Filecoin Virtual Machine – Polyglot, WASM-based execution environment
filecoin.io
filecoin.io
Looking around, some projects (like https://estuary.tech/) seems to have successfully stored around ~160 TiB of data on Filecoin (via IPFS), so there are setups where it does work successfully.
Lots of folks are working on retrievability even as we speak (https://retrieval.market/). Stay tuned!
BTW, if you ever want your content directly, you can go here - https://ipfs.io/ipfs/<CID>. Brave also offers IPFS native integration not via gateways. Again, we are well aware this isn't enough! Coming soon...
Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
What are some great usecases for filecoin at the current state?
As a web3 newbie trying to tell apart the wheat from the chaff, I'd love to see more explanation or evidence for either your or @sub7's claims. Do you have any pointers?
Payments for IPFS storage isn't a horrible idea, but it needs to be done in a normal way using real money, without the speculative tokens.
And so in order to make the business successful for them and their investors they do whatever is legally okay. Which is right now: anything. Hence why we see rug pulling, insider trading, money laundering, ponzi schemes, fraud and ultimately gambling.
In the real world, all those things you described are illegal in most places. So the only way they've gotten around that is by setting up this fake system, lying to people and telling them it's real and charging them real money to use it, and then when they get pressed by regulators they admit it's fake again.
This is a new feature set that was not available before. In practice it has enabled the emergence of a core set of highly reputable DeFi apps - MakerDAO, Compound, Aave and Uniswap - that have managed billions of dollars worth of digital assets and not malfunctioned in the recent market crash, while several centralized lenders and investment funds did.
>>and then when they get pressed by regulators they admit it's fake again.
This has never happened AFAIK. The opposite - of projects taking the credible position that they don't control the protocol because it is autonomous and immutable - has happened, as in the case of Uniswap Labs vis-a-vis the Uniswap protocol.
For decentralized/genuine DeFi apps, like MakerDAO, Compound, Aave and Uniswap, as opposed to centralized ones like Ripple, I don't expect this position to ever be challenged by regulatory agencies, because in reality, these protocols cannot be shut down or changed by any party.
Specifically about FileCoin, if I understand you correctly, your only gripe is that it uses cryptocurrency right? If I got that wrong, let me know.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
> Payments for IPFS storage isn't a horrible idea, but it needs to be done in a normal way using real money, without the speculative tokens.
That's what Filecoin is attempting to do. That's the wheat that you declared to be nonexistent, on the basis of arbitrarily deeming speculation on cryptocurrencies to be bad while ignoring the rampant speculation on "real money" (see also: the very existence of forex markets).
Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
There’s constant large amount of coins printed for the team and their VC’s in which they can sell on a daily basis to dump the market. Also new coins being owed to the miners are periodically unlocked as well (in FIL it’s like a ponzi, you gotta wait for your rewards to be unlocked after many months to take everything out). Basically too many coins can be sold daily, very little demand, real use case, or hype.
As far as the people actually using it, you can check it out here[1] We have about 18 Exabytes of space on the network, adding nearly 2+ PiB a day of new deals (people storing things). You can see a bunch of the important datasets being added here[2], replicated, universally available and uncensorable. If you see value in that, that's great! If you don't and have more feedback, we're here to help! If you hate us or want another solution, that's cool too!
[1] https://filfox.info/en [2] https://slingshot.filecoin.io/explore
> There’s constant large amount of coins printed for the team and their VC’s
But you can answer on this part without addressing the price. Is this claim factual?
Is this due to a small number of peers purchasing additional storage? When a new peer joins the network, are you able to estimate the expected number of bytes that peer will contribute to the network over its lifetime? Basically, can you calculate the “LTV” of an IPFS/Filecoin peer? (Let’s say “V” is “net storage,” i.e. the difference between storage contributed and storage consumed.)
[0] http://162.55.187.75:3000/d/CSQsORs7k/nebula?orgId=1&viewPan...
It's a great story filled with 80+% APR loans clamoring for unvested FIL balances, all kinds of middle men taking cuts, and of course putting max risk on retail when the ship eventually sinks
I really hope their $300m or whatever will build something useful, but I would be shocked if this tech ends anywhere because the whole project was/is a simple money grab and the grabbings been done already
I am trying to form informed opinions on this space, so I'd really appreciate an answer!
Filecoin may not be centralised the same as AWS but they are centralised in other ways.
Any time you have a project like this with $250+ million in VC investment there is going to be an inherent conflict in their goals and motivations versus other contributors to the project.
It's like Spark, MongoDB, Cassandra etc. Yes they are open-source. But the billion dollar companies that are behind them hold all the cards and will win against any attempt to take the project in a direction they don't like.
If somebody else could perhaps speculate about the detailed reasoning behind @sub7's claims (or even their own reasoning as to why FileCoin is a money-grab), that would also be great.
Nowadays there are other companies offering S3-compatible file storage, so at best "S3-compatible" would be federated, but compared to something like IPFS that's much closer to the "centralized" end of the spectrum than to the "decentralized" end.
That is: decentralization is a separate concern from geographic distribution; the former pertains to control/ownership over the data and the hardware storing it, and in S3's case that control/ownership is centralized into a single corporation.
I'm happy to answer questions directly, or discuss any sources, but I'm not able to respond to this point by point because this just is not correct. I'm on here all the time if you'd like to talk further, or email me directly - david (dot) aronchick (at) protocol (dot) ai
Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
And the rest of us should believe you despite your refusal to articulate any sort of rationale for your conclusion... why, exactly?
And then post the Protocol Labs cap table inception + changes over the same time frame.
And then post the FIL loan books from the biggest miners/market makers.
And then you will have actually done research and likely will stop shitposting
I'm also confused how your model accounts for all the ecosystem development and enablement work that is being done across the Filecoin ecosystem. Filecoin isn't just another ETH clone - there is a ton of engineering and product work happening across many teams, with a ton of resources and dev work being poured into them (ex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApVVg78ZBog)
Fine to complain about crypto economic token distributions or something specific - but please don't imply that the dev teams working on Filecoin / IPFS are freeloading or disingenuous. There's a massive amount of work going into building new content-addressed web primitives by some very mission-driven folks that you're unintentionally maligning. (full disclosure - I'm one of them)
On account of the word “coin” being in the name, I have a feeling the answer isn’t simple.
One of the reasons it's so cheap is that this is a quote for literally just raw storage; the other value-added services that you'd expect to accompany that are just beginning to appear now, including the FVM for more complex deals and processing over stored data.
The other big one is an automated retrieval market -- storage providers right now either negotiate separately for uploading and downloading of that amount of data (you mostly have to do that anyway when you're trying to work out how to transfer PiB of data!), or just include it in the price. But that's coming. https://retrieval.market/
All of these will add to the cost, but in optional ways, and not the orders of magnitude that differentiate Filecoin from, e.g., S3.
Another, which I will try and dig up a link to (if I haven't imagined it entirely) is more of a sentinel system, whereby clients and storage providers have a protocol to pick a neutral third party that escrows and streams FIL payments from clients to SPs, conditional on retrievability. But as I say, I'm not an expert here.
Also, the next FAQ question answers an interesting problem where the cost of data retrieval is not agreed before hand, and allows the storage providers to extort you for actually ever retrieving your data. Solution is again storing your bytes with multiple providers and hoping they are not all extortionists.
Indeed. So if you compare it to S3, the calculation seems to be "Filecoin cost / Amazon cost = 0.0010% the cost of Amazon S3", so if you're willing to pay the same amount as for S3, you can store your data with 100,000 different providers around the world.
I'm not sure how many locations S3 data get stored at, but I'm fairly certain it's not 100,000 different machines, so even with that, it seems like a pretty good deal for vital data.
If you want it cheaper than S3, you can store it with just 10,000 different providers (10% of the price of S3), and I'd still consider it a good deal.
How those 10,000 providers do is quite different - namely, a 6000 of them are all behind the same segment of the internet that can go down? Then if you were distributing data aggressively, you probably lost access to something temporarily - or permanently.
This isn't an idle risk: if it's cheap and easy to start making some amount of money off of Filecoin hosting, then you have the fly-by-night problem: suppose some Chinese firms with cheap warehousing cobble together a whole lot of storage, and then, to optimize against people doing exactly this (and thus increase revenue) they advertise themselves out onto the network as dozens, or hundreds of logically separate entities?
What looks like cheap storage which you've made redundant, suddenly actually isn't - it all has the same base fault possible.
By using an FVM contract, you can specify exactly what you'd like - how distributed, how automatic the replication, etc etc. This, of course, is a bit manual for now, expect lots more simplicity in the space - or just use https://web3.storage which does this all for you!
Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
Secondly: storage providers aren't anonymous, and in fact compete on additional features on top of the commodity storage offer. At the most basic level, you have orgs competing on geographical diversity -- so you have PikNik https://www.piknik.com/ or https://www.sealstorage.io/ in the US, dcent in the EU https://dcent.nl/ . And then there are other contractual requirements that let storage providers offer distinctive services, like the use of renewable energy.
Thirdly: the economic requirements of the Filecoin proofs at this point (constant availability, a reasonable amount of CPU/GPU power, an initial FIL stake that can be removed in the event that you fail to prove in a timely fashion you're storing the data), mean that the optimum storage provider setup is pretty professional -- you really need a presence and fast connection in an extremely reliable hosting center, a 100TB or more, and so on.
So, I'd say that there's a (potentially contingent -- i can imagine see the entry price for filecoin storage provision going down) entry barrier, and a lot of meta-data that can, and is, being used to make decision about which SP's to make deals with. So, for instance, Estuary and I believe the other front-ends use historical and business data to determine who they're making deals with.
But then that's affected heavily by: to ensure storage is secure and redundant, you'll need to research extensively which providers you contract with based on reputation.
Which pretty much completely undermines proposition 1: I could just transact with providers who act as registered business entities in countries who's legal systems I trust, using regular currency directly. Because that stance in the marketplace is a shortcut for "is a geographically distributed operation that can be held legally accountable for their behavior", and have a history of success backed in the regular market place.
HOWEVER, most folks don't want to do this - we recommend solutions like https://web3.storage (which gives you 1 TB with three replicas for free forever), and https://estuary.tech.
Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
How does this work? Are other providers earning many orders of magnitude in profit, or are filecoin's storage costs being subsidized somehow?
What I want to know is whether a good equilibrium is available. Say some decentralized apps with significant storage requirements win big over the next five years, and the filecoin network starts seeing a more moderate level of usage. Assume also that sentiment normalizes so that the filecoin market starts viewing filecoin as a service token for storage and retrieval, not as a speculative investment. Is the network still competitive with centralized storage providers, and how does the filecoin supply inflate over time as the network operates?
I'm not an economist, so I can't speak to the details of the balancing act, but the incentive system is engineered to create a balanced equilibrium -- so more demand increases the incentives to provide storage, etc. It's a challenge to follow all the thinking, but this video from ZX Zhang is a good guide to the current state (I fast-forwarded it to the relevant bits: https://youtu.be/gbJgsav2lP0?t=554 ). There's also one of the regular cryptoecon days coming up in Paris, and the videos of those are kept online. https://www.cryptoeconday.io/event-schedule/cryptoeconday-et... https://www.cryptoeconday.io/videos
Regarding the question of a “good equilibrium” and the ability for the network to “compete” with centralized storage/data services, we believe that as the network matures, and quality of service improves, it can certainly be a viable competitive option, with additional unique use cases separate from the current offerings from centralized players. The ability for clients and storage providers to come to market equilibrium prices for customized storage, retrieval, and computational services addresses the inherent inefficiencies in economies dominated by large, centralized players with limited choice.
How the network’s supply evolves over time is subject to many exogenous factors, but, in general as the network matures, we should expect the economy to be more deflationary rather than inflationary, as token vesting schedules end, and block rewards (minting) taper as mentioned earlier. Please see here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj4QxYKPMmA) for a discussion on Filecoin’s circulating supply, and the sources of inflow/outflow that determine its dynamics.
Translation: Free for maybe about 5 years if the company doesn't fold or less if it does
Pricing for web3 projects is a bit more complicated than getting a product from AWS. As you participate in a specialized economy it is like asking what a Danish stock costs from the US standpoint. First you need to buy DKK, and thereafter the stock might be volatile and have another price. (Spoiler alert, Danish stocks are cheap now :) )
Happy to adjust this conclusion - I've spent some hours trying to figure out how to pay for anything with FileCoin and come up empty-handed. Does anyone want to do a walkthrough of buying the coins, installing the software, storing data in exchange for FileCoin, and retrieving it?
In the meantime, you have to wonder: is this a sort of "you get what you pay for" scenario, and you pay nothing, so you get… no reliability?
Also, is the wasm-based (and therefore polygot) execution environment a novelty in the space of on-chain execution? That in itself should be a big deal right?
Some examples:
* Joining together to share storage of important data (e.g. several foundations together)
* Auto-renewing/auto-replication of storage (e.g. if a storage provider fails to respond after a certain period of time, content could be automatically replicated to a new provider)
* Automated caching & distribution - a single piece of content uploaded could be automatically replicated to other providers around the world
* Sophisticated storage auctions - let's say you're a storage provider and realize that someone has removed a large chunk of data, thereby freeing up a ton of space. A contract could automatically lower the price for storing on your disks so you're back running at full capacity more quickly.
* Futures contracts - let's say you have a lot of data you know you're going to need for a long time into the future (e.g. 10GB of log data generated every day). You may want more stability in pricing, so you "buy" all the storage now, and are not subject to volatility.
Etc, etc. But the best use cases are the ones we haven't even thought up yet!
Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
Do you have any recommendations as to the learning path I should take to be able to develop on the FVM? I've never coded in the web3 space before. Should I simply dive into the API docs and figure out what fundamentals I would need to learn and go from there? Or is there some pre-designed curriculum to get average SWEs up-to-speed with FVM and FileCoin in general? (For context, I've listened to many podcast episodes on IPFS/FileCoin ..etc and have a good understanding of the general gist of things).
Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
You can look for some of the FVM Foundry demo videos to see what folks are building so far! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTtZh1zqUr8