Filecoin is probably one of the few cryptocurrencies with intrinsic value, even if the amount is debatable. IPFS has stood the test of time and seems like a good protocol; and a cryptocurrency that can be used to pay for storage is not valueless.
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/
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.
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.
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.
source was personal communication, sorry
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-...
Anyone with two or more brain cells realizes that this sort of stuff is a scam.
The news is publicity to stir up investors.
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
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