Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive | Hacker News Reader

Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive

blog.archive.org

113 pointstoomuchtodo109 comments

Stealing this from Reddit as it summarizes my feelings about Filecoin's reward structure being a little ponziesque at current prices:

"The primary demand for Filecoin is from people trying to mine it. It requires that you deposit filecoin for every chunk of storage you want to “seal” for mining. It also takes a long time to seal and you have to get to 10tb or you can’t even mine. So people trying to build filecoin miners are likely the primary source of demand for filecoin. Then as the price goes up more people try to mine, but they also need to buy a ton of filecoin.

People are definitely not spending billions to try and store shit on IPFS. It’s people trying to buy filecoin to mine more filecoin. Sigh."[0]

That being said, the tech is pretty cool. And the funding scheme is no different from most PoS coins out there. Proof of Stake works best when there's already wide distribution of a coin. In the initial stages the game theory is tricky. This is all a long-winded way to say it's overpriced right now but could have a bright future.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mhpaar/file...

Is 10TB an arbitrary size or does it fluctuate like the bitcoin difficulty?

If it doesn't change then the whole thing is probably just going to crash eventually.

EDIT: after looking at the mining pdf in the child comment this whole thing looks goofy. idk what to say.

No, you don't need 10TB. But you do need a crazy machine with 128GB+ of RAM.[0]

[0] https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/mining-architectures/#protocol...

That link makes it makes it sounds like you need three such machines, one of which requires 256GiB RAM. To store 10TB, which a commercial NAS could do with acceptable performance with maybe 1 or 2 GiB RAM, tops.

Are they aware that 10TB is about 160$ in Hard drives>?

You can mine under 10TiB. You aren’t eligible for block rewards until you are proving at least 10TiB. Filecoin+ verified data deals count for 10x power. There’s a lot of power on the network, so the frequency of winning blocks at the threshold is fairly infrequent.

> And the funding scheme is no different from most PoS coins out there.

"Proof of stake" or "Piece of shit"? Unfortunately it's legitimately hard to tell what each person means with this acronym.

Clearly proof of stake. "Shitcoin" has monopolized the verbiage for, well, pieces of shit in crypto.

Oh, you are correct, thanks.

From here on out, I'm selling NFTs before every solid-waste flush. DM me for deets.

(I'm so glad HN doesn't have DMs. This is my attempt at a "joke" in the spirit of April fools day. Sorry)

Why not both?

Proof of shit coins are much more energy efficient than wasteful proof of work. There's already tons of shit going waste all over the world that could be used to build distributed consensus in a fair and equitable way!

After all, everybody poops.

And what's worse, the mining process has some rather absurd system requirements: 128+ GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD cache storage (separate from the data being stored!), and a high-end GPU is "recommended". The sense I get is that it's impossible to casually offer up some spare storage from a typical home system, or even from a NAS -- the system requirements effectively limit mining to people willing to spend a couple thousand dollars on hardware.

https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/

That seems crazy, especially considering Sia and others have functioning alternatives with no such insane requirements. Maybe they're trying to corner some certain performance oriented market, but that guarantees nothing about network performance which I suspect will be a much larger impact than any of it.

Yeah seems like a weird combination of both PoS and PoW which gets the best of neither. Would've been cool to see a novel PoW here that actually translates into actual "work" for the network.

or "borrow" the hardware and power from their school/employer either without any authorization or for the ostensible purpose of "testing/burn-in"

This raises a giant red flag for me. Storage is storage. This is not like hash mining, which is based on probabilities. You either have the data or you don't. If you have the data, even partially, this should be useful to the system. I can conceive of no reason why a reasonably designed distributed storage system would have such insane requirements.

Security, mostly - if the proofs fail, it’s not just the data that could be corrupted - bad actors could attack the consensus itself and steal unlimited funds. The params for the proofs could be loosened, at the cost of extra risk of an attack. They’ve gone the safe route and picked challenging parameters that would be uneconomic to brute force attack.

If you take a look at the top storage providers, there's dozens who are providing 10 PB+. These are folks that have invested millions to earn FileCoin.

https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?o...

Moreover, it's greatly disingenuous to claim that this system lets casual users let their HD space given the system requirements are so high.

Overall bandwidth in the system is 125TB/week. Filling up the storage provided by "dozens who are providing 10 PB+" would require about 20 years at this rate. And another 20 years to download it back

If you want to use spare space to "mine" crypto, look at Chia from the creator of BitTorrent.

The space isn't used for anything useful like IPFS though.

I wish Wuala was still around, damn Lacie for buying - then removing the most interesting part of project (exchanging local storage for cloud storage)... then killing the entire thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala#Trading

Their cryptree [0] design for access control was also pretty stunning. We've adopted and improved it in Peergos.

[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peergos/peergos/master/pap...

Besides the GPU, that's a pretty basic server config. Shouldn't cost more than 200/mo

This just sounds like a really clever mechanism for solving the cold-start problem for the protocol. You generate a bit of initial demand to pull in some initial supply, which in turn generates its own demand, which pulls in more profit-chasing supply (of storage), which drives down the real price of storage, which is part of the value prop to the non-speculative demand, which is how the crypto asset might maintain its value long-term. Boom, now you’ve got a functional network, a valuable token, and a more efficient market for a raw material of the internet economy.

The word bootstrap comes to mind.

The idea of making the Internet Archive decentralized is a very good one. It would be a real tragedy if the IA burned down like the Library of Alexandria did. I know Archive Team/Jason Scott attempted this a few years back with the IA.bak project but it seems like that died, so I hope this time turns out better.

That said, I don't actually understand how cryptocurrency or blockchains help with distributed file storage. Are these "filecoins" actually useful for anything, like incentivizing people to make copies of files? I'm by default skeptical when I hear about cryptocurrencies because the majority of ICOs seem to be get-rich-schemes riding off the Bitcoin buzzwave that then fizzle out over time.

> Are these "filecoins" actually useful for anything, like incentivizing people to make copies of files?

Yes, that's exactly what they are. They incentive making copies, then periodically proving you have the copies.

People have to keep renewing the contract to pay for those copies though. Afaik there's nothing that guarantees people will maintain them indefinitely after the contract expires.

Yeah that's right, I'm not sure how you could possibly value or incentivize indefinite storage. All storage mediums are consumable and require upkeep, a "one time" pricing model doesn't really make sense.

Arweave (https://www.arweave.org/) is attempting it. Of course, we'll have to wait and see if they're successful.

I would assume that eventually the cost of "old storage" will be too much and new payments wouldn't be able to subsidize it anymore (sort of like a failing Ponzi scheme) but to be fair I haven't heard of this. Thanks for the link!

You're welcome! I have some questions about how the network is going to play out over time wrt mining centralization and access incentivization, but their overall funding model seems sound to me. It's based an endowment that pays out over time to fund storage mining. Their yellow paper (https://www.arweave.org/yellow-paper.pdf) is worth a read if you want to learn about all the details.

And it's still not clear to me how you avoid the situation where a datacenter with 3 network connections masquerades as three different filecoin storage providers with a very similar set of files.

I got curious and looked it up. I found this[0]:

> As the storage miner receives each piece of client data, they place it into a sector. Sectors are the fundamental units of storage in Filecoin, and can contain pieces from multiple deals and clients.

> Next, a process called sealing takes place. During sealing, the sector data is encoded through a sequence of graph and hashing processes to create a unique replica. The encoding process is designed to be slow and computationally heavy, making it difficult to spoof.

[0] https://blog.coinlist.co/deep-dive-into-filecoin/

Oh, so it's secretly proof of work.

I think it's worse than that; it looks like Filecoin's PoRep proves that multiple copies of the data are stored on the same server. I don't understand why this is useful.

There's no incentive to store multiple copies of the same data vs a single copy of multiple datas. It's a possible attack vector, for example you could store all of the copies of some data and then lose it, but there's no economic incentive to do so from what I understand.

I agree, a better route would probably be exposing the archive via IPFS. I wonder if they could split the archive like this:

- Sites are archived to IPFS.

- The URL -> Archive mapping is published in a merkle dag.

This way people can help mirror the archive (or subsets of it) by replicating the IPFS archive. You can also separately mirror the merkle dag which would be relatively small. If sites are fairly predictable you could even crawl it yourself and verify that it matches the data that archive.org reported (although there are probably many sites that change on every request so the hash won't match exactly, but you could at least do some analysis/manual inspection on the diffs to check that archive.org appears to be reporting correct data).

You hit the hammer on the nail. IPFS urls point to content-addressable data. These URLs can be pinned by anyone running an IPFS node. However, what's missing is an easy way to "seed" lists of IPFS files with whatever storage you have. Ideally, there's a way for me to choose to contribute - say - 30 GB of space to a particular project, and the system will take care of pinning the most-needed files, up to that storage limit. This would be useful for any number of public archival projects.

I've seen efforts where people bring up a web page that tells you which torrents to seed, based on how many seeds are active. But this is manual work, and not too robust.

I was thinking that most people would just pin the content that is most interesting to them. But it would be also to pin the rarest content. There is no reason that both can't exist to capture multiple motivations.

They effectively are doing this, including with IPFS: https://dweb.archive.org/details/home

I'm not sure what the current state is though. And IPFS is basically just a protocol for storage, it doesn't ensure / encourage storage in any way - that's the point of filecoin.

It's also worth adding that the general idea of using distributed proof-of-work things in Internet protocols goes back quite a long way, to 1997 at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash : it's not just a post-Bitcoin/ICO-era notion.

Yeah, I sincerely wish hashcash had succeeded, it seems like a viable route for nigh-eliminating spam.

Bitcoin's achievement isn't a radically new core algorithm of any kind, it's using existing stuff in a clever way, to make it self-reinforcing even when thrown at humans. (I mean, yea, that's an algorithm, but you get my meaning)

From what I understand, Filecoin contracts are fixed-term. This means you need to read data back from the Filecoin network at the end of the term and negotiate another fixed-term contract to store those files again. Though Filecoin storage fees are low, isn't this back-and-forth a big pain for real archivists? I suppose you only need 1/n of the storage on your side if you stagger the data "withdrawal" and "deposit" actions. Does anyone have insight into this?

For long term archiving, it’s essential practice to move data from machine to machine over time anyways, as machines get old and obsolete and can’t be repaired after a certain age.

Right now there’s a maximum deal term of 1.5 years. Potentially that could be extended as the system matures and miners become capable of taking on longer commitments.

Decentralizing it would be far more simple if they provided something such as an application you could download and partially mirror some parts of it, for example.

Eventually, given enough interest, they'd mirror everything. Maybe they could even build this on top of Torrent.

Or even straight on top of IPFS since there are existing HTTP gateways for IPFS to access the content and most of the archive is static in nature. Provide a client which can be used to coordinate between the numerous volunteers to ensure a wide (ideally full) backup of IA distributed over IPFS, paired with volunteer pinning of specific portions by interest groups and individuals. Their self-hosted IPFS node(s) would become the permanent seeds for this system and broader use of IPFS would ensure wider (though not guaranteed sans pinning) availability.

IPFS devs commented on IA.bak back then, saying he would write a proposal to store IA.bak on IPFS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9148576

AFAICT, there was no follow up at the time, according to https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/i... ; so IA.bak went with git-annex, but it had issues given the scale of the project

It's stunning to me that IA.BAK is sort of dead and that there's no immediate efforts to revive it - losing IA in an earthquake would be unimaginable.

I'd love to donate some of my storage, if there was a project to support it.

To those curious, this is worth around 10 million dollars USD as of today.

It looks like people are dumping on the news. lol

Edit: nvm. Realized that was an entire market dip.

Yeah. Was worth nearly 12 million a few hours ago.

So what happens when someone puts password leaks or other security breaches onto FIL or another decentralized storage system? Compromising photos of individuals (revenge porn)? Underage pornography? Stolen credit card data? Critical state secrets or other sensitive information?

I generally dislike the "DAE crytpo is bad because illegal activity" argument, but in the case of distributed file storage the harm profile is very different than "but it allows you to spend money on illegal things" with payment-only cryptos. Anything seedy you can do with bitcoin, you can also do with cash. The same is not true for centralized vs. decentralized cloud storage.

What will happen is hosts will delete the offending data and lose their deposit on the contract (which will probably be small enough to write off as "shrinkage").

Well sort of defeats the purpose if hosts can do that, no?

What's the purpose of Filecoin?

I thought the purpose of a decentralized or blockchain storage service is that it's trustless - there's no single entity in control, who can unilaterally take off your content.

There's no single entity that can delete data from Filecoin, but precisely because of decentralization you can't prevent individual storage nodes from deleting data. And if all the nodes holding your data decide to delete it then it's gone.

You can already do this with regular old bitcoin.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu...

Neither Filecoin nor IPFS guarantee content is available forever. In the general case of IPFS, someone must be pinning it or someone must have recently downloaded it (pinning keeps it around until you unpin it, if you download it you may share it out for a period of time). So suppose someone does upload some illegal content, if no one pins it or downloads it and the original node hosting it were to drop off (as may be reasonably expected if law enforcement becomes involved depending on what the content is) then it will disappear from the network. IPFS does not forcibly distribute the content across the network, only when it's accessed does it become distributed. And even then it's only temporary unless it's pinned and the pinning node remains online.

Filecoin, being based on IPFS, will be similar but with the added limit of the content requiring payment. Without payment it would, presumably, disappear very quickly from the network.

It's a very different style than, say, Freenet (or at least Freenet in the 00s, haven't looked at it recently) which makes it deliberately difficult to discover where content is being hosted and to remove it.

Shitcoin gives 50K Shitcoins to $authority$ in order to legitimize its Ponzi scheme.

This reads like an April's Fools joke.

Knowing nothing about Filecoin, just reading the quotes ("Holy Crow"), I assumed it is.

Obvious PR stunt. Hope they cash out soon.

I like the idea of a decentralized Internet Archive in theory, but I'm very skeptical about the idea of decentralized (as opposed to distributed) filesystems, and tying the whole system to a cryptocurrency seems like this creates additional volatility exactly in a situation where you want stability.

Buying hard drives and sticking them in data centers is a very cost-effective, efficient way to store large amounts of data, and with careful design (Internet Archive definitely qualifies) you get amazing durability. The failure rate of hard disks is relatively well-known or "mostly" bounded and predictable, so you can fine-tune your data encoding to get a good tradeoff between storage efficiency, CPU usage, network usage, and durability.

With a decentralized system, you're adding intermediaries with some amount of additional risk that is difficult to model. The idea is that these intermediaries have "leftover" storage which is basically free, and Filecoin lets them sell it. However, the risk that these intermediaries lose the data is difficult to model and so you would likely choose a wider encoding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasure_code) with poorer storage efficiency and higher CPU usage.

Meanwhile, the cost of buying storage outright is already quite low, and the cloud providers are already busy selling storage (or using it themselves) in high-IO applications like active databases, and this subsidizes raw storage (with low-I/O requirements). Essentially, if someone in the cloud needs a 2TB drive, the cloud provider can buy an 8TB drive instead, split it in half, and sell it as "2TB + priority I/O" and "6TB + best-effort I/O".

Finally, in order to be stable long-term, Filecoin needs to provide enough income to miners so they can be profitable. I don't see a good story for how this can happen. The most profitable thing you can do per-byte is to sell "leftover" storage on existing systems that are not full, but this doesn't give you enough to cover overhead, so you would want to run a large operation. Once you are running a large operation, your costs would be similar to that of a cloud provider, but your customers would be choosing wider encodings with lower storage efficiency. If Filecoin were to turn into a common market for larger storage operations, it would then make sense to vet those operations and develop business relationships with them, because by reducing risk you could increase storage efficiency and reduce costs. There is a de facto way to do this already: several cloud providers implement the S3 API, so you can shop around fairly easily, as long as you are willing to transport the data.

Short story is that distributed storage is in a race to the bottom with or without Filecoin, it's already "hyper-competitive", and I'm unconvinced that Filecoin provides benefits that outweight the drawbacks.

Article posted 1st April. Hopefully it's real?

Donating nearly 0.1% of the currently available supply to archive.org would be pretty cool.

is there anyway to track the total energy cost of the Filecoin ecosystem?

Take the total storage size on the network, figure out the number of spinning disks, multiply by the power consumption per disk + typical overhead for servers and switches, etc. There’s power consumed by the processing for proofs on data ingest (bigger miners are more efficient at this), but not much afterwards.

So this isn't an April Fools post?

Sweet. Now just deposit that twice into an exchange for double the $FIL

And I am donating 100k bunglemudgeons as well, which is a currency that only exists in my head.

Are your 100k bunglemudgeons exchangeable for $10 million?

On bunglemudgeonexchange.ru, yes. I’m seeing a ton of depth on their order book. Why not buy a few bunglemudgeons from me and see for yourself?

If you guarantee 100x returns, I’m in.

I guarantee 100x returns as long as you never sell.

Sure - easy.

1. Find a rich person with money that needs laundering (this is the hardest step)

2. Sell the "bunglemudgeons" (could just be a .txt doc that contains the phrase "100k bunglemudgeons") to the rich person in the form of an NFT for $10M

3. 100k Bunglemudgeons are now worth at least $10M

4. Rich person can now re-sell it to an alias of himself (or a rich friend) for an even greater amount to launder his dirty money

That's not how money laundering works.

How do people launder money with NFTs then?

They buy them from themselves, not by sending millions to some random stranger, never to be recovered.

True, so I guess step 0 is:

0. Be rich and have money you need to launder

1. Invent "bunglemudgeons" as a way to launder your money

It's more about tax evasion than anything else.

Two important advantages Filecoin has over bunglemudgeons are:

1. Filecoin has a market with liquidity. Archive.org could sell their coins for roughly $9.7m.

2. Filecoin can currently be used to purchase reliable cloud storage at a significantly lower cost than AWS or GCP.

I can definitely relate to cynicism towards crypto/blockchain, particularly in the defi sector, but Filecoin is doing good work.

They should take the 9.7 million and manage the storage themselves. The thing is they could host filecoin rigs which also provide the storage so it’s a win win for Filecoin and also internet archive

> Filecoin can currently be used to purchase reliable cloud storage at a significantly lower cost than AWS or GCP.

I spent a little while looking at their site and docs, and I cant find any information on what storage actually costs. Where are you finding this information?

There isn’t really a single price. Each miner sets their prices dynamically (off-chain). Some miners set ridiculous prices to scare off load and some even set their prices to zero to attract test deal traffic. Miners have different reliability and business strategies too. If you look at average prices for asks or deals, it can be very misleading.

What’s the market value of bunglemudgeons on CoinMarketCap?

Because filecoin right now is at 194USD and the internet archive can sell them on the open market, right now if they want, today.

I literally just did a huge rip on crypto currencies the other day, mostly regarding bitcoin. However, there's one aspect to Filecoin that I do see as... potential is a strong word, but maybe appropriate still. It's not entirely fair to lump it in with other cryptocoins. There is some value behind it, in means of distributed storage. While I would argue it's more efficient, easier and all around better to use standard alternatives since Filecoin adds a layer of complexity to marginal benefit... I can never argue it's completely useless. There is some economic value backing it since it provides a service outside of just being a cryptocurrency.

If I woke up from a 15 year coma and was quickly told about Bitcoin and Filecoin, one had a value of $200 each, the other $50k. Then asked which one was the $50k one? I'd first say, "Filecoin obviously" and second, please just kill me I don't want to live in this bizzaro reality.

> please just kill me I don't want to live in this bizzaro reality.

Don't kill yourself, just buy Bitcoin and relax

Sad when even the Internet Archive fall for the digital tulip mania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Crypto currencies might have space and maybe someday a good one might appear, but so far, it's all a Ponzi scheme.

Why not just build an application to mirror their data in a distributed manner using Torrent and let people support their efforts by downloading it?

While there's tons of unfounded mania going on in the crypto space, to paint it all as nothing more than Tulip mania is really pretty ignorant at this point.

Theoretically, it's not all. It's possible to have a reasonable cryptocurrency backed by something tangible.

In practice, all I saw so far was either pure fraud (USDT) or fiat currency (BTC).

I'm a free-market capitalist/anarcho-capitalist so I want to see people free from the awful state-issued money, but these stupid cryptos we see are no better to use as a substitute.

Eventually, we will probably see alternatives that make sense, but it might take a while.

Non-profits can accept assets of any kind, and it takes fifteen seconds to sell $10,000,000 worth of FIL for USD.

It is likely that a majority of charitable contributions are transfers of assets with a wide spectrum of liquidity, mostly illiquid. Accepting an asset is not an indication of interest or speculation or bullishness, any contribution towards a non-profit only tells you that the donor was accepted.

You extrapolated a lot for something you will never have information on, as the subsequent transactions will never be reported.

>and it takes fifteen seconds to sell $10,000,000 worth of FIL for USD.

That's an oversimplification. If you dumped ~ $10m of FIL in such a short time, you'd undoubtedly drive the price down while doing so.

Right now, Kraken shows that selling ~ 1000 FIL would drive the price down by over 1% and the support only gets worse from there.

On an asset that has changed in value 3% or 10% in one day, 1% slippage is pretty tolerable, to me. On an altcoin pair that's fantastic.

Filecoin is listed on over 100 trading pairs across exchanges.

If hitting the tape simultaneously sounds like a contrived rebuttal to you, I guarantee you I could get a quote from three OTC desks that will take $10,000,000 in Filecoin today and wire transfer $9,900,000 in a few hours.

It's not 1% slippage on a 10m trade though, that was on a 1000 FIL trade.

Crypto support is quite fickle. I didn't even go near the withdrawal aspect, but withdrawing anything more than ~5 BTC worth of currency from an exchange will take at least several business days to get verified, and depending on the exchange you use might takes weeks or possibly you'll never see your money again (there are several stories of less reputable exchanges freezing accounts for "fraud" when they attempt a large withdrawal).

In principal I do agree with what you're saying, but crypto is still very much the wild west at the moment, so I personally would not be trying to shift millions of dollars around on such short time frames.

Good luck dumping that much shitcoins overnight.

Also, they could always accept without endorsing.

Enough of wasting energy and human effort on shitcoins...

Use an OTC desk

Message a few and tell me what spreads they quote

Tulip Mania? Never heard of that one!

Is this prestigious?

> Today, the Filecoin Foundation announced a 50,000 FIL grant to the Internet Archive – the largest single donation in the digital library’s 25-year history.

Today it is the largest single donation to IA. Tomorrow based on the value of FIL, it may be the smallest single donation.

Filecoin, at it's lowest value since inception, traded for ~ $4, which would still make this a $200k donation. I hope we can agree such a donation is still worthy of praise.

Any currency risks devaluation in some form. Cryptos are orders of magnitude more volatile than USD, of course. That is both a curse and a blessing. This donation is evidence of that, but belittling this donation because of disagreements with the underlying tech does little to add to the conversation.

You would think HN would like FIL since it's one of the more environmentally friendly coins. Maybe the BTC hate really is everyone feeling butthurt about not buying it on #bitcoin-otc in 2011.

EDIT: NVM the whole thing is a mess

> it's one of the more environmentally friendly coins

I'm not convinced that's even true. It's still a proof-of-work coin; the only real difference is that the work is storage-intensive.

There's a huge difference between proof of useless work and getting paid for storing real data.

The storage is incidental. Filecoin "storage miners" are required to perform work to prove that they're still storing the data. This work serves no purpose beyond acting as a proof of storage, and performing this work has nontrivial costs.

I like the concept of incentivizing storage through a self-governing decentralized system. I don't like that it's named "-coin" and that its website clearly trying to ride the wave of blockchain hype without explaining the basic economics of the system.

Nocoiners have already lost all hope. They're not even trying to FUD anymore.

As usual, HN is not one person. Also, I think most people are pretty skeptical of anything -coin / -blockchain - like AI and Cyber it sounds like a lot of the money is spent on marketing and there's a good chance the whole thing is just a cash grab or a pump and dump.

This is not against Filecoin specifically - I don't know it -, but if you tried to sell me "AI generated code enhancements", I'm going to be skeptical based on that name alone, as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com