
Filecoin 2017 Q4 Update - hanklazard
https://filecoin.io/blog/update-2017-q4/
======
hathathat
They seem to have solved proof-of-storage, but the network can’t guarantee the
available of the files you pay to store! A profitable strategy:

1\. Set up a miner on AWS. You’ll only need a small machine as you’ll persist
the data in S3.

2\. Accept bids for storage, and use your free ingress bandwidth to copy the
data into S3

3\. Calculate and publish your proofs of storage so your Filecoin (held in
escrow after your successful bid) is released.

4\. Refuse all bids to access the content - egress bandwidth costs money!

5\. Win! You’ll always be able to undercut other miners when bidding for
storage as they have to bake in bandwidth costs in their bids, and you
strategy is easily scalable (as you can pump as much data into S3 as you need
- you’ll only need to get more machines to calculate more storage proofs).

~~~
wmf
I think you're assuming some kind of broken strawman version of Filecoin.
(Edit: This wasn't really justified, see below.) The price of retrieving data
needs to be agreed ahead of time and nodes that refuse to provide data need to
lose collateral. Ultimately there's also replication/erasure coding so that
one node can't hold your data hostage (but it would be worrying if evil was a
dominant strategy because then all the nodes might hold your data hostage at
the same time).

(Also, for step 3 I think proofs of storage are supposed to be calculated
continuously, not once. So you'd be constantly reading data from S3.)

~~~
hathathat
I'm not sure why you say it's a strawman? The whitepaper[1] says that an ask
order on the storage market is just (space, price) -- no mention of the cost
to retrieve the data. Similarly, the storage market protocol (Figure 11)
doesn't mention losing stake for failing to provide the data on demand (it
only mentions losing stake for failing to post proofs).

[1] [https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf](https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf)

~~~
wmf
I admit that the concept of retrieval miners makes no sense to me since it
seems like they would have to be the same as the storage miners. It is
worrying that the whitepaper says "we must assume that there is always one
honest Retrieval Miner"; you can't assume honesty without incentives.

In general, I don't take the Filecoin whitepaper too literally. There are a
lot of aspects of it that will probably have to be changed. I think the
Filecoin ICO (which I didn't participate in BTW) is more of a vote of
confidence on the team, not any specific protocol.

------
beedrillzzzzz
Very interesting to contrast with competitor Sia's latest status update.

Sia quietly developed a fully functional network over the last 5 years, and
has now stated they will begin big marketing efforts.

Also, no reason IPFS cannot integrate with Sia.

[https://blog.sia.tech/sia-triannual-update-september-
decembe...](https://blog.sia.tech/sia-triannual-update-september-
december-2017-8afdf9c10325)

~~~
cantrip
I own some amount of Siacoin, but what I don't fully understand is how the
value of Sia is supposed to work with the platform itself.

As the value of the currency increases, doesn't that make actually using the
service prohibitively expensive?

Also, the Sia wallet has been completely inoperable for about a week, which is
what has caused its latest price inflation. It went from .02 to .10 so I
figured I'd get rid of it, but I can not send it from my personal Sia wallet
to an exchange.

~~~
wmf
_As the value of the currency increases, doesn 't that make actually using the
service prohibitively expensive?_

AFAIK this is an unsolved problem for all "app coins"/"utility tokens"/"fat
protocols". The service could be dynamically repriced when the value of the
currency changes, but that requires oracles and many cryptocurrency idealists
are reluctant to admit that things should be priced in a stable currency.

~~~
hndamien
Sia has cluster management software to let the hoster dynamically set prices
with respect to the exchange rate.

------
koolba
Any update on what they did with the $257 million they raised[1]?

Did they convert it to fiat or keep it in crypto? Between Sep and now there's
been some big shifts in value. Be nuts if they have over $1 billion to play
with now.

[1]: [https://www.coindesk.com/257-million-filecoin-breaks-time-
re...](https://www.coindesk.com/257-million-filecoin-breaks-time-record-ico-
funding/)

~~~
throwwwwaway9
\--- _Any update on what they did with the $257 million they raised_

They are paying people to write and release quarterly updates. Without any
inside info, I can tell you that that costs money. Maybe they setup trust
funds to issue such updates well into year 2087. What more do you want???

~~~
koolba
I'm specifically asking how they're holding on to the massive amount of
funding they raised.

A traditional funding raise would be in USD and the startup may receive in a
number of tranches tied to milestones. In the case of Filecoin I think they
received a large chunk of it in crypto, specifically Ether, which has grown
significantly since then. If they didn't convert it to fiat shortly after the
funding round they could be sitting on a (paper) value of over $1 billion.

~~~
throwwwwaway9
_I_ doubt they converted it all in USD. Maybe they invested in other crypto,
and maybe somewhere between $257m and $1b might be their bank acct balance.
Imagine having at least $250,000,000 and as much to hire employees! Of course
they can keep 5 employees and pay "managers" xx $millions a year...no law
against that, "that's how they decided their company should be run"

~~~
banderman
How is that different from embezzlement?

~~~
oh_sigh
Because in that situation you're just paying with their own money for
employees for their work. Usually, in a normal company, you will have a board
of directors or ombudsman or somebody with some kind of incentive to prevent
massive overpaying that essentially becomes a gift(unless, of course, we're
talking about the CEO, then pay away until the cows come home) - I don't know,
does FileCoin or the parent company have that kind of set up?

------
hanklazard
I'm actually very interested in setting aside some storage for this project
but have legal concerns. Namely, if an encrypted shard of [illegal file X] is
sitting on my IPFS node without my knowledge, could I be held responsible
legally for holding/distributing that illegal file? As far as I've been able
to ascertain from a few lawyers I've curbsided, the answer is "maybe," but if
anyone knows of any clear legal precedent around this issue, I'd appreciate
your input. Seems like this issue could preclude mainstream adoption, if not
addressed (maybe it has been and I just haven't seen it).

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Yes, you could be held legally responsible.

Do you have the funds to mount a reasonable defense if you were to be
prosecuted? Would a negative outcome significantly impact your life?

If you can’t afford to fight it don’t risk it

~~~
vel0city
IANAL, but from my understanding of the DMCA Safe Habor provisions it could be
very tricky to hold a host responsible for data stored on their servers
unknowingly. However, once they find out about the file's illegality, they
must act or then they become liable. Amazon is not immediately liable if
someone uploads illegal files to S3.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
The GP just incriminated themselves now though I.e.

“The defendant installed software that they knew could be used to store
illegal materials, proceeded to profit off it, and did not put any protections
in place to try to limit this”

For some judges that’s all they’d need to hear. Amazon have lawyers and
essentially an endless budget, processes and teams to defend their position
and support law enforcement, they have no trouble defending themselves, but an
individual could find themselves in a really tough position.

~~~
Nuzzerino
There needs to be a point at which one can reasonably determine that someone
has done everything they possibly can, short of not running the node, to keep
illegal content off of their machines. I don't think the only solution need be
to abstain from using the system. This is an age-old problem, almost as old as
the Internet itself.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Completely agree

------
revelation
Section 7 seems to be the kind of status update a doomed crowdfunding hardware
project posts. Lots of buzzwords on all the incredibly complicated problems
their awesome rockstar team is working all day to solve, nothing anyone can
verify. Section 4 is an entirely transparent scheme to ride on the coattails
of IPFS.

~~~
zebnyc
This style of providing updates seems to be standard amongst crypto /
blockchain projects. Do you have any different examples? Thanks

~~~
revelation
Just look at the updates of some of those famous crowdfunding projects (or
"ICO+whitepaper" if you want)

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/torquing/zano-
autonomou...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/torquing/zano-autonomous-
intelligent-swarming-nano-drone/posts/1245513)

"we have all been flat out working" "Getting a high speed shutter and minimal
jitter from the video feed, testing the camera with the motors and all RF
devices running at full power"

~~~
adbachman
It’s hard to tell if you’re using a massive failure like that as an example of
what to do or what not to do.

Or is it sarcasm?

------
kbody
Pretty underwhelming to have the top challenges outsourced to bounty-based
RFPs. With the money they got any kind of centralization because of
overpromises is a huge failure in my book. Really disappointed by the greed
that ICOs have brought out of people.

------
goldcountry
Even assuming they meet all their product goals, who is going to choose this
over AWS?

~~~
rememberlenny
From what I understand, thats not what its about. AWS and all of the various
centralized hosting providers are still valuable.

The idea of web 3.0 and the ethereum/ipfs structure is that you have a fat
client and thin server. This means that all the business logic sits on the
client and the server is just utility.

Filecoin and the ifps structure allows content like text or images to be
stored in a place that the smart contract based client could access.

Some recent examples are:

\- Marketplace that uses ifps to store data:
[https://demo.originprotocol.com](https://demo.originprotocol.com)

\- Game (not sure if this uses ifps)
[http://cryptokitties.co](http://cryptokitties.co)

~~~
Aunche
Why not just do this without the overhead of mining and maintaining a
blockchain? Surely there's a more efficient way of maintaining a public
distributed file system.

~~~
pfraze
In the Dat world, we have [https://hashbase.io](https://hashbase.io), a self-
deployable service for rehosting archives

------
treyrosch
How many coins do you think will be given per token?

------
eoinboylan
Pied Piper Update, Q4 2017

