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Comment by gtrubetskoy | Hacker News Reader

I like what Juan had to say, it's good stuff and IPFS has the potential of being very disruptive.

With Filecoin I think what happened in that conversation was that to Juan it wasn't a big deal, it's just one of the things possible in the IPFS paradigm. But since crypto currency is all the rage these days, and this being YC, he was being lead to talk about the money side of it, but I don't think he really gave it much thought, other than that Filecoin is a neat way to trade storage without any paper/fiat currency, across country borders, etc.

To put it another way - IPFS is the thing. Filecoin is just a side-effect. But in our present times, Filecoin is worth actual millions, while IPFS is just a protocol. But it's clearly a fluke, the most important technology/idea here is IPFS.

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Filecoin is a completely different beast than IPFS. Based on the Filecoin whitepaper, it requires the creation of 2 new proof mechanisms "Proof-of-Replication" and "Proof-of-Spacetime" which are not well-defined at all on the whitepaper. It's like saying you achieved Byzantine fault tolerance but not say how, which is a big deal. That's one of the core challenges.

It seems to me that their team has underestimated those challenges and were more busy on designing a big ICO than actually thinking about those problems and the feasibility of their claims. Most probably it will take much more than 6-18 months that they claim or it will be launched with centralized components of the system ("compromises") until they figure things out.

I think you are absolutely right, that there are huge problems still left to solve. But even so, then how is this different than a very large VC round that is (slightly) more open to the public? Plenty of businesses get money to build out technology with only the belief that the team raising it have what it takes to make it happen.

That's not quite true. The vast majority of VC money is to scale up a company. Only a small minority of investments, aka a portion of seed rounds, are done with the technology (and subsequent business model) merely in a hypothetical whitepaper stage.

This company might be different because they demonstrated their ability as IPFS is fleshed out but as others pointed out Filecoin is a different beast entirely and they are basically starting from scratch again.

The higher end of 6-18 months of pure dev time is a long risk range to get an untested product out. But I guess they have plenty of runway now to work on it with this massive ICO. Let's just hope they don't spin their wheels forever in research mode and spend their time and money wisely.

It's entirely possible someone else figures it out before them and this play will be a game of scale. I've heard this idea from more than one person well before Filecoin was around.

> Only a small minority of investments, aka a portion of seed rounds, are done with the technology (and subsequent business model) merely in a hypothetical whitepaper stage.

There are occasional exceptions [0].

[0] https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/25/khosla-ventures-leads-50-...

Here's a more in-depth look at Proof of Replication: https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf

I liked most of the podcast except for this specific part, I did think the interviewer had a point, he was asking if there's any exciting consumer use case.

I think as the inventor of IPFS he would have thought a lot about these things so he should at least have a few interesting consumer use case but he gave 0. I'm guessing because it's all illegal ideas. Instead he said it's more about B2b (or something like that) and about people making money from sharing their drive.

Just to be clear I still think IPFS is awesome. Just like how i think BitTorrent is awesome. They will have the same problem if the leader doesn't have a clear picture of how it can be used. Most successful platforms started out NOT as a platform but as a single application and then expanded. He's obviously not trying to build an application but an equivalent of the Internet itself, but then we have the problem of how are you going to make money and how are you going to get consumers excited? And this is something they do need to have an answer to.

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