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Comment by jothi | Hacker News Reader

How different is it from Storjcoin ?

Storj doesn't make any technical innovations, their plan is essentially "make some nice looking web apps and let other people worry about inventing the things we need". Storjcoin is a standard blockchain, but actually isn't even neccessary at all.

Filecoin actually addresses the technical challenges in building something like this, and maybe Storj will end up using it in their stack.

I spoke with super3, the Storj founder earlier today, and he was going over how they'll go about providing Proof of Storage. I'm not qualified to explain it myself, but expect a revised whitepaper in the next couple weeks that goes over it in detail.

At first glance the concepts may seem similar, but this is a different thing altogether. Storj is a service layered on top of other blockchains. Filecoin is a new blockchain protocol itself, with its own contributions: mining construction, use of proof-of-retrievability, put/get as transactions, and more. Read: http://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf

Soon will have simpler explanation. :)

Both smell like a scam, "coincidentally" today storj started fundraising by getting people to send them bitcoins for useless storjcoins they created, the worst part is people falling for such a scam, then again there's a fool born every minute which is a business model a lot of companies rely on.

In this case and in storjcoin case the actors behind it all remain anonymous

I can understand why -- with all the scams out there -- that would be one reaction. But note that Filecoin makes important technical contributions on top of the Bitcoin protocol. You can read the paper here: http://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf

FWIW, we aren't really anonymous. Neither in the storj case (you can find who they are in their website), nor in the Filecoin case. (hi!)

Apologies for being skeptical, your whitepaper does seem to be more indepth unlike the Storj scam which will probably unravel soon

If this filecoin does take off and does what is being promised I will personally add hundreds of terrabytes of storage from our storage servers.

But seeing what Storj are doing I am extremely sceptical so please understand where I am coming from.

Understood! Stay tuned :) We're working hard to upgrade internet infrastructure with the nice properties cryptocurrencies can give us.

And, by the way, see http://static.benet.ai/t/ipfs.pdf -- https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs -- Filecoin's sister protocol.

Howdy! So this, I take it, is you? :) http://juan.benet.ai/about/

In any case, congrats on the launch. I've only skimmed the white paper so far, but the filecoin.io concept looks promising.

The Storj developers aren't anonymous at all...Their names and photographs are posted in their pitch deck, and they're active on reddit. The Storjcoins won't be useless either; they'll be the native cryptocurrency in their apps, and from what I understand they intend to add the ability to send data directly to an address in the future.

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