Filecoin – A Cryptocurrency Operated File Storage Network

by setra • 9 years ago

145 62 9 years ago

tyingq3• 9 years ago

If it takes off, will be interesting to see how they deal with the inevitable questionable content and resulting DMCA takedown requests.

Kinnard2• 9 years ago

Filecoin's actually been around for several years. I think Storj is based off of it.

tyingq3• 9 years ago

Ahh, thanks. Storj doesn't appear to support file sharing though, looks more like personal storage, which would make this less of an issue.

Edit: Might want to put 2014 in the title.

brador• 9 years ago

In that case, how are they dealing with questionable content and resulting DMCA takedown requests?

super32• 9 years ago

Filecoin whitepaper came out a few months before the Storj one. Filecoin however is not functional, while Storj has been functional for about 8 months.

Taek7• 9 years ago

Takedown requests would need to be sent to the nodes holding the data or to servers holding links to the data. I don't think the dev teams or parent companies would have too much to worry about.

tyingq3• 9 years ago

At a high level, the idea seems to hinge on "incentive to hold the data". Dealing with DMCA becomes a disincentive.

Nutomic• 9 years ago

Seems to be the same as Sia [1]. Except that you can already use Sia today.

[1] https://sia.tech/

iamgopal• 9 years ago

What's your experience of it ?

infinisil• 9 years ago

I believe filecoin is going to be a part of IPFS [1] at some point in the future, but development hasn't started yet. I really hope all the decentralized technology is going to blow up.

[1] http://ipfs.io/

api2• 9 years ago

I feel like it's approaching a tipping point. We have good decentralized networking, storage, currency, etc.

A missing piece is decentralized compute at scale. That's hard, especially for security reasons.

It's too bad Amazon branded "serverless" because lambda is not serverless. It's one big mainframe server. This stuff is serverless.

adrianN2• 9 years ago

There is https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

chuhnk• 9 years ago

https://golem.network/

kefka3• 9 years ago

In all honesty, I need to try building something that does semi-distributed computation. Here's my idea to throw in the pool.

First, you don't get something for nothing. So you need computers (surprise). Now, how do you share code? You can share code directly via IPFS. Now, admittedly, binary is the fastest, but limits your architecture rather greatly. So an interpreted language seems better.

I'm looking at Erlang, given its functional attributes and ability of swapping code with no downtime. It also works in a cluster.

I also look at Tor for entry points to get requests on these machines. We already can interact with IPFS for files, but it has no logic capability. And Ethereum is a joke in many ways (and it simply can't interact outside its blockchain).

The idea: IPFS filestore for storing functions, and chaining IPFS hashes to be ran by a Erlang cloud connected by Tor Onion links.

It's not completely serverless computation, but you can ideally abstract out the server so it doesn't matter where it is, or who handles it.

Other ways to go about this would be homomorphic encryption (way too computationally expensive at this time)... Or some sort of trusted computing (shudder).

eptcyka• 9 years ago

This isn't anything novel. How are they different from https://maidsafe.net/ ?

bogle• 9 years ago

Sia [http://sia.tech/]; filecoin; Storj [https://storj.io/]; maidsafe [https://maidsafe.net/]. Sounds like someone could do a good comparison article. Does anyone have any experience of using any of these? They do take quite a bit to set up compared to, say, Backblaze B2 or AWS S3.

Taek7• 9 years ago

https://forum.sia.tech/topic/21/sia-vs-storj-vs-maidsafe

(I am the founder of Sia)

Sia's key distinguishing feature is that it's the only platform today which is fully/properly decentralized. If the MaidSafe devs today disappear, I believe all the servers running MaidSafe go with them. If the Storj team disappears, payments stop entirely and anyone using the Storj bridge (most of their users) will not be able to access files. If the Sia devs disappear, everything will continue to work as it currently does (though, bugfixes and feature adds will stop)

Sia distinguishes in two other major ways as well. First, we are the only platform that allows hosts to put up collateral - if a host loses your data, they don't just lose revenue they also lose collateral money that they put up as a promise to keep the data safe. Second, Sia is the only network that gives you full control over which machines your data ends up on. This is good if you want to run a CDN, need to comply with data laws, or have some other reason for favoring a particular region or set of hosts.

I encourage you to dive deep in the technical details, I think you'll find that Sia is pretty far ahead of everyone else.

problems• 9 years ago

Sia seems really cool - out of curiosity, is there a way to see the available storage prices on the network?

xvolter• 9 years ago

Seems really annoying to get setup with Sia though. You need to have at least 50,000 SC to begin hosting, and you can't earn SC until you start hosting. You even need SC to announce your host (15 SC), and the apps don't explain if the software deals with dynamic IPs or if it supports hostnames instead of just IPv4 addresses. Also, it seems like it is only using IPv4 addresses, kind of short minded for modern technology.

How are you even supposed to get started using Sia if there's no way to do it except to go and spend money. The point of being able to host files is that I'll offer up some storage on my NAS, earn coins, then be able to backup some of my own important documents on the network. Seems like if I have to dish out money to get started I doubt I'd ever be able to maintain the service without continuously spending money. So many other syncing technologies seem easier than this.

brilliantcode2• 9 years ago

what problems did end users solve with Sia?

waynenilsen• 9 years ago

Maidsafe is fully decentralized. It is still in testing but full networks can and have been run without maidsafe servers. Any node can be used to bootstrap

super32• 9 years ago

CEO of Storj here. You can sign up to use Storj and get the tools working to upload/download your files in 60 seconds. Last time I tried to use S3 it was 12 steps, and a phone call. Its faster, more secure, 50% cheaper than traditional cloud storage.

Basics are data stored for each. Storj: ~1400 TB, Sia: ~100 TB, Filecoin: Not Functional, Maidsafe: Not Functional.

mintplant• 9 years ago

Working clickable links:

https://sia.tech/ https://storj.io/ https://maidsafe.net/

j_s• 9 years ago

A good comparison article would include costs and the difficulty of obtaining that info... feels fuzzy for most of these, and that's a big problem for adoption.

Taek7• 9 years ago

Happy to fill in:

Prices on Sia:

- siapulse.com contains some information about pricing

- running `siac renter prices` on client on the master branch (yet unreleased) will give you a price estimate given the set of hosts you know about. This feature will be available in the next release.

- Storage cost: about $1 / TB / Mo (for 10-of-30 redundancy)

- Bandwidth cost: about $0.60 / TB

Prices on Storj:

- Not sure how the prices get set, but the prices are advertised on their website

- Storage cost: $15 / TB / Mo

- Bandwidth cost: $50 / TB

Prices on MaidSafe:

- No price given, but the claim is that it will adjust according to supply and demand. Should be within a small factor of Sia if that is the case (Sia's prices are also set by supply + demand).

myowncrapulence• 9 years ago

Instead of simply using bitcoin (internet), these companies all created arbitrary currencies (intranet) to essentially generate profit for themselves. Having seen dozens of literally identical projects I can promise you all of these "networks" which utilize their own arbitrary currency are scams.

sneak• 9 years ago

The "altcoin == scam" assertion doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

Bitcoin is IPv4. There is lots of research into the next, better version.

INTPenis• 9 years ago

Isn't KBFS (keybase) also based on blockchain technology?

mundo• 9 years ago

I believe Keybase (the identity and key management tool) stores signatures on the BTC blockchain, but KBFS (the encrypted shared filesystem built on Keybase) does not, it is just S3 storage that they're offering as a freebie (10GB/user) to drive adoption.

jakeywankenobi• 9 years ago

I'm always curious about how things like this would do if an effort was made to market it to the general populace. The makers are all amped about the underlying tech (and rightfully so), but it's a hard thing to really care about outside that niche space. What if you hid all the underlying tech, layered on a good UX, and spoke to the value proposition?

homakov• 9 years ago

I know how hard it is to explain an outsider what your product does, but maybe you could try to explain to me who should be using it? Personally, I have enough space on my laptop.

tromp2• 9 years ago

I wonder how these proof-of-retrievabililty blockchains deal with the potential problem of miners injecting a ton of fake files (e.g. whose i'th block is H(secret||i)) into the system in order to boost their chances of being able to do a retrievabililty proof without actually needing storage.

Is it simply a matter of mining rewards not being able to compensate for the cost of injection?

Taek7• 9 years ago

Is there more than just Filecoin? Sia and Storj both only do file contracts, consensus is driven by other means (Proof of Work for Sia, Counterparty for Storj).

As for Filecoin, I believe that it has several significant issues, both with the game theory (super linear returns when investing in hashrate and storage simultaneously - a massive centralization pressure), and with data withholding attacks (to mine on Filecoin, you need to have the Filecoin data. What if the existing miners decide not to give it to you?).

tromp2• 9 years ago

I see this is answered in Section 2.7:

"Altering the reward scheme must include careful analysis of the resulting market equilibria. For instance, if the currency is too inflationary, then attackers may benefit from adding large amounts of “dummy data” that they can easily reproduce without incurring the cost of storage (e.g., the outputs of a pseudorandom function for which they know the secret key), and thereby gain a net advantage in the challenge reward system over the long term."

xkxx• 9 years ago

Hmm, and their last activity on Twitter was 3 Nov 2015: https://twitter.com/MineFilecoin/with_replies. Why is it important? They provide Twitter and email newsletter as main ways to follow their news. If there was no activity for over a year, the project might be stalled.

lgierth• 9 years ago

The latest news on Filecoin is that it's being built on top of Ethereum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itb_2EMgBUI

While Filecoin isn't available yet, IPFS and libp2p have been functional for more than two years, and can be used independently of Filecoin: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs && https://github.com/libp2p/libp2p

(IPFS dev here)

brilliantcode2• 9 years ago

say you want to "sprinkle" cryptocurrency on a really bland idea.

What is the fastest and cheapest way in doing so?

Just so you can put "cryptocurrency" on your website to get marketing exposure.

That's about the only value I see with the current crypto business. Hype.

OJFord• 9 years ago

This looks really interesting, but the misuse of 'rent' all over the landing page is confusing at first, ("I get paid to use someone else's storage space?") and subsequently distracting.

vocatus_gate• 9 years ago

Prediction: Dead or abandoned in <= 2 years.

verelo• 9 years ago

I see you've heard of startups before...

Seriously though, that is a likely outcome, but most good ideas do not sound like good ideas to begin with.

My bigger concern here is the types of files people use this service for, and as distributed host of these files, what are the legal ramifications on me for doing this?

_prometheus• 9 years ago

Hey Everyone, thanks for the great discussion and excellent questions. Was surprised to see this rise up to FP, given we have not updated the site in ages. :] Thanks for the great discussion here! Unfortunately i can't give much in form of answers as time is super punishing right now :(. Good news is we're hard at work, and we'll have a big announcement within 2 mo. ;) See you then! --- Oh also, big shoutout to Sia, Storj, & Swarm. They're all doing solid work on this. One thing that we've been working on is how to increase collaboration, interop, and shared upside across our systems. Stay tuned!

(I'm jbenet, of IPFS, Filecoin, & Protocol Labs)

vasili111• 9 years ago

Does anyone use one of the decentralized storage networks? Please tell us about your personal experience.

Filecoin – A Cryptocurrency Operated File Storage Network

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