First impressions of Filecoin | Hacker News Reader

First impressions of Filecoin

gergely.imreh.net

71 pointsimrehg10 comments

Seems a little odd to devote so much of the article to evaluating the user interface when the current release is aimed at "developers, researchers, and community members who want to help _make_ Filecoin"[1]. Still, I can see the potential.

One thing I'm still not sure of is how Filecoin compares with Sia. Based on the articles I've read so far it seems very similar (except that Sia is older so its tooling/UI is obviously much more mature). Are there any fundamental differences I may be missing?

[1]: https://filecoin.io/blog/opening-filecoin-project-repos/

The main difference is the proof of work algorithm relies on proof of storage.

Oof. Manual price setting for the storer/miner, manual storer selection for the user... Pretty large barriers to mainstream adoption. I'd think that in order for that to happen, both of these would be totally automatic. Still needs a lot of work.

Which seems totally expected given that the current release was explicitly stated as being "for development".

The TL;DR: Definitely not ready for primetime.

So many crypto projects lack tooling or a real UI. This is sad and earmarks the distinction between hobby level tools and those which can be used by regular people.

I think that’s a false dichotomy. Plenty of projects used by regular people have atrocious UIs.

Indeed. But the learning curve for the current set of crypto wallets and tools is too high to allow any widespread adoption.

These cannot be products for devs only or they will never take off. If you want a $1B product to pursue, someone should built decent tooling for crypto.

Maybe it's a combination of both the bad UI and lack of real use cases. After all, if there is a real demand for decentralized storage space, then it doesn't matter the UI, people will still use it even if it's in beta. The lever just hasn't been tilted enough with a real immediate need.

I don't think so. You have to have simple UI's and basic tooling before anyone other than hardcore devs will be interested.

Everything we do with modern website tooling like Shopify was also possible in 1995, but it was too dev-heavy. (I've been in that business since that date.) The demand was there but the barriers to entry were too hard to overcome.

Fix crypto's UIs and you'll see wider adoption.

Nice article! Thanks for taking the time to write up such a thorough summary

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