Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space
fil.org
fil.org
This seems like the kind of application that works best when bandwidth and storage are cheap, and I would have assumed that that, in space, both are about as far from cheap as you can get.
Instead, IPFS uses content-addressing, where the content is hashed and given a ID based on the content itself. So "foo" could have the ID A, while "bar" could have the ID B. No matter who added the content to the network, if the content is the same, the ID will be the same.
The benefit of this is that you can fetch the data from anywhere, and you'll get the data you wanted guaranteed (assuming the content is available somewhere on the network).
In terms of space, imagine being on the moon and requesting some website. With location-addressing, you have to be able to reach that particular node, and the data has to travel from there to you. With content-addressing, that content can be fetched from anywhere, maybe another node on the moon has it already, so it can fetched quicker from there, or some node in-between the moon and earth.
More reading about content-addressing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage
Magnet links and git are two fairly common technologies that uses content-addressing with lots of benefits.
(edit: of course, this is a simplification of both how IP, networks, IPFS, DNS and more works, but I hope it provides a fair overview at least)
This complete nonsense. First of all DNS can give you multiple IP addresses[1] (that's how CDNs work eh!) and then IP addresses are only very loosely coupled to geographical locations…
[1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-anycast-dns/
Edit: I removed the "geographical" from the "pointing to a IP which has a specific geographical location" part. Hopefully it'll make things clear enough while not over-simplifying it.
CAS is a separate issue than a caching hierarchy.
CDNs usually offer location-addressing, sometimes via different ways but most of the time boils down to "I have to reach that specific node to fetch this specific content". I'm not sure in what other words I could use to explain how content-addressing is different from that...
(not even talking about IPFS at this point (or in my grand-parent comment), it's just about URIs vs URLs in the end)
(edit: besides, the CDNs you're talking about are with 99% certainty using content-addressing all over the place internally)
Reality is the space thing is just part of the usual crypto grift narrative building.
Being able to arbitrary place caches anywhere and let anyone serve the data, and you can trust you're getting the right data, is a huge benefit over location-addressing. Ignoring IPFS, content-addressing makes sense for so many things, which is what lots of storage/caching/CDN solutions have discovered decades ago.
Content-addressing is nothing new (nor did Protocol Labs/IPFS "invent" it) and if you're using a CDN to serve content today, the CDN is with 99% certainty using content-addressing at least internally.
This is the grift.
The "libertarians" want to be able to host their CSAM, sorry, their "freedom materials" on everyone's servers in such a way that nobody can ever "silence their freedom" because it would mean silencing the cat gifs, too. Want to be "on the net"? Well, you absolutely have to agree to host anyone else's content without question at all times. But, it's okay, we'll pay you with... coins!
Besides, how on earth is your argument even relevant when we're talking about content-addressing as a whole, without involving IPFS at all?
Lots of things use CAS, not just IPFS.
The specific case you outline can be served by existing technology, without having to introduce magic coins, beans, or other distractions.
I was pretty interested in IPFS prior to it being overtaken by web3 grifters.
> The benefit of this is that you can fetch the data from anywhere
Only works if the data I want is being replicated in many locations. But storage in spacecraft is presumably a tightly constrained resource, due to the need to use technology that's space-hardened and has an extremely good reliability record, and is therefore probably far from being both cutting edge and high density. JWST, for example, only has 68GB of storage despite being an instrument for taking high resolution photographs.
I would guess that that creates a situation that is very far from the one content-addressable storage is trying to solve. The goal isn't on-demand access to arbitrary files that are just sitting around in long term storage, because I'm guessing that, in space, there is effectively no long-term storage of data files in the first place. Instead, what you're looking to do is to get the data off of the spacecraft and down to earth as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then delete it from the spacecraft's storage so that you can make room to do more cool space stuff.
And I also don't want to be using my spacecraft's SSD to cache or replicate data for others if I can possibly avoid it. That will unnecessarily shorten the lifetime of the SSD, and, by extension, the piece of hardware that I just spent millions or perhaps even billions of dollars to build and launch into space.
And I just can't follow you as far as
> imagine being on the moon and requesting some website
because, right here right now, that is such a hypothetical situation that I have absolutely no idea why it needs a real-world demonstration of proof of concept using currently-available technology. Let's wait to see if browsing the Web from the moon leaves the domain of science fiction and becomes science reality first, so that then we can benefit from whatever technology exists in that future when we're solving the problem.
Yes, the actual transfer won't be fetching from multiple sources unless it's replicated.
The difference between location-addressing and content-addressing is that it enables the content from being fetched from anywhere, which has uses outside of space too, as many storage solutions has already discovered since long time ago (multiple decades).
> SSD to cache or replicate data for others if I can possibly avoid it. That will unnecessarily shorten the lifetime of the SSD
Correct me if I'm wrong, but SSD lifetime is based on writes, not on reads. So you should be OK with replicating already saved data, in that case?
> that is such a hypothetical situation that I have absolutely no idea why it needs a real-world demonstration
The whole "IPFS in space" is a "utopia goal" of sorts, but aiming for it gives us benefits today.
Personally, I'd love to see a move from location-addressing to content-addressing as I'm often in locations with spotty global-internet connection and really poor latency. Sometimes, websites refuse to even try to serve me data, as it takes really long time for packets to go between where I am, and the host I'm trying to reach, so they decide to cut the connection as tell me "sorry, timed out..."
If the web was already built with content-addressing in mind, my machine could automatically fetch the content from another machine on my network, my neighbor, a dynamic cache at the ISP or wherever, anyone could serve me that data instead of that particular node with that particular IP on the other side of the world. Sharing a YouTube video between two computers on the same network would just transfer bytes on the local network, instead of reaching out to the internet. The benefits of this should be fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with networking today.
Realistically, I don't think IPFS will be the technology that makes this possible in 10+ years, but that doesn't mean content-addressing itself is the reason why it isn't more widespread. Content-addressing been around for a long time already, and I'm sure even more and more people will realize its value over time.
You can add distributed caching to HTTPS with message signatures (or a similar scheme): https://httpwg.org/http-extensions/draft-ietf-httpbis-messag...
I don't think the lack of content-addressing is the main thing holding this "utopia" back. The bigger problem is designing P2P communication protocols that work efficiently, utilize bandwidtch fairly, are not easily attackable, do not accidentally cost peers excessive amounts of money and so on. If your neighbor is on a metered connection, I'm sure they are happy the web is not using their machine to serve you content. Even if they are not, if connections are spotty and bandwidth limited, they may not be happy if their YouTube video starts stuttering because their system is now serving you Netflix content. And when they're watching porn, they're probably happy that someone else can't easily find out which porn movie they are watching by polling nearby peers for a content hash.
Ultimately the client-server model has major advantages over peer-to-peer that are highly ingrained in our society. It is the model by which delivery has almost always worked, way before the internet.
Imagine shipping an IPFS node to Mars and being able to have content consistency
See, for example, DTN, which is already being used to do real work on the ISS. There are also plans use it elsewhere, including in some future lunar missions. https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/delay-disru...
So I just want to point out that IPFS was fairly deliberately designed to have numerous, forward-compatible features that could be swapped out in the future : like https://multiformats.io/ and in particular https://multiformats.io/multiaddr/ .
In the IPFS community, there's always been a fairly heated discussion about which bit of the entire system should be stuck with the term IPFS. Like, if you took away the libp2p protocol, and just served CIDs over http, would it be IPFS? What if you took away CAR files (the merkle-tree file format used to define multi-item content)? What if you're a private IPFS network, with no shared nodes with the public network (like https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet ). What if you didn't use bitswap, the file transfer protocol (Filecoin doesn't use bitswap, and mostly doesn't interconnect with the main public IPFS network). What about if you didn't use a DHT to find providers of a CID. What if you're not using any of the "IPFS" software stack, but your implementation still uses bits and pieces of content-addressability as defined in the standard?
Interestingly, right now, there are a bunch of experiments going in all of these directions: I think it's fair to say that if you wanted to test out content-addressable networks across the solar system, they probably wouldn't be IPFS as it is now, but their nature could probably be described using the primitives the IPFS stack uses, and learning about what needs to change would give a useful direction to some part of the extended IPFS ecosystem.
Or once its in the network thats it?
Seems easy to DDOS by changing one character many times in a file which generates a new id each time
The same as you'd delete anything from any protocol essentially, you delete it locally. If you've shared it on the internet, you ask people nicely to delete it, if they refuse, you either pursue them legally or give up. Basically, just like how you delete a picture from the internet today.
> Seems easy to DDOS by changing one character many times in a file which generates a new id each time
All you're doing in that case is adding more files locally and filling your hard-drive with random files. No content gets automatically distributed unless people request it.
Also, even for a peer-to-peer network, you still need some way to discover the peers that actually have the data, so you need some kind of centralized infrastructure that can help coordinate. Ultimately whether you connect to a CDN or to the centralized P2P facilitator is not such a massive difference.
Also, given the way ISPs typically operate, you will probably have much better bandwidth downloading from a centralized server than from a generic other end-user.
This is why BitTorrent only really has two successfully deployed use cases:
1. Windows updates and similar, where machines can rely on broadcasts on a small LAN to coordinate without needing more complex infrastructure (doesn't scale beyond LAN)
2. "Piracy", where the major advantage is that it diffuses the blame for copyright infringement, instead of presenting a single large target that holds all of it.
It doesn't guarantee that the content the ID resolves to is available, but once you have a content-addressable ID, you can be sure you'll be able to get the data as long as the data is available somewhere on the network.
"there is no GUARANTEE about file preservation there at all (unless you pay to people hosting your files specifically)"
Sure your files are accidentally still present in the cache. Good for you. The problem is deceiving other people who may think it's somehow spacemagically-interplanetary guaranteed.
The only thing I can find from official resources is documentation saying IPFS does not do that at all. Example from https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/what-is-ipfs/#what-ipfs-isn-...
> What IPFS isn't
> IPFS is not ... A storage provider: While there are storage providers built with IPFS support (typically known as pinning services), IPFS itself is a protocol, not a provider
Reading your link I don't quite understand how come they claim IPFS is both a protocol AND a network of nodes AND not a storage. For example TCP is a protocol, but TCP is not a network of nodes even if there is a network of nodes using TCP to communicate.
I think this is some cheap wordplay to play pretend distributed filestorage and but also absolve themselves from any responsibility in case something goes wrong "IPFS is only a protocol, you probably was holding it wrong".
Sounds like those people either don't understand what they're saying, or they're mindlessly shilling for Filecoin. Both are obviously shitty, but I don't think it's fair to point the team behind IPFS in a bad light because of what others say about it.
> I don't quite understand how come they claim IPFS is both a protocol AND a network of nodes AND not a storage
IPFS is a protocol, IPFS is also the name of the network. IPFS doesn't automatically distribute data, hence it's not "storage", but a protocol for doing storage.
In the analogy to TCP, TCP/http are the most common protocols, and the most common network is what we call "Internet". Initially, there was many competing networks, until eventually The Internet overtook all the other networks and essentially "won".
(edit: again, gross over-simplification about the history the internet and more, hopefully won't be too misleading. Better overview can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet)
ipfs is not a fileserver. but you can use it to host files.
Start thinking that way and it will take you to a whole new universe.
The throughput probably won't be great, but mainly if we assume 1:1 not broadcast connections! There will be roving access, not continual, to a given satellite - a fact until there are thousands of other satellites also serving ipfs. Costs will be high.
But still, there are wins. So far, satellite reliability is fairly high; there haven't been natural or human-made disasters afflicting many satellites. In some conditions the roving nature of the satellite could be a boon; you can get information out to a lot of people.
Wikipedia, news, important events... those would all benefit from guaranteed-reoccuring-availability model, perhaps. This would be an interesting tamper-resistant way to store something like votes, if it could be vetted. If there's satellite to satellite communications, the ability to have an expanding archive of crucial orbital information is useful; the swarm can grow & update vital behavior with ipfs in interesting ways.
Rather than assess just on whether this will make a good ipfs node as ipfs is typically used (high bandwidth, high storage nodes), I think it's worth considering this on the merits of what this technology offers that is distinct. Pulling out a single ruler to measure everything isn't always the best and only way to judge; indeed I think we miss a lot when we apply only our current set of expectations to new ideas & encounters. I'd encourage a more liberal consideration. Although I agree, I'm not sure either what the killer use is, I want to see thinking that pioneers what could work, that explored what values are on offer, even if it's not the same old values as the incumbent (fiber optics on the ground).
The same thing could be applied to space.
If you think IPFS is trying to "re-spin CDNs as their invention", I'm pretty sure you misunderstand what IPFS. The homepage is a great starting point if you're curious rather than antagonistic: https://ipfs.tech/
> IPFS doesn't solve persistence of data
I don't think it claims to solve this either? What it does claim to solve is the persistence of identifiers of data.
> doesn't solve churn in p2p systems
What P2P system has ever done so or even claimed to have done so?
You might be thinking that I'm making this up to troll. But the funny thing is so few people have any idea about this area of technology a company like Protocol Labs can get away with being completely insular, mediocre, unimaginative, impractical, and actually full of shit, and no one will notice. In fact, I'm routinely reminded what a 'visionary' the founder is. Despite nothing of value ever coming out of the company. But what I've learned is if enough people believe the lie it might as well be true.
Now give me money! Space, space, blockchain, space!
Typical "web3" though, solving problems nobody actually has.
But while I love the idea of IPFS, it comes with a bunch of tradeoffs that I think make it very unlikely that it'll ever become mainstream.
What I do think will happen in space, is similar to what already happens with PoPs around the world, no IPFS required. As an example: I believe that there will be a YouTube on the moon and YouTube on Mars, and YouTube servers caching most of the content on both, and it'll all work the same. Cross-planet communication will be high latency, but it won't matter.
Importantly, this is enabled by content addressable storage in IPFS, where the address of the data is derived deterministically with cryptographic hashing. Agree it likely won't ever become super popular, but it is a core component of distributed storage systems without central orchestration.
Can't it be enabled in all sorts of ways? E.g. edge caching, the way YouTube works today?
That wouldn't be the case on the moon I would have thought, as you won't have a huge network of intermediate nodes to draw on. You probably just have one or two links, which you can push content through en masse.
Tl;dr I don't see why what you're saying applies in this scenario.
I'm saying in a hypothetical future in which we have colonised other planets, tech companies will just plop caching servers on Mars and the moon, completely obviating the need for IPFS or anything special.
(edited original comment a little to clarify)
Content-based indexing (as in IPFS) handles that. Plus the data gets cached in the starlink you locally accessed, in your example.
It might help to think about IPFS as a public CDN operating on an open specification protocol and an open-source implementation.
*One other thing I noticed is that the "Resources" section doesn't have the gradient border edges on it, which I don't know is intentional or not.
EDIT: However, it is strange that the foundation has a totally different site.
I don't see a use case for this other than speculation.
I would even go as far to say that this 'side project' was done to try and pump the price of filecoin so that people can take profit off of it.
The other use cases are hinted to in the name of the project...
Gimmick, sure. but it's an important milestone and costs less than a series of TV ads.
That's exactly what cryptomoney has been about for years now, so it fits right in.
I love the idea about data being addressable by hash, but I don't feel IPFS has actually delivered anything meaningful in that area yet.
And with ipfs-search.com shutdown, there is not even any way left to explore what is actually on the network now.
And technical issues aside, there is also the legal problem that IPFS conflicts with copyright. Redistributing anything is illegal by default, unless somebody gives you permission, IPFS provides no means to track that permission. You can't attach a GPL or an author to a hash.
I think you might misunderstand how IPFS works, or possibly confuse it with Freenet. When you use IPFS, nothing is automatically distributed, unless they happen to know the hash of the content you've added locally. It's not until someone starts to explicitly request data from you, that you start sharing anything.
Assume A is the copyrighted work. Now construct a file of random bits and call it B. Then assuming A=B^C, then you can solve C=A^B (where ^ is the XOR operator). Both B and C appear to be completely random.
Assume you are sued because C is found on your harddrive and if you XOR it with B (found on someone else's harddrive) you get copyrighted work A.
To construct your defense, take a work in the public domain, and call it P. Compute D=C^P. Now tell the judge that there is a file D on a friend's harddrive, that allows you to reconstruct P.
Alternatively, tell the judge that you are researching random numbers and C is just a file you work with. It is not illegal to have random numbers (bits) on your harddrive.
I mean, the XOR thing is a bad idea, because obviously at least one of those files is violating copyright. Trying to feign innocence is not engineer logic, it's failed logic.
But Aereo I'm still mad about. They saw that distribution is what cable companies have to pay lots of money for, so they removed distribution. It should have been fine.
The effect of the decision is that it's legal for a person to set up a remote antenna for personal use, but it's a copyright infringement to pay a company to set it up for you. Or, perhaps, that it's possible to pay a company to do so but only if it's your idea as a one-off. Either way, that doesn't make any sense as a copyright issue.
And after the supreme court decision, they tried to pivot to legally being a cable service... only to get denied recognition as one!
My point in the GP comment was more that if the entire justification for your technical architecture is to make an end run around some law, you have to consider the possibility that a judge is going to see what you're trying to do and may have a different interpretation. There's a big human element in the law that I think engineers, especially "code as law" blockchain people, often overlook or misunderstand.
Maybe in the future we'll have AI judges and AI lawyers and your case will be decided in 100 milliseconds. However, that's not what we have today.
The point with the XORing is that you can't blame one person for the infringement.
Imagine twin brothers. One of them steals a painting and is caught on camera. The judge knows that one of the twins is guilty. However, he can't convict either of them exactly because of the human element in the law.
I really had high hopes for it, but I realized that all I really want is an object storage with content addressable urls.
In fact, while F2FS is a ludicrous example, this happens regularly with filesystems. The core design of filesystems is still built assuming that a block device will be behind it. IPFS is the same way, just s/block device/blockchain/.
- You can have files on IPFS and no blockchain whatsoever "behind it".
- IPFS itself makes no use of blockchains as an abstration for data storage or file organization
- If all the blockchains networks and nodes disappeared overnight, no IPFS nodes would be affected.
I don't know if you actually used any of that or just going by hearsay.
There's a separate "layer on top of IPFS" called Filecoin that does involve a blockchain. (From a technical point of view, it's not really a layer on top, more of a re-implementation of IPFS with a blockchain.)
I've worked on IPFS and know many of the key people at PL. They really are not blockchain people or cryptobros. They are much different from anyone else in crypto I have encountered. But ultimately they have to fund their activities somehow, and this is the reality of where the business potential is in P2P circa mid-2020s.
This was one of the things that made IPFS a non-starter for us. We ended up grafting Hashicorp Vault into kubo (the go-ipfs implementation) so that we could use IPFS and have things like detetes and access revocation that actually work.
https://guide.fission.codes/developers/webnative/file-system...
We have block level access control for example: https://peergos.org/posts/bats
As well as E2EE, sharing, trustless servers and more [1].
There is a Java implementation of the modified bitswap for this in Nabu [0] and a Go one in ipfs-nucleus [1]. With both of these you can use whatever auth verification protocol you like.
Every time someone downloads a book from a shadow library like Library Genesis, it's through IPFS most of the time, often via an IPFS gateway such as Cloudflare's IPFS gateway, so you don't even notice it's using IPFS. These shadow libraries have millions of users per day, especially academics.
You bring up a valid point though. From my experience, IPFS suffers from a tragedy of the commons issue. It's performance is generally terrible because the free providers are overloaded.
> Every time someone downloads a book from a shadow library like Library Genesis, it's through IPFS most of the time
I would like to see evidence this is actually true. My theory is that IPFS's "success" in hosting Libgen is roughly turning ICO proceeds into free hosting. Paying for dedicated servers might have been more cost efficient and, given the performance issues, more robust!
When it comes to FOSS, I personally don't understand why something like a package manager isn't P2P by default. It feels very aligned with the hacker culture - a la "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". Virtually nobody uses it, so the solutions are half baked, clunky and not integrated with every day workflows (ex: browsers don't support anything P2P). Something like libcurl can't pull a torrent from the web
My (possibly wrong) feeling is that IPFS is meant for smaller files, and torrents for bigger collections. So with the example of a package manager, you could download each individual package via IPFS, whereas a torrent would make sense if you wanted to download an archive of them all.
Not to say torrents couldn't work, but it just kinda feels like not the intended use case.
(The above feeling come from reading about IPFS a few times throughout the years and toying with it for a while).
Packages are a lot of small files, and not everyone is interested in them all. Torrents are good for large content that everyone wants. The two are in opposition and there needs to be a balance: do you need to make One Unique Torrent with everything, but then peers have to individually ask each and every other peer if they have the content they're looking for, making it unscalable ? Or do you make one torrent per package, meaning peers have to track thousands of torrents ? (That's the direction IPFS took, which is why it's extremely inefficient and resource-heavy). DebTorrent has made the choice to go in the middle.
The real problem, to me, is that content-addressed content is the anti-privacy protocol: since you ask everyone "do you have this content", you're basically telling everyone what you want. In the case of installing packages, this means telling everyone what the version of your packages is, and is potentially a security issue.
But the real "problem" is that it fails at being much more better than the existing solution. Bandwidth is cheap, storage is cheap, so hosting everything on a few independent but centralized servers is good enough.
Netflix uses IPFS. [0]
[0] https://blog.ipfs.tech/2020-02-14-improved-bitswap-for-conta...
FWIW it seems like NixOS at least tried or is trying: https://blog.ipfs.tech/2020-09-08-nix-ipfs-milestone-1/
It raises the question, though: I can pay Storj S3 with STORJ tokens, and I can also pay for renterd space with Sia tokens, and I can also pay for IPFS with Filecoin, and all of them still work with good old credit cards. What "intrinsic" value is there for any of these tokens, if they can only be used on their own internal economies?
And before the "but permissionless, so I can pay with crypto!", why not just use DAI?
Microtransactions are not practical with credit cards and other traditional settlement methods.
The reasons not to use something like DAI are fundraising (unfortunately - crypto VCs really like seeing a token), network bloat/decentralization, and leadership risk. Your own currency is less likely to collapse by other people’s bad decisions.
No one cares about microtransactions, and I'm yet to see a customer who likes a product or service but refuses to make a pre-payment of $10.
None of the reasons you mentioned for a token are beneficial to the end user.
Barely paying for power does sound like too little, but enough money to pay back hardware cost in a year is definitely overkill.
For the past 6 months, I've received an average of 5.8 STORJ per month, which on today's rate amount to $4/month, but if I look at the price at the time I received them it would be more like $2.2/month.
I don't know the exact wattage, but given that is a oldish celeron and that I'm based in Germany, I'm guessing that running that server + disks takes ~25W, which means ~18kWh per month and given how energy prices have gone up last year (close to 0.30€ per kWh), I am actually losing money by keeping this server on.
If I was buying hard drives right now, I'd expect 2x14TB for about $500 including tax. If that pulled in anything close to $2/TB/month then $6 of electricity would not be a big deal.
Hmm, I just built a NAS, maybe I should rent out some of that space.
That makes sense, but then what can you do with Storj?
The important thing is not that coins can be exchanged for a product or service that you want, it's that they can be exchanged for a product or service that many people want. And you want that trade to be the basis of the price, rather than speculation.
I recently set up a Minio cluster with 80TB (usable, 120TB total) for ~150€/month. Storj is cheap (~3.5€/TB/month), but there is no way that Storj can ever be that cheap. And we are not even talking about egress fees.
It's difficult for them to see them truly disrupting the market when their systems have by design so much overhead and middleman wanting a cut. The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices and then any advantage will be gone.
The best I see for these decentralized storage systems is to work as a tit-for-tat backup, maybe?
> The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices
I doubt it's ever going to be a big threat, since this kind of storage is never going to have great latency. I don't think that's an existential risk. Though even if it is, and happens, there's billions of dollars to make before we reach that point. It's not a reason to avoid the market.
Yeah, these people will pay for iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox... Or maybe if they are a bit more technical they will look into Backblaze B2.
> there's billions of dollars to make before we reach that point. It's not a reason to avoid the market.
I want to agree with you, but honestly this feels more like a situation where all the players will be investing a bunch of time and money in the hopes of becoming a winner and they will all end up finding an ever shrinking spread.
To illustrate the point, all these projects raised already billions of dollars, but there is a very low chance that any of them will ever recoup that money. It's not a problem for them because they are all playing with someone else's money, but globally this has been nothing but a waste of time and resources.
So if you want to cash out or use the tokens you receive, you need to eat the fees. It's ridiculous and a clear mechanism for them to restrict the circulating supply.
It's really not hard - I've done a PoC when I was working on https://hub20.io - but it doesn't help with their "tokenonomics", so they just ignore it.
I would claim it has failed the test of time as it has very little adoption.
From my experience it’s a “heavy tech”/resource hog hog that does not appeal neither to developers nor to end users(it has no killer app)
I think the challenge with torrents is maintaining communities of seeders without getting taken down, but I don't think IPFS really helps with that.
The benchmark for success here would be people participating being able to earn meaningful amounts of file coin simply by hosting ipfs data. Is that even remotely profitable at this point?
IPFS as a technology is fine. It seems to work well enough though there are some resilience and scaling challenges. Your data basically disappears unless you ensure it doesn't Which is where filecoin and other incentives come in. Basically it requires you to pay for someone to host your content. Because others won't unless they happen to have downloaded your content in which case it may linger on their drive for a while.
My guess is that the whole Filecoin thing is scaring away a lot of enterprise users though.
What it boils down to is that things like s3 and other storage solutions are pretty robust and affordable as well if you are going to pay for hosting the files anyway. And probably a lot easier to deal with. So, for most companies they might look at it and then use something like S3. The whole business of having to buy some funny coins on a dodgy website is a bit of a nonstarter in most companies.
Price (market cap): ~3B
Annualized revenue based on the last 30 days: 3M.
Intrinsic value based on perpetual DCF assuming 5% interest rate: 60M.
2. You're valuing it like a company which is also flawed
Anyone with two or more brain cells realizes that this sort of stuff is a scam.
The news is publicity to stir up investors.
None of these coins have any intrinsic value.
There are thousands of people who sat on bench and thought, "I want to create a ponzi coin" doesn't mean they create value.
Crypto is a net negative phenomenon.
Any coin, including USD, has no intrinsic value. Its value is in what people can buy with it.
Sounds pretty useless to me.
But whatever helps you sleep better at night.
Of course it won't
> and is well on its way to achieving that.
Of course it isn't
> But whatever helps you sleep better at night.
Well, we all know what lullabies you sing to yourself
The company that lied about partnerships, structured itself as a way for insiders to cash out on tokens early, then failed to attract any business so pivoted to a new tech and a new token to do it all again?
Helium is a failure and a joke.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2022/09/23/helium-...
source was personal communication, sorry
If we won't be wasteful with IPv6 space, it'll suffice for all inter-planetary and inter-galactic communication. Considering 1 trillion stars per galaxy and 1 trillion galaxies in the universe, we're safe with more than 340 trillion addresses per star.
We would be able to address between 1/3 to 1/2 of all atoms in the universe with IPv6.
Now that's a safety margin!
There are around 10^38 IPv6 addresses and 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. It's not even close.
What is the use case of these crypto tokens other than speculation?
Where is the market in space that is asking to use this?
Or pump and dump scams.
Crypto has no fundamentals, do not pay out dividends and only resemble ponzi and pyramid schemes.
Incorrect. Ethereum has a lot of utility, has chain revenue (txs fees), and you can stake your ETH and generate yield.
Based on the end of your statement I think you're letting your bias get in your way.
On April 1, 2021, “The FileCoin Foundation” announced that they were donating 50,000 FileCoin to The Internet Archive, valued at $10 million. That announcement got a lot of PR for FileCoin and drove its price to its highest value ever - $237 - that same day. It never saw anything near those prices again.
Just a guess, but I bet the creators cashed out big time right after pumping their coin by announcing their generosity by press release.
FileCoin’s current price is $5.85.
A while ago, I contacted The Internet Archive to ask if they were able to sell their donated FileCoin at the price it was trading at when they received it. I didn’t receive a reply.