8 ms·

And what's worse, the mining process has some rather absurd system requirements: 128+ GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD cache storage (separate from the data being stored!

And what's worse, the mining process has some rather absurd system requirements: 128+ GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD cache storage (separate from the data being stored!), and a high-end GPU is "recommended". The sense I get is that it's impossible to casually offer up some spare storage from a typical home system, or even from a NAS -- the system requirements effectively limit mining to people willing to spend a couple thousand dollars on hardware. https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/ https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/

arsome 6y ago
That seems crazy, especially considering Sia and others have functioning alternatives with no such insane requirements. Maybe they're trying to corner some certain performance oriented market, but that guarantees nothing about network performance which I suspect will be a much larger impact than any of it.
rodiger 6y ago
Yeah seems like a weird combination of both PoS and PoW which gets the best of neither. Would've been cool to see a novel PoW here that actually translates into actual "work" for the network.
ChainOfFools 6y ago
or "borrow" the hardware and power from their school/employer either without any authorization or for the ostensible purpose of "testing/burn-in"
colllectorof 6y ago
This raises a giant red flag for me. Storage is storage. This is not like hash mining, which is based on probabilities. You either have the data or you don't. If you have the data, even partially, this should be useful to the system. I can conceive of no reason why a reasonably designed distributed storage system would have such insane requirements.
- jimpick 6y ago
  Security, mostly - if the proofs fail, it’s not just the data that could be corrupted - bad actors could attack the consensus itself and steal unlimited funds. The params for the proofs could be loosened, at the cost of extra risk of an attack. They’ve gone the safe route and picked challenging parameters that would be uneconomic to brute force attack.
pradn 6y ago
If you take a look at the top storage providers, there's dozens who are providing 10 PB+. These are folks that have invested millions to earn FileCoin. https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=now-30m&to=now&kiosk https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?o... Moreover, it's greatly disingenuous to claim that this system lets casual users let their HD space given the system requirements are so high.
- raxi 6y ago
  Overall bandwidth in the system is 125TB/week. Filling up the storage provided by "dozens who are providing 10 PB+" would require about 20 years at this rate. And another 20 years to download it back
VectorLock 6y ago
If you want to use spare space to "mine" crypto, look at Chia from the creator of BitTorrent. The space isn't used for anything useful like IPFS though.
Lorin 6y ago
I wish Wuala was still around, damn Lacie for buying - then removing the most interesting part of project (exchanging local storage for cloud storage)... then killing the entire thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala#Trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala#Trading
- ianopolous 6y ago
  Their cryptree [0] design for access control was also pretty stunning. We've adopted and improved it in Peergos. [0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peergos/peergos/master/papers/wuala-cryptree.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peergos/peergos/master/pap...
FDSGSG 6y ago
Besides the GPU, that's a pretty basic server config. Shouldn't cost more than 200/mo

arsome 6y ago

That seems crazy, especially considering Sia and others have functioning alternatives with no such insane requirements. Maybe they're trying to corner some certain performance oriented market, but that guarantees nothing about network performance which I suspect will be a much larger impact than any of it.

rodiger 6y ago

Yeah seems like a weird combination of both PoS and PoW which gets the best of neither. Would've been cool to see a novel PoW here that actually translates into actual "work" for the network.

ChainOfFools 6y ago

or "borrow" the hardware and power from their school/employer either without any authorization or for the ostensible purpose of "testing/burn-in"

colllectorof 6y ago

This raises a giant red flag for me. Storage is storage. This is not like hash mining, which is based on probabilities. You either have the data or you don't. If you have the data, even partially, this should be useful to the system. I can conceive of no reason why a reasonably designed distributed storage system would have such insane requirements.

jimpick 6y ago
Security, mostly - if the proofs fail, it’s not just the data that could be corrupted - bad actors could attack the consensus itself and steal unlimited funds. The params for the proofs could be loosened, at the cost of extra risk of an attack. They’ve gone the safe route and picked challenging parameters that would be uneconomic to brute force attack.

pradn 6y ago

If you take a look at the top storage providers, there's dozens who are providing 10 PB+. These are folks that have invested millions to earn FileCoin. https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=now-30m&to=now&kiosk https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?o... Moreover, it's greatly disingenuous to claim that this system lets casual users let their HD space given the system requirements are so high.

raxi 6y ago
Overall bandwidth in the system is 125TB/week. Filling up the storage provided by "dozens who are providing 10 PB+" would require about 20 years at this rate. And another 20 years to download it back

VectorLock 6y ago

If you want to use spare space to "mine" crypto, look at Chia from the creator of BitTorrent. The space isn't used for anything useful like IPFS though.

Lorin 6y ago

I wish Wuala was still around, damn Lacie for buying - then removing the most interesting part of project (exchanging local storage for cloud storage)... then killing the entire thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala#Trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala#Trading

ianopolous 6y ago
Their cryptree [0] design for access control was also pretty stunning. We've adopted and improved it in Peergos. [0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peergos/peergos/master/papers/wuala-cryptree.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peergos/peergos/master/pap...

FDSGSG 6y ago

Besides the GPU, that's a pretty basic server config. Shouldn't cost more than 200/mo