
IPFS, CoinList, and the Filecoin ICO [audio] - craigcannon
http://blog.ycombinator.com/ipfs-coinlist-and-the-filecoin-ico-with-juan-benet-and-dalton-caldwell/
======
Confiks
I'm excited to see that the Filecoin project is getting an update. It long
seemed to be stale, with IPFS being the main priority. While a new shiny
website and this podcast is up, the new promised Filecoin paper isn't yet
public.

It will be interesting to see how it compares to Maidsafe. A notable
difference is that Filecoin uses a transaction ledger, while Maidsafe promises
to use groups of nodes 'close by' to maintain a consensus:
[https://blog.maidsafe.net/2015/01/29/consensus-without-a-
blo...](https://blog.maidsafe.net/2015/01/29/consensus-without-a-blockchain/)

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jzelinskie
A lot of the early discussion about P2P dark periods is largely ignoring the
usage for internal networks rather than being the basis of customer facing
applications. Many large companies (fb, twitter) use P2P protocols for
internal distribution of resources. They can make far more assumptions about
network topology when they control the network thus these aspects of P2P
algorithms don't get applied to the general internet. I'd argue this period
was when people really figured out the value of BitTorrent and decided it was
often too difficult to expose to the end user.

FWIW, I built a BitTorrent tracker "framework" (chihaya.io) that a few orgs
use to get the advantages of P2P with whatever extra middleware they need for
their use cases.

~~~
amelius
Nice. By the way, it would be interesting to see a Bittorrent tracker ported
to WASM, so it can run in the browser.

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wyager
Have any of these storage coins figured out how to deal with the fact that
it's easy to collude with yourself and efficiently pull off a Sybil attack to
make it look like you're hosting lots of data?

~~~
Taek
On Sia, contracts are direct been renters and hosts. Hosts can collude with
themselves to make it look like they are storing lots of data, but to what
end? Renters on Sia only pay for the data they are directly storing.

For the Sybil attack, Sia uses proof of burn. Hosts provably burn money to
demonstrate legitimacy. A Sybil attacker would have to spend real resources to
appear as many hosts, and as the network grows, the required burn grows as
well.

~~~
wyager
Then why use the Sia coin instead of just paying someone to (provably) host
your stuff using Bitcoin? Not being snide, I just don't know what the platform
offers if you're just doing direct contracts anyway.

~~~
Taek
In Sia both the renter and the host pay up front (host is putting up
collateral). The payment is held for the duration of the contract (typically
12 weeks), and then the host only receives the full payment if they complete a
proof of storage on the blockchain.

This means the host is guaranteed to get paid even if the renter disappears
forever on week 2.

You can't set that up on Bitcoin.

~~~
philtable
Sia is quite volatile. If the payment is held for 12 weeks, the host has no
idea what that payment will be worth. Do you have a mechanism preventing this
issue?

~~~
hndamien
You know what it is worth at the start of the contract, just like when working
with foreign currencies. But yes, volatility is an issue that I presume will
be less of an issue as it grows.

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xur17
One thing I don't fully understand about Filecoin (or siacoin for that
matter): can I utilize this as a service provider to directly host and deliver
content to my users, or do I need to sit in the path of the traffic, and
retrieve the content for them? Or does this not fit into the traditional
hosting model at all? Filecoin mentions the retrieval market, but I'm
struggling to find more details.

A concrete example would be a file or image hosting service. I can pay to
store my content using Filecoin, but am I required to retrieve the content and
transfer it to my users?

~~~
lgierth
You won't have to sit on the retrieval path with Filecoin. Nodes participating
in the retrieval market will probably simply expose a Filecoin-enabled version
of the HTTP-to-IPFS gateway. The v2 paper will have more details very soon.

Interesting to note is also that, if you want to deliver content yourself, you
can just run IPFS nodes on their own, without Filecoin. IPFS has been working
fine for the past two years.

~~~
XorNot
IPFS works but its not really fine - trying to use it on a small scale (home
internet connections) has proven completely impossible for me. It reliably
saturates my upload despite not actually serving any content - the DHT
connection overhead in every mode is just too high.

This would be fine, but the whole point is decentralized internet - if I can't
have a node running at home, or more specifically a node running on pretty
much every device I have, its not practical.

~~~
lgierth
Yeah I feel you, the management overhead is a big pain for many people at the
moment, ourselves included.

There's a couple of improvements to this coming in the next two months: 1) a
new transport (QUIC) which has less overhead, 2) smarter connection handling
which closes unneccessary connections earlier, 3) more efficient announcements
of who-has-what.

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atomical
How can Filecoin compete with Amazon?

~~~
aoeusnth1
By

\- Not having ridiculous profit margins on bandwidth

\- Having the profit margin of a commodity (storage), instead of the profit
margin of company in monopolistic competition (GCP, AWS, Azure)

Why would you imagine it hard to compete with Amazon?

~~~
pigpigs
How would availability of the data compare? Will the stored files be available
at all times & under high loads?

~~~
thatcat
There are tiers of hosts/miners with different options.

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_prometheus
Thanks Craig and YC. Ton of fun.

~~~
free2rhyme214
Out of curiosity, can you clarify how Filecoin is different than Sia or will I
need to wait for your new whitepaper?

~~~
lgierth
There are a ton of technology differences which the upcoming Filecoin v2 paper
will address (very soon!).

On the conceptual layer there's a difference in that Sia and Storj seem to be
a bit more geared towards consumers and file storage, while IPFS+Filecoin's
aim is to be infrastructure in the commons.

(Disclosure: IPFS & libp2p dev)

~~~
free2rhyme214
I thought Sia is focused on the enterprise?

Either way, thanks for replying. I'm looking forward to reading the new
whitepaper soon.

