Filecoin Virtual Machine – Polyglot, WASM-based execution environment

https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-v16-network-upgrade-skyr/

by capableweb • 4 years ago

95 78 4 years ago

vosper• 4 years ago

So how much does it cost to store 1gb of data for one month on/with filecoin? I looked all over the site and there was a lot of talk about it being cheap but no prices. Is there some way to compare cost and reliability to S3?

On account of the word “coin” being in the name, I have a feeling the answer isn’t simple.

squishy47• 4 years ago

currently seems to be $0.0000001 USD for 1GB for 30 days https://file.app/

compsciphd• 4 years ago

so it costs 10c a month to store 1PB?

vesinisa2• 4 years ago

Apparently that does not include data redundancy. You must take care of that yourself by buying the same storage from multiple vendors: https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/faq/#after-i-made-a-...

Also, the next FAQ question answers an interesting problem where the cost of data retrieval is not agreed before hand, and allows the storage providers to extort you for actually ever retrieving your data. Solution is again storing your bytes with multiple providers and hoping they are not all extortionists.

TheIronYuppie9• 4 years ago

This is broadly correct! It's remarkably cheap. As other commenters have noted, you'll want to handle reproduction/etc, which is a bit more work, but still many orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else out there.

HOWEVER, most folks don't want to do this - we recommend solutions like https://web3.storage (which gives you 1 TB with three replicas for free forever), and https://estuary.tech.

Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.

madsbuch• 4 years ago

https://file.app/

Pricing for web3 projects is a bit more complicated than getting a product from AWS. As you participate in a specialized economy it is like asking what a Danish stock costs from the US standpoint. First you need to buy DKK, and thereafter the stock might be volatile and have another price. (Spoiler alert, Danish stocks are cheap now :) )

davidatbu10• 4 years ago

I think it's currenlty free? https://web3.storage/

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

There is virtually no way to really answer that. People quoting the nominal dollar cost are misleading you. Nobody can buy hard drives and keep them running and connected to the Internet for $0.10 per PB per month. The fact that they're willing to offer you that price anyway presumably means they're actually getting paid in some shitcoin they hope will go to the moon. If it doesn't, then you'll find out what it was really costing. The other possibility is the global demand is so low that hard drive owners who already found some other way to fund their capex are just charging peanuts for the slack in otherwise idle disk space, but that is inherently a pricing model that can't scale, like airlines giving away seats on a plane that is not going to meet capacity but needed to fly anyway to keep a route alive.

ilaksh3• 4 years ago

Take a look at web3.storage and Filebase for IPFS pinning. Pinata if you know it will be a small amount of if you are rich.

tmcw• 4 years ago

The answer is: nobody knows, because nobody pays for anything with FileCoin. The services that get pointed to, like estuary, have the price of "free," and most of the incentives in the system are pumped in automatically to "reward suppliers" rather than there being any value transferred between people paying for storage and those providing storage.

Happy to adjust this conclusion - I've spent some hours trying to figure out how to pay for anything with FileCoin and come up empty-handed. Does anyone want to do a walkthrough of buying the coins, installing the software, storing data in exchange for FileCoin, and retrieving it?

In the meantime, you have to wonder: is this a sort of "you get what you pay for" scenario, and you pay nothing, so you get… no reliability?

e19293001• 4 years ago

White paper says Filecoin heavily rely on zk-SNARKs.

momack23• 4 years ago

Yep! The SNARKiest network out there I believe! https://research.protocol.ai/sites/snarks/

davidatbu10• 4 years ago

Can someone explain to me what potential applications are unlocked by the addition of on-chain execution (the FileCoin VM) to a proof-of-storage backed blockchain (ie, FileCoin)?

Also, is the wasm-based (and therefore polygot) execution environment a novelty in the space of on-chain execution? That in itself should be a big deal right?

TheIronYuppie9• 4 years ago

Your best bet is to browse through here - https://fvm.filecoin.io/ - there are A TON.

Some examples:

* Joining together to share storage of important data (e.g. several foundations together)

* Auto-renewing/auto-replication of storage (e.g. if a storage provider fails to respond after a certain period of time, content could be automatically replicated to a new provider)

* Automated caching & distribution - a single piece of content uploaded could be automatically replicated to other providers around the world

* Sophisticated storage auctions - let's say you're a storage provider and realize that someone has removed a large chunk of data, thereby freeing up a ton of space. A contract could automatically lower the price for storing on your disks so you're back running at full capacity more quickly.

* Futures contracts - let's say you have a lot of data you know you're going to need for a long time into the future (e.g. 10GB of log data generated every day). You may want more stability in pricing, so you "buy" all the storage now, and are not subject to volatility.

Etc, etc. But the best use cases are the ones we haven't even thought up yet!

Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.

davidatbu10• 4 years ago

Thank you!! I'm super intrigued by the potential applications listed under "Data DAOs"(coming from an ML background :) ).

Do you have any recommendations as to the learning path I should take to be able to develop on the FVM? I've never coded in the web3 space before. Should I simply dive into the API docs and figure out what fundamentals I would need to learn and go from there? Or is there some pre-designed curriculum to get average SWEs up-to-speed with FVM and FileCoin in general? (For context, I've listened to many podcast episodes on IPFS/FileCoin ..etc and have a good understanding of the general gist of things).

aaaaaaaaata2• 4 years ago

Are you still with MS?

psKama• 4 years ago

Smart contracts + decentralized storage is a great idea but since the beginning to this date, IPFS has been totally unreliable/unstable for me. Whenever I try to load a web page hosted on IPFS or whatever app which uses IPFS as backend (e.g. audios), 80% chance it simply doesn't load. I just hope this update addresses stability issues as well as introducing smart contracts.

capableweb3• 4 years ago

Have you always tried to run it on the same network? Might be something in your setup. I agree that it can sometimes be flaky, but usually adjusting the settings for the daemon solves the issue for me, either it's connected to too many peers (basically saturating all my available bandwidth) or too few.

Looking around, some projects (like https://estuary.tech/) seems to have successfully stored around ~160 TiB of data on Filecoin (via IPFS), so there are setups where it does work successfully.

traverseda• 4 years ago

I've stored over 1PB to dev/null over the year's. Retrieval is the real problem :p

TheIronYuppie9• 4 years ago

One of the things we're well aware of is the huge opportunity/need for better gateways. What you're seeing is actually the gateway failing (not IPFS) so _technically_ ipfs is doing fine. NOT THAT THAT MATTERS IF YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO LOAD A WEB PAGE - WE KNOW! WE PROMISE! :)

Lots of folks are working on retrievability even as we speak (https://retrieval.market/). Stay tuned!

BTW, if you ever want your content directly, you can go here - https://ipfs.io/ipfs/<CID>. Brave also offers IPFS native integration not via gateways. Again, we are well aware this isn't enough! Coming soon...

Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.

easrng• 4 years ago

Using a local IPFS node doesn't usually work much better. Or at least it hasn't for me. Been a little while since I deleted IPFS desktop since I wasn't using it enough to justify its resource usage.

tarunmuvvala• 4 years ago

Asking as product enthusiast,I have seen the development of Filecoin over the years.

What are some great usecases for filecoin at the current state?

naillo• 4 years ago

I've the same experience roughly. The one recent happy finding I found though is that using the 'ipfs.io' link on library genesis is generally much faster (and as reliable) than the other mirror links. Kinda gave me hope that there's something to the ipfs idea after all.

ilaksh3• 4 years ago

The Pinata paid account gateway has worked pretty well for me. The $1000/mo for 100k pins screwed me though. But I may keep an account for the gateway since I am under 100k now.

sub74• 4 years ago

No discussion of Filecoin is complete without talking about how much miners got paid per gb per hour for the past few years (hint: they covered the cost of their SSD in < 1 hour at one point)

It's a great story filled with 80+% APR loans clamoring for unvested FIL balances, all kinds of middle men taking cuts, and of course putting max risk on retail when the ship eventually sinks

I really hope their $300m or whatever will build something useful, but I would be shocked if this tech ends anywhere because the whole project was/is a simple money grab and the grabbings been done already

davidatbu10• 4 years ago

I'd love to get more clarity on this: are you saying that FileCoin's innovation of "proof-of-storage blockchain" is inherently useless (or useless in comparison to centralized alternatives, like AWS's S3), and therefore FileCoin is a money-grab? Or are you saying that the incentive structure employed was unfairly favorable to only some participants in the system? Or are you saying something else?

I am trying to form informed opinions on this space, so I'd really appreciate an answer!

threeseed2• 4 years ago

or useless in comparison to centralized alternatives

Filecoin may not be centralised the same as AWS but they are centralised in other ways.

Any time you have a project like this with $250+ million in VC investment there is going to be an inherent conflict in their goals and motivations versus other contributors to the project.

It's like Spark, MongoDB, Cassandra etc. Yes they are open-source. But the billion dollar companies that are behind them hold all the cards and will win against any attempt to take the project in a direction they don't like.

sdfhdhjdw32• 4 years ago

Why exactly do you call S3 "centralized"? You can distribute it around the world if you choose to.

TheIronYuppie9• 4 years ago

I'm sorry, but you'll need to explain this a lot more.

I'm happy to answer questions directly, or discuss any sources, but I'm not able to respond to this point by point because this just is not correct. I'm on here all the time if you'd like to talk further, or email me directly - david (dot) aronchick (at) protocol (dot) ai

Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.

sub74• 4 years ago

My comment had no questions, but thanks for making yourself available. I'll be happy to share all kinds of details from 2017 onwards, but only with someone from the SEC/CFTC. This, sadly, is very correct. I am the source.

momack23• 4 years ago

Hm, I've taken a look at some of the Storage Provider ROI dashboards and AFAIK numbers aren't anything like that -- so not sure what timeframe or cost of goods you're extrapolating from. (ex https://fgas.io/)

I'm also confused how your model accounts for all the ecosystem development and enablement work that is being done across the Filecoin ecosystem. Filecoin isn't just another ETH clone - there is a ton of engineering and product work happening across many teams, with a ton of resources and dev work being poured into them (ex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApVVg78ZBog)

Fine to complain about crypto economic token distributions or something specific - but please don't imply that the dev teams working on Filecoin / IPFS are freeloading or disingenuous. There's a massive amount of work going into building new content-addressed web primitives by some very mission-driven folks that you're unintentionally maligning. (full disclosure - I'm one of them)

greatpostman2• 4 years ago

Word on the street is that the low filecoin price, and low future price prospects mean that this crypto isn’t profitable for miners and will eventually fail. The coin economics also mean that VCs vest slowly, with constant selling pressure on a coin that no one uses. The economics don’t work out, it’s a money scheme

davidatbu10• 4 years ago

Interestingly, @sub7 had the opposite impression (if I understood them correctly), which is that miners got compensated way too much. But they also concluded that FileCoin a money grab.

As a web3 newbie trying to tell apart the wheat from the chaff, I'd love to see more explanation or evidence for either your or @sub7's claims. Do you have any pointers?

hnthrow10102• 4 years ago

There's no wheat. The entirety of web3 is a series of ponzi-like schemes to pump up the price of some token and dump it on unsuspecting users. When someone is trying to sell you a currency, they're not trying to sell you a product. They're trying to get you to inflate the value of it so the miners can realize their profits, while you get stuck holding the tokens that will then change value randomly. And even if there were any merit to any of the claims made by web3 companies (there isn't), by definition most of these web3 projects/startups would fail and collapse to nothing anyway, making the token worthless, and losing everything the holders have.

Payments for IPFS storage isn't a horrible idea, but it needs to be done in a normal way using real money, without the speculative tokens.

TheIronYuppie9• 4 years ago

Can't respond to "word on the street" (i guess my streets have different words?), but I am more than happy to respond to any detailed questions you have! There's also a ton of public research (for example https://twitter.com/MessariCrypto/status/1546894197671821320 - amount stored on Filecoin grew at 128% quarter over quarter).

Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.

greatpostman2• 4 years ago

Appreciate your response and my apologies if I am incorrect. But what I have heard is the following:

There’s constant large amount of coins printed for the team and their VC’s in which they can sell on a daily basis to dump the market. Also new coins being owed to the miners are periodically unlocked as well (in FIL it’s like a ponzi, you gotta wait for your rewards to be unlocked after many months to take everything out). Basically too many coins can be sold daily, very little demand, real use case, or hype.

TechBro8615• 4 years ago

What is the explanation for the steady rate of storage growth combined with apparently high churn [0] of peers on the Filecoin network?

Is this due to a small number of peers purchasing additional storage? When a new peer joins the network, are you able to estimate the expected number of bytes that peer will contribute to the network over its lifetime? Basically, can you calculate the “LTV” of an IPFS/Filecoin peer? (Let’s say “V” is “net storage,” i.e. the difference between storage contributed and storage consumed.)

[0] http://162.55.187.75:3000/d/CSQsORs7k/nebula?orgId=1&viewPan...

fire• 4 years ago

Is there a mirror? I'm just getting 502's trying to view the blog.

Filecoin Virtual Machine – Polyglot, WASM-based execution environment

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