3 ms·

As blockchains are slow and inefficient databases, it's only reasonable to employ them where censorship resistance is required. If no one is trying to censor wh

As blockchains are slow and inefficient databases, it's only reasonable to employ them where censorship resistance is required. If no one is trying to censor what you are doing, avoid blockchains. I believe torrents have shown their censorship resistance. So if it's not for discovery or censorship resistance, what could it be for? Efficiency? Vertical integration of hard drives into the highest density 4u space is already open source. For instance 60 drives in 4u: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv... Backblaze and others also use vertical integration to get better prices from all vendors for the drives, connectivity, and they even use fancy parity systems to get redundancy across machines with minimal overhead. Distributed (horizontal) scaling loses to vertical integration. So what are you left with? Yet another token, with a proof of storage instead of proof of hashing or proof of memory hard hashing, or proof of time locking (caveat, I founded a cryptocurrency based on that last one, for inflation only, consensus is still vanilla POW.) At least one or two "usuable" things came out of the billions wasted of 2017 ICO money... I guess.

vlmutolo 6y ago
I agree that there are lots of problems and too much complexity in blockchain-based systems. But it's important to note that there is a real problem that Filecoin is trying to solve. Censorship absolutely exists in file storage. Just blocking access to a website could be considered an example of this. Torrents are one solution, but normal people don't want to set up servers to stay on for people to be able to get their files. And there's no standardized way to have someone else seed a torrent for you in exchange for money. IPFS is basically a giant, distributed file server. Also, it uses libp2p under the hood, similar to torrents. However, it has an incentives problem. Why would other people offer you storage on their devices? So that's the problem, and Filecoin claims to have a solution. I personally think there's too much complexity in the interface right now for people to prefer it over S3.
- stevenicr 6y ago
  I have seen this in the past year with two videos in particular. The most recent one I watched beginning to the end - it stayed on a video hosting site for weeks.. then one day I found the page saying 'taken down for hate speech' - I don't recall any kind of calls to hate - if there were, I would think they could of edited part of the vid and still left up the main gist of info.. like they do with song copyright complaints in techno mixes... Anyhow - some people likely believe that some videos / news stories / files are important enough for people to have access to that they would likely chip in some coins to keep them accessible I'm sure - I would even say there is and will continue to be more of need for further distributed / multiple backups (some available in some countries and not others for example) and people will certainly be willing to pay and others will to host - to get around bans in certain countries for example. I hope there will be a filecoin option or other options for the world to push multiple copies to multiple countries so when access is denied in one place and file removal is demanded in another - that there would be the possibility that people could access from a third place via a 4th place that kept access available. No idea how all that would come to fruition, perhaps it's already been figured out with torrents or peertubes or similar things, I have not researched that aspect. But I have been seeing more and more censorship in more and more places the past few years - and it appears gov's and other interested groups are ramping up for more, not less - so the need will be increasing more and more in most parts of the world I am guessing. I also imagine there is a desire in some neighborhoods to be able to share videos and other files with the community that would be censored by news portals and national hosts - if a secure scuttlebut meets filecoin crosses with some sort of non-accessible via internet - and only shared via bluetooth / wifi / and limits on bandwidth taken kind of thing is out there I think we'll see more use and need of such a thing as well.
_uwu_1 6y ago
Is it just censorship resistance that makes sense to put on a blockchain database? I know blockchains also have a trustless property to them. Maybe exchanging information among people who do not trust each other also has value here?

vlmutolo 6y ago

I agree that there are lots of problems and too much complexity in blockchain-based systems. But it's important to note that there is a real problem that Filecoin is trying to solve. Censorship absolutely exists in file storage. Just blocking access to a website could be considered an example of this. Torrents are one solution, but normal people don't want to set up servers to stay on for people to be able to get their files. And there's no standardized way to have someone else seed a torrent for you in exchange for money. IPFS is basically a giant, distributed file server. Also, it uses libp2p under the hood, similar to torrents. However, it has an incentives problem. Why would other people offer you storage on their devices? So that's the problem, and Filecoin claims to have a solution. I personally think there's too much complexity in the interface right now for people to prefer it over S3.

stevenicr 6y ago
I have seen this in the past year with two videos in particular. The most recent one I watched beginning to the end - it stayed on a video hosting site for weeks.. then one day I found the page saying 'taken down for hate speech' - I don't recall any kind of calls to hate - if there were, I would think they could of edited part of the vid and still left up the main gist of info.. like they do with song copyright complaints in techno mixes... Anyhow - some people likely believe that some videos / news stories / files are important enough for people to have access to that they would likely chip in some coins to keep them accessible I'm sure - I would even say there is and will continue to be more of need for further distributed / multiple backups (some available in some countries and not others for example) and people will certainly be willing to pay and others will to host - to get around bans in certain countries for example. I hope there will be a filecoin option or other options for the world to push multiple copies to multiple countries so when access is denied in one place and file removal is demanded in another - that there would be the possibility that people could access from a third place via a 4th place that kept access available. No idea how all that would come to fruition, perhaps it's already been figured out with torrents or peertubes or similar things, I have not researched that aspect. But I have been seeing more and more censorship in more and more places the past few years - and it appears gov's and other interested groups are ramping up for more, not less - so the need will be increasing more and more in most parts of the world I am guessing. I also imagine there is a desire in some neighborhoods to be able to share videos and other files with the community that would be censored by news portals and national hosts - if a secure scuttlebut meets filecoin crosses with some sort of non-accessible via internet - and only shared via bluetooth / wifi / and limits on bandwidth taken kind of thing is out there I think we'll see more use and need of such a thing as well.

_uwu_1 6y ago

Is it just censorship resistance that makes sense to put on a blockchain database? I know blockchains also have a trustless property to them. Maybe exchanging information among people who do not trust each other also has value here?