the network." But that data ends up stored on many IPFS nodes, some (many?) of those hosted by people who've never even heard of Filecoin, but are just running on the public IPFS network for other reasons (usually the same reasons someone would donate to the Internet Archive, or host a public-access Debian APT mirror.) When you look up a file "on Filecoin", you're really looking it up from the IPFS network. Filecoin just incentivizes the insertion process. But data inserted "into Filecoin" is now on IPFS. So you have to think about what an IPFS node would (want to) do with your data. Why would these "pure" IPFS nodes that have your data, care about deleting it in response to requests? That's not what IPFS is "for." These nodes aren't participating in the filesystem-like storage paradigm that Filecoin represents. They're participating in a "content-addressable storage" paradigm. Deletion would be a violation of the ideology that likely motivates them to run their node.
Proven 6y ago
That's hilarious! Yet another shitcoin (and that was clear before the ICO)
adamlangsner 6y ago
The technology behind Filecoin is very impressive. I can’t wait for the mainnet to be released so I can continue to use S3 as I always have. :)
RichardHeart 6y ago
Cryptocurrency was invented to remove middlemen and counterparty risk. Yet every week I hear about middlemen and the tokens they control, and the actions they take or don't take that harm their investors... This is the opposite of crypto. By the way, all file storage coin projects are beyond inefficient, because backblaze is always going to win on price due to vertical integration. Adding a "distributed" network in there is extra points of failure, not less. But in crypto, price tends to not care about actual efficiency or utility at all, and is really just a roulette wheel of ticker symbols. Disclaimer: founded a crypto.
bonedaddy 6y ago
I think the problem here isn't just Filecoin, it's Protocol Labs as a whole. I've been building applications using IPFS for about 3 years now, and the entire time Protocol Labs has dropped the ball at every corner when it comes to the development of IPFS. Basically any project I've seen started by Protocol Labs ends up a mess of a project so I'm not surprised Filecoin is where it is now. It's quite clear that Protocol Labs is extremely incapable of managing a project of scale.
- rsa25519 6y ago
  > Protocol Labs has dropped the ball at every corner when it comes to the development of IPFS. How so? I don't have much experience with IPFS, but I've heard great things about it
  - bonedaddy 6y ago
    Primarily due to poor management of the project. The best way to showcase this is through something called "testground". Testground was an initiative started by Protocol Labs to create a solution that would be used for testing of IPFS at all levels of the protocols, while also giving developers an SDK that can be used to write new testground tests. The reason this was needed is because the before the Testground project was started, the last few releases of go-ipfs (the reference implementation of IPFS) introduced new bugs, and regressions. Why? Primarily because of the poor planning, poor test coverage, and overall poor project management. So Testground development started and went on for about 5 months until the developer in charge of Testground development makes a post on a GitHub issue (https://github.com/testground/testground/issues/42#issuecomment-569057553 https://github.com/testground/testground/issues/42#issuecomm...) Tl;dr of that comment? Poor project management lead to a lot of wasted development time on Testground. Irony of the whole situation aside, if this was an isolated incident it might not be so bad. But it's not an isolated incident, it happens all the time, and with every single project managed by Protocol Labs. Interestingly enough this latest post from Axios caused me to come out of the woodworks with my own series of posts about how Protocol Labs has failed both IPFS and Filecoin. I briefly detail a few more of the problems here (https://bonedaddy.io/blog/ipfs/posts/failure-ipfs-filecoin-protocol_labs/#the-problems https://bonedaddy.io/blog/ipfs/posts/failure-ipfs-filecoin-p...)
rudolph9 6y ago
It seems like there is a lot of hostility toward protocol labs (among others doing stuff with “blockchain”). However, everything they build is free and open source. They’ve gone to considerable length to make their libraries modular and support a multitude of languages. Libp2p is the best peer-to-peer utility I’m aware of (please share if you know of comparable others). This in it self is a massive undertaking. Multiformats is brilliant. A few simple tweaks to the way we form address open so many doors. IPLD is supports json, cbor, protobuffers, git and more. All of which tie together really nicely in to the multiformat addressing and utilized by IPFS. Literally everything they do is open source and free to use how ever you want. If you find a bug, fix it. If want support for something new, propose it. Their projects are frustrating sometimes with regard to understanding the nuances of decisions that were made (such as /p2p vs the overloaded /ipfs) but they’re not building pay per use service like AWS S3, they’re building an open source community and they deserve at least a look at their source code before writing them off.

87 points by ilamont 6y ago

Filecoin is a great example of raising a lot of money slowing a project down. They did a $200m ICO in 2017 and they still haven't shipped a 1.0, while smaller, much less well funded projects (Sia, Arweave, ...) have made a lot more progress.

neckardt 6y ago
Are any of these projects ready for personal backup use, or still experimental?
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  The chance of "filecoin" or whatever else existing 12 months into the future is astonishingly low. The "completion" rate on ICOs is close to zero. > "Obviously it could fail and become worthless. But if it works it could be huge, like Google-scale huge, which is why this became so contentious," a different investor explains. That anybody put money into such a bleak concept is still beyond me.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > But if it works it could be huge, like Google-scale huge Or tulip-huge, the first shitcoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
  - cjbprime 6y ago
    I can generally agree about random ICOs, but for what it's worth the Filecoin team is world-class distributed systems talent. I wouldn't say this about any other ICO. (I don't own Filecoin tokens and have nothing to gain by the project being successful, I'm just a fan of that team.)
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      If you're investing in a business venture, the distributed systems talent doesn't matter nearly as much as their ability to build and maintain a successful business without it falling over. If they've got millions USD worth of cash in the bank, they can hire talented engineers, but if they don't have any idea how to run a business no algorithm is going to fix that.
      - cjbprime 6y ago
        I'm responding to: > The chance of "filecoin" or whatever else existing 12 months into the future is astonishingly low. I actually think the chance of Filecoin existing in a year is close to 1. It's not due to a prediction of a wildly successful corporate structure. It's mainly about the tech.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Seems roughly in like with most startups
- koeng 6y ago
  I’ve found Sia to be quite good. Their “skynet” system is really cool.
  - really3452 6y ago
    ScPrime has been looking really good too!
    - fishbed4 6y ago
      i'll look into SCP. thanks. love all the storage coins. always looking for another to add to the portfolio.
    - koeng 6y ago
      Any reason the fork is better than the main project?
- yupyup54133 6y ago
  Sia (and its Skynet product) have been working great for me for the last 6 months!
- shakezula 6y ago
  Storj, Sia, and a few others minor players are in production. Each have their tradeoffs.
- companyhen 6y ago
  Arweave has a pay once, store forever model where after the initial payment to upload (~$0.005/MB) the file is stored forever on the permaweb. You can get started with some free tokens to play with arweave here: http://tokens.arweave.org/ http://tokens.arweave.org/ I also suggest you check out the latest Arweave x Gitcoin Open Web Incubator Demo Day from last week to see the latest stuff being built. Looking forward to ArDrive, Verto, WeaveID and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slzyw1w5Ric&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slzyw1w5Ric&feature=youtu.be One further advantage of decentralized UI hosting on Arweave is simply resilience to website outages: https://twitter.com/rleshner/status/1278444807011139585 https://twitter.com/rleshner/status/1278444807011139585
  - wmf 6y ago
    Interesting that this is 1,000 times the price of B2 per month, so if you're willing to pre-pay for 1,000 months (83 years) of service you get the "rest" for free.
    - lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
      You're not paying for storage. You're paying for permanent, guaranteed immutable, community-programmable storage immune to seizures, platform changes, manipulation, and censorship. For the right use cases, that's a bargain.
      - theamk 6y ago
        It is only immutable and immune to manipulation while there are enough miners, and there are no hard forks. While it may look good now, there is a non-zero chance it will disappear within 5 years for some reason or other. So if your data is really important, better make a backup copy of it somewhere safe, like in B2.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Filecoin is a great example of raising a lot of money slowing a project down. I wouldn't assume the money was the cause of the slowdown. More likely, raising huge amounts of money was the goal in the first place. From the article: > But multiple sources say that a large percentage of those tokens had been unilaterally distributed by CEO Juan Batiz-Benet to himself and early employees for less than a penny each, and that he has continued to make such distributions in the years since. > Sources also say that no tokens were distributed to shareholders and that it often was difficult to get questions answered.
- shakezula 6y ago
  There's a good argument to be made that the money made it slower. They hired a TON of engineers at once and after looking at their code, you can tell it's a too-many-cooks situation. Raising huge amounts of money certainly was the goal but that doesn't mean it couldn't have detrimental effects past their bank accounts.
john_moscow 6y ago
It is unsurprising given that the raison d'etre for Filecoin was never the demand for decentralized storage, or backup, or anything else. It was started with the sole purpose of raising money, because of the overwhelming demand for hype-driven investment opportunities that tick the typical checkboxes. And that was delivered perfectly. Releasing an actual product is more of a side product. If you don't develop or release anything, and just buy yourself Porsches, it's textbook embezzlement. But if you spend the money in a plausible way, you're mostly safe, even if the product turns out a major flop. Unless you get greedy and start doing too shady stuff, like issuing yourself tokens under the table, that the founders apparently did.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  This isn't true of Protocol Labs. They have already shipped IPFS, which is already in substantial use. Filecoin's testnet is live now, they have not shipped mainnet yet, but it's pretty imminent at this point. There are certainly some ICO scams out there, but I do not believe Filecoin was one of them. I still think $200m was too much, too soon. However, they didn't issue the tokens to themselves under the table. They issued a SAFT agreement for tokens to accredited investors in the United States, abiding by SEC regulations. They allocated 10 percent to investors, 15 percent to themselves, 5 percent to the Filecoin foundation, and 70 percent for Filecoin miners. That was all part of the upfront ICO. It could turn out to be a flop, but the only people that would lose would be accredited investors who, according to regulations, should know better. I would say Filecoin has at least as good of a chance of succeeding as any ordinary VC investment.
  - john_moscow 6y ago
    What is the actual IPFS user base besides curiosity traffic and crypto speculators?
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      IPFS is an independent protocol from Filecoin. It is not a cryptocoin in and of itself. It is an alternative addressing system for content on the web. The idea is that files are organized by their contents (using a cryptographic hash of those contents) rather than by IP address. You can pin content with your own independently run IPFS node using any tech stack of your choosing. You can spin up a website powered by IPFS today and many people are already doing that. https://ipfs.io/images/ipfs-applications-diagram.png https://ipfs.io/images/ipfs-applications-diagram.png for some examples of applications using IPFS. Visit https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ for more info.
vagab0nd 6y ago
It would be interesting to know what life is like for a developer on such a team. Is it like a full time job? A demanding one? Less?
rasz 6y ago
? raising a lot of money WAS the project

tempsy 6y ago

This project has always felt DOA to me - I can't think of any other possibility than the first adopters for this product being distributers of child porn over just about anything else.

lifty 6y ago
Of course, you don't like it because it's blockchain, so it must be for child porn and criminals.
- tempsy 6y ago
  nope I like some projects, actually, but if you spin up a node you have no control over the content that is stored on your computer. if you really think the first adopters are going to be sharing cat pics you're being incredibly naive.
  - lifty 6y ago
    I don't have the expectation that it will be used only for sharing cat pics. Do you only think in extremes? Of course that any permission-less technology will be used for nefarious purposes, among other, but trumpeting the child porn argument immediately shuts down any nuanced discussion.
    - tempsy 6y ago
      every file storage system has to deal with child porn eg dropbox, google drive, amazon, fb, etc etc. the advantage is they can easily convert files to hashes and delete and remove content at scale + work with law enforcement to find and arrest distributors. can filecoin do that? obviously not. the whole point of being decentralized is that that kind of action is not possible. why wouldn't that be incredibly beneficial to any distributor of any type of illegal content that would otherwise be removed from the centralized storage systems?
      - leotaku 6y ago

elliekelly 6y ago

> But multiple sources say that a large percentage of those tokens had been unilaterally distributed by CEO Juan Batiz-Benet to himself and early employees for less than a penny each, and that he has continued to make such distributions in the years since. > Sources also say that no tokens were distributed to shareholders and that it often was difficult to get questions answered. I think this highlights where it's really difficult to be a young founder. Giving your investors news you know they won't want to hear isn't a fun conversation but it's necessary. And the longer you avoid those difficult conversations the harder it is to recover the relationship and the closer you get to running afoul of your duties.

duxup 6y ago
And the more it looks less niave / akward as it does something else.

gruez 6y ago

So how are the economics of decentralized storage solutions supposed to work? They don't have the economy of scale that big providers (eg. aws, google, backblaze) have, but yet they're somehow able to offer the service at a cheaper price?

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The idea is that it's a technology to unlock the free space on the hard drives you and I own, which we're currently not monetizing at all. I'm not sure that even that ends up working, but it's not meant to scale indefinitely.
- gruez 6y ago
  >The idea is that it's a technology to unlock the free space on the hard drives you and I own, which we're currently not monetizing at all Right now backblaze b2 charges $0.005 (half cent) per GB. This is probably an upper bound on what decentralized storage services can charge. I sampled some computers on bestbuy and found that most of them come with 1TB storage (this excludes computer with SSDs, which have less). This probably translates into 500GB of free space that the average person can rent out, which works out to... $2.5/month. If we factor in a modest electricity consumption of 30W for 24hrs/day, 30 days/month, that's 21.6kWh, or $2.16 in monthly electricity costs (assuming 10 cents per kWh). So best case, you're going to be making $2.84 per month per computer, which doesn't seem worth it. In reality it's probably worse because sia's currently paying $3.68/TB, which works out to a loss of $0.32/month.
  - 7373737373 6y ago
    This line of thought needs to noticed be much more. While I was initially also very excited about distributed/decentralized processing/filesharing systems, this exact type of economic calculation seems to make the existence of many small, personal nodes in such networks unlikely. Even ignoring the electricity and network cost, if the setup and maintenance of such systems takes more than a few minutes per month, it just won't be worth it for the majority of potential providers. They would have to be zero-click installs, daemons in the background, unnoticeable, without requiring any attention from the user, despite issues like moderation. Makes me wonder how the distribution on other filesharing/torrent networks looks like. Another line of questioning I have is about the possible effects of this system should it become popular. Cryptocurrency mining caused huge spikes in graphics card prices - will the same apply to high-capacity harddisks, due to people trying to run mini-datacenters for profit? How much storage will the Filecoin network be able to provide? How would a hypothetical large storage supply interact with pricing models of other providers? And on a more optimistic note, will it enable individuals to develop a new class of programs using lots of storage which aren't possible currently, technically or economically?

ahnick 6y ago

What I don't understand about Filecoin is that they advertise it is for "Private data" too, but there are no access control mechanisms and no ability to delete data from the network. (You can "unpin" it, but there's no mechanism in the clients to compel nodes to actively remove content afaik) If I put private data on the Filecoin network, I would like to be able to largely prevent most people from even pulling down the encrypted files. What happens when the encryption guarding those files is found to contain a flaw and gets compromised? If someone has an old copy of the encrypted files, then that data can now be unencrypted. These issues seem to go largely ignored by Filecoin as best as I can tell.

jluxenberg 6y ago
I'm not sure how you would implement this, since there's no way to provide a proof of deletion. Proof of storage is possible since you can do some operation on the stored data and then provide the result. However, I assume when a file is "unpinned" in IPFS you stop earning Filecoin for storing it? I'm not sure but I can't imagine why it would be any other way.
- ahnick 6y ago
  So I have read this is why they didn't implement deletion support before. With that said, I would still think that 1) It should be possible to guarantee that a particular object is not being actively served by a node on the network at any particular point in time and 2) If all the node software supports deletion, then even if you couldn't provide a 100% guarantee at least it would provide some mitigation.
  - derefr 6y ago
    Keep in mind also that Filecoin's storage layer is IPFS; and IPFS nodes don't have incentives that are perfectly aligned with those of Filecoin. There's maybe a reason for the owner of a "Filecoin node" to want to delete data "on the network." But that data ends up stored on many IPFS nodes, some (many?) of those hosted by people who've never even heard of Filecoin, but are just running on the public IPFS network for other reasons (usually the same reasons someone would donate to the Internet Archive, or host a public-access Debian APT mirror.) When you look up a file "on Filecoin", you're really looking it up from the IPFS network. Filecoin just incentivizes the insertion process. But data inserted "into Filecoin" is now on IPFS. So you have to think about what an IPFS node would (want to) do with your data. Why would these "pure" IPFS nodes that have your data, care about deleting it in response to requests? That's not what IPFS is "for." These nodes aren't participating in the filesystem-like storage paradigm that Filecoin represents. They're participating in a "content-addressable storage" paradigm. Deletion would be a violation of the ideology that likely motivates them to run their node.

Proven 6y ago

That's hilarious! Yet another shitcoin (and that was clear before the ICO)

adamlangsner 6y ago

The technology behind Filecoin is very impressive. I can’t wait for the mainnet to be released so I can continue to use S3 as I always have. :)

RichardHeart 6y ago

Cryptocurrency was invented to remove middlemen and counterparty risk. Yet every week I hear about middlemen and the tokens they control, and the actions they take or don't take that harm their investors... This is the opposite of crypto. By the way, all file storage coin projects are beyond inefficient, because backblaze is always going to win on price due to vertical integration. Adding a "distributed" network in there is extra points of failure, not less. But in crypto, price tends to not care about actual efficiency or utility at all, and is really just a roulette wheel of ticker symbols. Disclaimer: founded a crypto.

bonedaddy 6y ago

I think the problem here isn't just Filecoin, it's Protocol Labs as a whole. I've been building applications using IPFS for about 3 years now, and the entire time Protocol Labs has dropped the ball at every corner when it comes to the development of IPFS. Basically any project I've seen started by Protocol Labs ends up a mess of a project so I'm not surprised Filecoin is where it is now. It's quite clear that Protocol Labs is extremely incapable of managing a project of scale.

rsa25519 6y ago
> Protocol Labs has dropped the ball at every corner when it comes to the development of IPFS. How so? I don't have much experience with IPFS, but I've heard great things about it
- bonedaddy 6y ago
  Primarily due to poor management of the project. The best way to showcase this is through something called "testground". Testground was an initiative started by Protocol Labs to create a solution that would be used for testing of IPFS at all levels of the protocols, while also giving developers an SDK that can be used to write new testground tests. The reason this was needed is because the before the Testground project was started, the last few releases of go-ipfs (the reference implementation of IPFS) introduced new bugs, and regressions. Why? Primarily because of the poor planning, poor test coverage, and overall poor project management. So Testground development started and went on for about 5 months until the developer in charge of Testground development makes a post on a GitHub issue (https://github.com/testground/testground/issues/42#issuecomment-569057553 https://github.com/testground/testground/issues/42#issuecomm...) Tl;dr of that comment? Poor project management lead to a lot of wasted development time on Testground. Irony of the whole situation aside, if this was an isolated incident it might not be so bad. But it's not an isolated incident, it happens all the time, and with every single project managed by Protocol Labs. Interestingly enough this latest post from Axios caused me to come out of the woodworks with my own series of posts about how Protocol Labs has failed both IPFS and Filecoin. I briefly detail a few more of the problems here (https://bonedaddy.io/blog/ipfs/posts/failure-ipfs-filecoin-protocol_labs/#the-problems https://bonedaddy.io/blog/ipfs/posts/failure-ipfs-filecoin-p...)

rudolph9 6y ago

It seems like there is a lot of hostility toward protocol labs (among others doing stuff with “blockchain”). However, everything they build is free and open source. They’ve gone to considerable length to make their libraries modular and support a multitude of languages. Libp2p is the best peer-to-peer utility I’m aware of (please share if you know of comparable others). This in it self is a massive undertaking. Multiformats is brilliant. A few simple tweaks to the way we form address open so many doors. IPLD is supports json, cbor, protobuffers, git and more. All of which tie together really nicely in to the multiformat addressing and utilized by IPFS. Literally everything they do is open source and free to use how ever you want. If you find a bug, fix it. If want support for something new, propose it. Their projects are frustrating sometimes with regard to understanding the nuances of decisions that were made (such as /p2p vs the overloaded /ipfs) but they’re not building pay per use service like AWS S3, they’re building an open source community and they deserve at least a look at their source code before writing them off.