Filecoin 2017 Q4 Update | Hacker News Reader

Filecoin 2017 Q4 Update

filecoin.io

156 pointshanklazard71 comments

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).

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.)

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

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.

Collaterals can be tricky. For how long is this collateral held? It could potentially be years until the data is retrieved.

Last I looked at FileCoin, you were going to need much more than a small machine to compute the proofs of storage, They seemed to be the main economic impediment to FileCoin as a competitive storage mechanism.

Have there been technical developments since the whitepaper?

Why bother even copying the file to S3? Just throw it away and then never serve it.

Because you need the files to do proof of proof-of-storage and get your coins (back).

But as the OP said there's currently no proof-of-will-to-distribute-storage so you can save money by just sending the proof-of-storages to the network and never actually provide bandwidth for the distribution of the stored data.

How many coins do you think they will give per token for filecoin?

You will get undercut because AWS storage is extremely expensive and nobody sane actually stores data with significant amount of traffic there. The outbound network traffic fees are enough to make your strategy unprofitable. Then there is also the fact that you're wastefully storing 3 redundant copies of an erasure coded piece of data when you could just store 3 erasure coded pieces of data directly without any redundancy.

What's most likely going to be profitable is buying crappy consumer HDDs inside external enclosures and shoving 60 of them into a single chassis. The reliability of the storage medium doesn't matter with something like filecoin. Node failure is not just an edge case. Filecoin has to account for it by using erasure coding to survive the loss of nodes.

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...

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.

Hosts actually set their own prices, so as Siacoin increases, the price for storing data (denominated in Siacoin) decreases. Hosts compete with one another, so prices are driven down to their absolute lowest.

The recent issues have been on exchange wallets, which should be fixed very shortly on Bittrex and Shapeshift, as announced recently on Reddit and Twitter.

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.

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

Hosts already set prices, in addition I have seen the Sia community occasionally discuss adding some further pricing tools on the reddit, see what features are being added on the roadmap: https://trello.com/b/Io1dDyuI/sia-public-roadmap

I personally have not had issues moving siacoins, but a few exchanges have been slow to patch issues on their end in the last month: https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/7pc5rv/brief_offic...

Prices aren't fixed and prices will be adjusted accordingly, so the absolute token value doesn't matter at all. Every host decides the price individually. The buying power of tokens is relative to the total supply of storage. If you hold X% of the tokens, you can buy Y% of the storage supply. This is true now and in the future, which is the mechanism for the increasing value of the Siacoin tokens, because the total network get more valuable as it grows.

Wow, I find Sia’s update way more user-friendly than Filecoins — no buzzwords, just clean comprehensive updates. Filecoin honestly seems to have an air of technical/academic pretentiousness to them.

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...

---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???

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.

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"

That would piss off many investors and you don't want to do that. The most recent example is Martin Shkreli [1].

What they could get away with is spend 20-50% of the funds on hiring a large well-looking diverse team, spend the rest on consultancy fees from world-class experts in XXX and YYY and eventually quietly shut down. In the current investment climate this won't be taken as a questionable spending, at least not enough to bother investigating possible affiliation between you and the experts (e.g. Juicero and Ottolock).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

How is that different from embezzlement?

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?

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).

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

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.

My understanding is that you have to register a DMCA notification agent in order to be eligible for DMCA Safe Harbor: http://www.haynesboone.com/alerts/dmca-safe-harbor-protectio...

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.

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.

Completely agree

IANAL, but these statements seem to fly in the face of the general requirement that a actor must have the requisite mens rea to commit a crime. There certainly are exceptions to the mens rea requirement, but it seems like if you're making a conclusory statement like "Yes, you could be held legally responsible.", then you should provide some reasoning for why that would be the case.

There's contributory infringement in copyright law, but copyright law is so far out of balance these days that I'm hesitant to draw an inference from it.

This otherwise sounds like worrying that you'll be charged with armed robbery because the robbers threw their gun onto your lawn while escaping the cops. Yeah, sure, that could happen, but only through a series of factual misunderstandings about who did what, not because you actually committed a crime.

Source?

From what I've heard on the ipfs irc, there should be a whitelist/blacklist feature so that you could make sure you're not hosting anything shady.

Ip? Hashes?

Hashes. You have to know a hash to get content and the content.

Can't imagine that would work for preventing? Folks can just do a minor edit of the file to go around the blacklist. That said I imagine the solution for any hosting company applies to would be filecoin'ers too, on request of the government, certain hashes are publicized and update your node to blacklist them after the fact?

That's how all blacklists work.

Extra step would be using tineye.com or local machine vision to generate hashes for your blacklist based on visually similar images.

Most likely this depends on the country. For the US, I guess it would be most interesting to read the DMCA safe harbour definitions and see if they apply to you as ipfs storage provider.

My concern too and the reason why I think it'll never truly work. IF someone can proof that you stored child pornography on your system then good luck fighting that.

Professional storage providers have legal departments that very carefully design systems in a way to avoid any responsibility. Also, those are limited liability companies and companies can't go to jail. As a private individual, I'd never offer to store anyone's data.

I spent a little time searching for evidence of people getting in trouble for running an open WiFi AP that someone else used for illegal activity. Didn't find anything.

Possibly relevant to your question.

It seems like a safer way to dabble would be to set IPFS up on a VPS hosted somewhere with more favorable laws (OVH, e.g.) - though I suppose you might run into bandwidth limits.

Neither Canada nor France (main data centre locations of OVS) are favorable when it comes to child pornography (for a good reason!). Same for terrorism-related material. We're not talking about copyright breaches only.

You are still the operator, subject to the laws of your jurisdiction.

What would be 'mainstream adoption' in this context?

If the government starts making files illegal, we have bigger problems.

Ever hear of child pornography?

>> 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?

It's a very interesting question. If it ever happens. So let's freeze it for now. I mean if they use the funds to develop the company, instead of buying Ferraris and mansions.

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.

The same people are developing IPFS and Filecoin so they're riding their own coattails.

It's a layer on top of IPFS. That's like saying a Wordpress plugin is riding on the coattails of Wordpress.

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

https://blog.sia.tech/sia-triannual-update-september-decembe...

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...

"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"

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?

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.

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

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

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

AFAIK cryptokitties is "just" a clever Ethereum smart contract system. Has nothing to do with IPFS.

That said, I'm not familiar with it in-depth, and I'd love to hear otherwise if someone knows!

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.

In the Dat world, we have https://hashbase.io, a self-deployable service for rehosting archives

If you have a system where anyone can provide storage and anyone can buy storage, then you need to have a system to verify that the files are actually being stored. As I understand it, that's filecoin mining.

Filecoin eliminates a lot of the overhead of selling storage, but it adds some overhead all its own. The big question is: which is larger, and by how much?

That's what IPFS is. Filecoin is an extension on top of IPFS to allow people to pay to ensure their content stays available.

There is. It's SAFE Network. https://safenetwork.org/

People that want decentralized hosting. We use IPFS for OpenBazaar to distribute ecommerce listings that we don't want to be censorable. I think eBay and Etsy would continue to use AWS.

People who want to distribute illegal material.

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

Pied Piper Update, Q4 2017

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