
Filecoin – A Cryptocurrency Operated File Storage Network - setra
http://filecoin.io/
======
bogle
Sia [[http://sia.tech/];](http://sia.tech/\];) filecoin; Storj
[[https://storj.io/];](https://storj.io/\];) maidsafe
[[https://maidsafe.net/](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.

~~~
Taek
[https://forum.sia.tech/topic/21/sia-vs-storj-vs-
maidsafe](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.

~~~
xvolter
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.

~~~
Taek
Hostnames, IPv4, and IPv6 are all supported. Dynamic IP addresses are also
supported, but they are generally a lot less reliable (the renter needs a way
to discover that the host IP has changed, and often this discovery is late).
[http://siapulse.com/page/network](http://siapulse.com/page/network) has
examples of hostnames, IPv4, and IPv6 addresses. Not all home connections are
able to use IPv6, so if you don't see any it's probably a problem with your
home setup.

> You need to have at least 50,000 SC to begin hosting, and you can't earn SC
> until you start hosting.

This is one of the ways that we address churn on the network. It's actually
really bad for the network for a host to get started, be around storing files
for a day or two, and then leave. If you are going to be a host on the Sia
network, it's important that you are committed.

> 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.

Sia is not designed as a tit-for-tat network. The economics are supposed to
work much like Bitcoin + Bitcoin mining. That is, you have a dedicated set of
specialists who work hard to provide a high quality service at a very good
price. If you are hosting, the goal is to make money, not to be able to afford
to back up your own data.

> So many other syncing technologies seem easier than this.

Yes but none of them are offering storage at $1 / TB / Mo. But also, Sia is
still an early product and we're still iterating heavily on both the core
algorithms and on the user experience.

Sia's core user market is people who are willing to pay for cloud storage.
This would include businesses and enterprises. Sia's long term game is to
offer a cloud storage platform that competes with the likes of Amazon S3 at
less than 10% of the price, all while offering the security, privacy,
decentralization, and open source codebase of a blockchain project.

------
_prometheus
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)

------
lgierth
The latest news on Filecoin is that it's being built on top of Ethereum:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itb_2EMgBUI](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/ipfs/ipfs) &&
[https://github.com/libp2p/libp2p](https://github.com/libp2p/libp2p)

(IPFS dev here)

------
infinisil
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/](http://ipfs.io/)

~~~
api
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.

~~~
kefka
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).

~~~
chriswarbo
> Ethereum is a joke in many ways

Ethereum is/was pretty interesting; but as with all blockchains, it's solving
a globally-distributed byzantine/trustless problem, at the expense of being
_massively_ inefficient.

It's a good idea for that domain, but such constraints don't apply to the
majority of computing problems. For example, Web app A might want its events
to appear in the same order to all of its clients, and Web app B might want
the same for its events, but there's no reason to enforce that all clients of
all apps see all events of all apps in the same interleaved order, in an open
world where new apps can be created without any central authority, and where
no app or client trusts any other app or client.

Regarding a _practical_ language, I think something like Morte/Annah/Dhall
would be nice as a way to:

\- Use pure functional computation as a powerful 'sandbox' against causing
nasty effects or having results affected by outside interference

\- Use IPFS URLs as function names

\- Use Church (et al) encoding and strong normalisation as a form of
statically-checkable duck-typing (i.e. if it encodes to a duck, then it's a
duck)

------
tromp
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?

~~~
Taek
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?).

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

[1] [https://sia.tech/](https://sia.tech/)

~~~
iamgopal
What's your experience of it ?

------
xkxx
Hmm, and their last activity on Twitter was 3 Nov 2015:
[https://twitter.com/MineFilecoin/with_replies](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.

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

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

~~~
tyingq
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.

~~~
Kinnard
I think filecoin's even older than that though this site appears to be from
2014.

~~~
Taek
I believe that Filecoin is from early 2014, same as Sia and Storj.

------
jakeywankenobi
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?

------
vasili111
Does anyone use one of the decentralized storage networks? Please tell us
about your personal experience.

------
OJFord
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.

------
homakov
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.

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

~~~
mundo
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.

------
vocatus_gate
Prediction: Dead or abandoned in <= 2 years.

~~~
verelo
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?

------
brilliantcode
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.

------
eptcyka
This isn't anything novel. How are they different from
[https://maidsafe.net/](https://maidsafe.net/) ?

