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Comment by lalaland1125 | Hacker News Reader

Like so many cryptocurrency projects, Filecoin just seems like a solution in search of a problem more than anything else. What exact problem is Filecoin trying to solve that's not possible with current infrastructure? It seems like the decentralization adds a lot of overhead and complexity for no benefit.

The main argument that I hear is that somehow Filecoin will be cheaper than centralized competitors. However, services such as Backblaze are already quite efficient. Why exactly would costs be cheaper and why can't Backblaze do those same things and overtake Filecoin?

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They needed to compensate providers of storage for IPFS. The challenge is how to prove that a provider has your block and that they aren't double dipping, ie claiming redundancy when they only are storing one copy.

That's pretty neat. I wonder if similar could be achieved for processing power. Distribted hosting ftw.

that's what https://golem.network/ is trying to do.

Exactly. IPFS has millions of end users and hundreds of apps storing data on the decentralized network, creating demand for decentralized persistence of that data. Current solution is to either run your own IPFS node or pay a pinning service to run a node persisting your IPFS data for you - but even better to have a highly resilient marketplace of storage nodes that can store redundant copies!

Where are you getting “millions of end users” from? A quick google search doesn’t return anything, and that seems a lot for a relatively unknown project

IPFS is by no means 'relatively unknown'. It is used in dozens of projects. See: https://github.com/ipfs/awesome-ipfs

I think parent was saying the projects using IPFS are relatively unknown, so where are the millions come from?

I have the same question.

In contrast, GUN, has 20M+ downloads/month from known sources: Internet Archive, HackerNoon, etc. (https://github.com/amark/gun see jsdelivr download stats).

lol it's not a HN post about a decentralized project without marknadal shitting on it and shilling GUN. got a running bet it always happens, and you don't disappoint <3 -- keep it up!

Yeah, Its pretty much a staple. Despite repeated attempts by the mods to get it to stop.

IPFS, a YC company, is trying to censor Open Source competitors? Interesting. What are you scared of?

I'm not trying to censor anything, lol. Just referencing many hilarious moments in your comment history where the HN mods tell you to quit spamming, and here we are again with more off topic mark spam ;)

Links?

Gun is currently a pile of shit. Anyone saying otherwise hasn't used it. The sole founder and developer is a very nice person, but it's the reality of Gun tech right now.

Thanks for the comment.

Could you expand further what didn't work? We have some pretty heavy load in-production systems running. Definitely some rough edges still, so I'd like to hear what problems you had, so I can focus on fixing them in the future.

Thanks again.

It was a month ago I checked it out and it just wasn't usable - i do not remember the details but even basic things did not work. I had a json dataset i just wanted in a local db, and that was proving challenging for simple operations is what I remember, didn't even get into the p2p side yet. If I remember correctly, it wasn't returning accurate results when queried.

try creating a youtube video of getting it to work from scratch, reading and writing data and i think you will see the problems. Or maybe ask a friend that is less familiar than yourself to try it, the problems seemed rather obvious as it just didn't work for a basic use case.

Thanks for the reply.

If you ever have time, it'd be great to snag whatever code or data you had, to create a replicable test case for us to make a fix against. Sorry about the wasted time you experienced, I hate that.

I went through that list and can’t recognize any of those names. Most of them seem clones of “<website> but on ipfs”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everipedia alone is 3M monthly active users.

How many of those users connect via IPFS protocol though? Because I bet overwhelming majority of them use https website, and do not interact with IPFS in any way.

Storing and serving files a lot cheaper and more reliably than current cloud providers seems like something people actually want.

Yes, but does Filecoin actually get you there? And if so, how and why?

Right but you actually have to be able to do that, and introducing inefficiency in the form of blockchain doesn't seem like a way to make anything cheaper.

Presumably they think decentralization is a benefit in its own right.

If a decentralized system is using spare resources that are literally free it could theoretically be cheaper than a business that pays for hardware. It will be interesting to see if that works in practice.

One issue is that you are always paying for power. Some back of the napkin calculations indicate that Backblaze's prices are low enough that it's not worth it to compete unless you are getting more than 1 terrabyte per 30 watts as otherwise the power costs alone would kill you. That's going to be a pretty hard target to hit with "spare free resources" (not to mention hardware degradation and capital costs).

You're always paying for power regardless of whether you're offering your unused drive space on a distributed system.

Hard drives consume less power when idle, like CPUs.

I imagine that extra power consumption has to be less than the combination of non idle HDDs and all of the other infrastructure at backblaze, no? And they're still going to be idle most of the time.

And there's the added likelihood that people providing hdd space on filecoin are not going to even measure the impact of extra power consumption, they're just going to notice the revenue. (Not that this is a good thing, if someone was losing money, they should know)

Agreed.

Cloud storage is a commodity race to the bottom. Cloud providers want you to use their storage systems because it means that you’ll also use their more profitable associated services in order to save money on egress. Accumulate enough data, and you’re locked in because of the high cost to migrate. Because IO dominates so many workloads, you already get a bunch of bytes for cheap when you are running a cloud storage provider. It’s already dirt cheap and potentially a loss leader (I suspect).

So, I have a hard time seeing how “spare free resources” are going to be competitive when you factor in the network, capital costs, power, etc. Then there’s some unknown legal risk that you are e.g. accepting money to distribute child porn to people, just like there’s a legal risk associated with running a Tor node (not commenting on whether this is just or not).

Just my opinion. Not speaking on behalf of anyone here.

I don't want to start a business that pays a cloud service for storage. I want to write an application and set it free on the internet to run all by itself.

What sets us apart: Inefficiency and a higher cost basis than any cloud storage providers due to our devout adherence to blockchain.

Founder of another decentralized storage product here:

Decentralized storage is going to replace the cloud. We have a working platform today with thousands (and growing) of users which is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than the centralized alternative.

One of the major challenges of the cloud today is deplatforming and loss of ownership, two things that are squarely handled by decentralization. It opens the door to innovation and allows builders a lot more freedom in how they approach solving modern problems.

Decentralization also ends up being a huge element in cost reduction. Our platform uses dozens of hosts at one to store and serve data, which means any given host only needs about 95% uptime. The network is completely open and anyone with good infra can join at any time, making revenue, and competing, which drives prices down. We're currently at 1/10th of Amazon.

Decentralization also makes it possible to build apps that don't shut down. Users today have to worry about the health of a parent company when choosing a product, with many people having been displayed by a "Google RSS Reader is shutting down" message. That problem disappears with decentralized infra.

It may take some time for the rest of the world to catch on, but decentralization is just a better way to build apps.

>> Our platform uses dozens of hosts

>> We're currently at 1/10th of Amazon.

Curious, where is the "1/10th of Amazon" coming from?

https://siastats.info/storage_pricing

Like other cryptos, Filecoins founders don't get rich off existing and usually better solutions.

Technical complexity isn't the only dimension.

Surveillance capitalism and privatized censorship are byproducts of data centralization.

Cryptocurrency has a political aspect. Why view it only through a lens of technical complexity?

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