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Filecoin is probably one of the few cryptocurrencies with intrinsic value, even if the amount is debatable. IPFS has stood the test of time and seems like a goo
by dannyw 3y ago
Filecoin is probably one of the few cryptocurrencies with intrinsic value, even if the amount is debatable. IPFS has stood the test of time and seems like a good protocol; and a cryptocurrency that can be used to pay for storage is not valueless.
- grumbel 3y agoHas it? I have never seen anybody using IPFS in the wild, even projects for which it should be well suited (archive.org, Linux package distribution, Git, Lemmy, Imgur, CivitAI), don't use it. Worse yet, IPFS still provides no real way to deal with private or local data, which drastically limits its use. I love the idea about data being addressable by hash, but I don't feel IPFS has actually delivered anything meaningful in that area yet. And with ipfs-search.com shutdown, there is not even any way left to explore what is actually on the network now. And technical issues aside, there is also the legal problem that IPFS conflicts with copyright. Redistributing anything is illegal by default, unless somebody gives you permission, IPFS provides no means to track that permission. You can't attach a GPL or an author to a hash.
- sandbx 3y agolibgen uses it
- timtom39 3y agoIn practice libgen uses torrents. The available seed nodes for IPFS are... few. This is largely due to the software/protocol being pretty bad compared to battle tested torrents.
- arsome 3y agoPerhaps if you're downloading full dumps, but distribution of individual books is often done via IPFS.
- diggan 3y ago> there is also the legal problem that IPFS conflicts with copyright. Redistributing anything is illegal by default I think you might misunderstand how IPFS works, or possibly confuse it with Freenet. When you use IPFS, nothing is automatically distributed, unless they happen to know the hash of the content you've added locally. It's not until someone starts to explicitly request data from you, that you start sharing anything.
- grumbel 3y agoEverything in your local cache is redistributed, meaning every single website you view through IPFS ends up getting potentially redistributed. Can you guarantee that each and every item you view on the Web allows redistribution?
- jerbear4328 3y agoI don't know how it works legally, but if you publish your own content to a distributed protocol like IPFS you should expect it to be distributed. If content that shouldn't be redistributed is put on the public IPFS, it should be the person who added it's fault, imo.
- grumbel 3y agoThe person who added it, is not tracked. A file can be added by anybody at anytime and anywhere and it will get the same content address. It's up to the person doing the redistribution to ensure it's legal, but IPFS gives them no tools to do so.
- amelius 3y agoPerhaps it should use the fact that any file A can be written as the XOR of two files B and C, where B and C look like complete noise. If you only host B and another person only hosts C, then there can be no copyright infringements, while you can still reconstruct A by simply XORing the other files together. Of course at the expense of having to store and transfer twice the amount of data.
- jrwr 3y agoIPFS also has issues with large datasets, anything larger then a few TBs cases nodes to explode and indexing takes forever.
- realPubkey 3y agoAlso the lookup time for files is too slow to use it on anything user facing.
- rglullis 3y agoI was working on the same building as the team from Protocol Labs. I talked with a couple of devs and it seems like they never even considered that most people who would be interested in running a node would like to have control over who gets access to the pinned files. I think I opened a ticket asking for an ACL system, but it got closed. I really had high hopes for it, but I realized that all I really want is an object storage with content addressable urls.
- tutfbhuf 3y ago> Has it? I have never seen anybody using IPFS in the wild Every time someone downloads a book from a shadow library like Library Genesis, it's through IPFS most of the time, often via an IPFS gateway such as Cloudflare's IPFS gateway, so you don't even notice it's using IPFS. These shadow libraries have millions of users per day, especially academics.
- shuckles 3y agoI’ve recently observed that both IPFS and the Cloudflare gateways are extremely unreliable on Libgen.
- poopsmithe 3y agoThat's besides the point. The point being made was that IPFS is being used in production. You bring up a valid point though. From my experience, IPFS suffers from a tragedy of the commons issue. It's performance is generally terrible because the free providers are overloaded.
- shuckles 3y agoNot really: > Every time someone downloads a book from a shadow library like Library Genesis, it's through IPFS most of the time I would like to see evidence this is actually true. My theory is that IPFS's "success" in hosting Libgen is roughly turning ICO proceeds into free hosting. Paying for dedicated servers might have been more cost efficient and, given the performance issues, more robust!
- beaugunderson 3y ago100%, and same for Standard Template Construct. There are basically no reliable IPFS gateways with book or paper content. They all get struck from the more reliable gateways immediately.
- shuckles 3y agoUnfortunate behavior in an apocalypse-proof distributed filesystem.
- geokon 3y agoWouldn't all those examples also work just as easily with torrents/magnet-links? I think in all those cases a central server distribution model has unfortunately been "good enough" for the majority of users (even though their data is mined and ads are injected) When it comes to FOSS, I personally don't understand why something like a package manager isn't P2P by default. It feels very aligned with the hacker culture - a la "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". Virtually nobody uses it, so the solutions are half baked, clunky and not integrated with every day workflows (ex: browsers don't support anything P2P). Something like libcurl can't pull a torrent from the web
- anthk 3y agoP2P works better for ISO based distros with full offline backups or maybe LTS based distros with small repos as Hyperbola. Having a full repo of Trisquel with continuous updates would not work well.
- geokon 3y agoOh right, that's a very good point. I've only use LTS for years. Forgot about rolling releases haha
- sseagull 3y ago> Wouldn't all those examples also work just as easily with torrents/magnet-links? My (possibly wrong) feeling is that IPFS is meant for smaller files, and torrents for bigger collections. So with the example of a package manager, you could download each individual package via IPFS, whereas a torrent would make sense if you wanted to download an archive of them all. Not to say torrents couldn't work, but it just kinda feels like not the intended use case. (The above feeling come from reading about IPFS a few times throughout the years and toying with it for a while).
- rakoo 3y agoThere has been attempts at doing torrent-based package distribution, see the notes of debian testing it here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent. There are basically 2 problems: Packages are a lot of small files, and not everyone is interested in them all. Torrents are good for large content that everyone wants. The two are in opposition and there needs to be a balance: do you need to make One Unique Torrent with everything, but then peers have to individually ask each and every other peer if they have the content they're looking for, making it unscalable ? Or do you make one torrent per package, meaning peers have to track thousands of torrents ? (That's the direction IPFS took, which is why it's extremely inefficient and resource-heavy). DebTorrent has made the choice to go in the middle. The real problem, to me, is that content-addressed content is the anti-privacy protocol: since you ask everyone "do you have this content", you're basically telling everyone what you want. In the case of installing packages, this means telling everyone what the version of your packages is, and is potentially a security issue. But the real "problem" is that it fails at being much more better than the existing solution. Bandwidth is cheap, storage is cheap, so hosting everything on a few independent but centralized servers is good enough.
- rvz 3y ago> I have never seen anybody using IPFS in the wild, even projects for which it should be well suited (archive.org, Linux package distribution, Git, Lemmy, Imgur, CivitAI), don't use it. Netflix uses IPFS. [0] [0] https://blog.ipfs.tech/2020-02-14-improved-bitswap-for-container-distribution https://blog.ipfs.tech/2020-02-14-improved-bitswap-for-conta...
- orblivion 3y ago> Linux package distribution FWIW it seems like NixOS at least tried or is trying: https://blog.ipfs.tech/2020-09-08-nix-ipfs-milestone-1/ https://blog.ipfs.tech/2020-09-08-nix-ipfs-milestone-1/
- LanternLight83 3y agoGuix has had some developments in this direction too. https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/GSoC-2023 https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/GSoC-2023 https://issues.guix.gnu.org/52555 https://issues.guix.gnu.org/52555
- rglullis 3y agoSo is Storj and Sia. It raises the question, though: I can pay Storj S3 with STORJ tokens, and I can also pay for renterd space with Sia tokens, and I can also pay for IPFS with Filecoin, and all of them still work with good old credit cards. What "intrinsic" value is there for any of these tokens, if they can only be used on their own internal economies? And before the "but permissionless, so I can pay with crypto!", why not just use DAI?
- buildbuildbuild 3y agoI’ve earned Storj for years by renting excess hard drive space to store other people’s files. Having a native currency lets you innovate in some unique ways. Microtransactions are not practical with credit cards and other traditional settlement methods. The reasons not to use something like DAI are fundraising (unfortunately - crypto VCs really like seeing a token), network bloat/decentralization, and leadership risk. Your own currency is less likely to collapse by other people’s bad decisions.
- rglullis 3y agoI also run my own Storj node. It took at least one year to pay back the hard drive. Now that they are cutting down the payout for hosting, I am receiving barely enough to justify the power bill. No one cares about microtransactions, and I'm yet to see a customer who likes a product or service but refuses to make a pre-payment of $10. None of the reasons you mentioned for a token are beneficial to the end user.
- Dylan16807 3y agoHow much is the power bill, and how many watts are you using? Barely paying for power does sound like too little, but enough money to pay back hardware cost in a year is definitely overkill.
- rglullis 3y agoI went to look, and I was wrong on both extremes. I've allocated 2TB. It actually took me two years to get make ~$125, when I bought disks at ~$60/TB. For the past 6 months, I've received an average of 5.8 STORJ per month, which on today's rate amount to $4/month, but if I look at the price at the time I received them it would be more like $2.2/month. I don't know the exact wattage, but given that is a oldish celeron and that I'm based in Germany, I'm guessing that running that server + disks takes ~25W, which means ~18kWh per month and given how energy prices have gone up last year (close to 0.30€ per kWh), I am actually losing money by keeping this server on.
- timtom39 3y agoRunning IPFS at scale is horrible. Try to download a few dozen TBs of small files. Its garbage collection is rubbish (ended up nuking the ZFS dataset every couple of days instead), it is very CPU and IOPS hungry, and it has bad network throttling support. I would claim it has failed the test of time as it has very little adoption.
- thefounder 3y agoWhy the torrents didn’t move to IPFS already? I think it looks more like DoA than standing the test of time. From my experience it’s a “heavy tech”/resource hog hog that does not appeal neither to developers nor to end users(it has no killer app)
- timtom39 3y agoI would like to add that IPFS pretty much doesn't run on spinning rust or slow CPUs. A PI or other low end box can easily run torrents with an external harddrive. IPFS can't download large files at a reasonable speed on slow hardware.
- chpatrick 3y agoIsn't IPFS pretty much the same tech as torrents with magnet links? I'm not sure there's any benefit. I think the challenge with torrents is maintaining communities of seeders without getting taken down, but I don't think IPFS really helps with that.
- fsflover 3y agoAre they interoperable with torrents yet?
- rakoo 3y agoBecause torrents work, so they don't need to switch to IPFS.
- carlsborg 3y agoHow was your experience using filecoin? Were you able to provision storage?
- jillesvangurp 3y agoOn paper yes. In practice a lot of these crypto coins are dominated by get rich quick types that treat the bit that actually generates value as an afterthought. I've not seen much evidence that Filecoin is any different. The benchmark for success here would be people participating being able to earn meaningful amounts of file coin simply by hosting ipfs data. Is that even remotely profitable at this point? IPFS as a technology is fine. It seems to work well enough though there are some resilience and scaling challenges. Your data basically disappears unless you ensure it doesn't Which is where filecoin and other incentives come in. Basically it requires you to pay for someone to host your content. Because others won't unless they happen to have downloaded your content in which case it may linger on their drive for a while. My guess is that the whole Filecoin thing is scaring away a lot of enterprise users though. What it boils down to is that things like s3 and other storage solutions are pretty robust and affordable as well if you are going to pay for hosting the files anyway. And probably a lot easier to deal with. So, for most companies they might look at it and then use something like S3. The whole business of having to buy some funny coins on a dodgy website is a bit of a nonstarter in most companies.
- josu 3y agoJust some perspective: Price (market cap): ~3B Annualized revenue based on the last 30 days: 3M. Intrinsic value based on perpetual DCF assuming 5% interest rate: 60M.
- Sparkyte 3y agoSounds like bullshit to me.
- diggan 3y agoIgnoring the question if it is bullshit or not, what do you personally gain from posting comments like this? Wouldn't it be more interesting for everyone involved (including yourself) if you actually share the arguments against the parent comment, if you have any?
- Sparkyte 3y agoTo keep people from investing in cryptocurrency. It is a waste of resources and provides little to no return. It does not help to decentralize or stablize the economy. Although to be fair not many fiat currencies do either. Anyone with two or more brain cells realizes that this sort of stuff is a scam. The news is publicity to stir up investors.
- jejeyyy77 3y agovalue of crypto is in the network (aka market).
- colesantiago 3y ago> Filecoin is probably one of the few cryptocurrencies with intrinsic value, None of these coins have any intrinsic value. There are thousands of people who sat on bench and thought, "I want to create a ponzi coin" doesn't mean they create value. Crypto is a net negative phenomenon.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI'm pretty cynical of crypto, but you're confusing what something can be used for with what it can only be used for. Any coin, including USD, has no intrinsic value. Its value is in what people can buy with it.
- colesantiago 3y agoYou cannot pay taxes or do anything legitimate with crypto. Sounds pretty useless to me.
- hanniabu 3y agoHave fun dying on that hill. 30 years ago you would have been saying the internet is worthless.
- troupo 3y agoCrypto isn't internet. At best, crypto is Juicero
- hanniabu 3y agoWithin 20 years Ethereum will be used as a global coordination and settlement layer, and is well on its way to achieving that. But whatever helps you sleep better at night.
- troupo 3y ago> Within 20 years Ethereum will be used as a global coordination and settlement layer Of course it won't > and is well on its way to achieving that. Of course it isn't > But whatever helps you sleep better at night. Well, we all know what lullabies you sing to yourself
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoFilecoin, Akash, DVPN, Jackal, Helium are all cryptocurrency projects with real products/use cases outside of the circular defi economy/number go up technology.
- Nursie 3y agoHelium? The company that lied about partnerships, structured itself as a way for insiders to cash out on tokens early, then failed to attract any business so pivoted to a new tech and a new token to do it all again? Helium is a failure and a joke. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2022/09/23/helium-crypto-tokens-peoples-network/?sh=57cbf45f7316 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2022/09/23/helium-...
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoI don't know anything about their business model, but I do know that they have a real product
- Dylan16807 3y agoThey sent out real boxes. The full package being sold to box-buyers, the reason they bought the boxes in the first place, did not exist.
- RF_Savage 3y agoThere is also Althea for network infrastructure/connectivity.
- hanniabu 3y agoYou're almost there, soon you'll realize digital assets in general are important for aligning incentives.
- bitzun 3y agoIt has the same intrinsic value as the other cryptocurrencies: Illegal activity (in this case, piracy).
- fulladder 3y agoI don't agree that Filecoin does anything to enable piracy. If your goal is to pirate software and movies, your needs were already (and still are) adequately met with BitTorrent and there's no need for a blockchain token. Tokens would just be an expensive distraction to someone like that.
- anonymoushn 3y agoIs there actually a way to use filecoin to pay for IPFS pinning yet? Last time I checked a couple years ago Filecoin was worth more than Disney and the actual use case was vaporware.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoIIRC they subsidize hosting by ~8x (ie, when someone pays $1 in filecoin to pin content, filecoin pays out $8 for people actually running nodes. Otherwise the economic incentive to run nodes isn't there, just another VC scheme of selling dollars for a dime to brag about growth) source was personal communication, sorry