[HN Gopher] Filecoin Virtual Machine - Polyglot, WASM-based exec...
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Filecoin Virtual Machine - Polyglot, WASM-based execution
environment
Author : capableweb
Score : 81 points
Date : 2022-07-12 10:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (filecoin.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (filecoin.io)
| e19293001 wrote:
| White paper says Filecoin heavily rely on zk-SNARKs.
| momack2 wrote:
| Yep! The SNARKiest network out there I believe!
| https://research.protocol.ai/sites/snarks/
| sub7 wrote:
| No discussion of Filecoin is complete without talking about how
| much miners got paid per gb per hour for the past few years
| (hint: they covered the cost of their SSD in < 1 hour at one
| point)
|
| 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
| davidatbu wrote:
| I'd love to get more clarity on this: are you saying that
| FileCoin's innovation of "proof-of-storage blockchain" is
| inherently useless (or useless in comparison to centralized
| alternatives, like AWS's S3), and therefore FileCoin is a
| money-grab? Or are you saying that the incentive structure
| employed was unfairly favorable to only some participants in
| the system? Or are you saying something else?
|
| I am trying to form informed opinions on this space, so I'd
| really appreciate an answer!
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| Why exactly do you call S3 "centralized"? You can distribute
| it around the world if you choose to.
| yellowapple wrote:
| S3 is owned and operated by a single entity (Amazon), with
| all data stored on and served by that single entity's
| servers - i.e. it's centralized.
|
| 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.
| davidatbu wrote:
| In this case, I'm happy to use another adjective like
| "traditional cloud" or something. My inquiry is into why
| @sub7 thinks FileCoin is a money-grab.
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| Almost all coins are money-grabs. At this stage I default
| to assuming a coin is a money grab, and expect them to
| convince me it's not. Maybe the person you were talking
| to is the same.
| davidatbu wrote:
| @sub7 specifically called out FileCoin as a money grab, I
| don't understand their reasoning (which might be because
| I'm a newbie to FileCoin/web3). And from @sub7's reply to
| @TheIronYuppie, it doesn't look like they are willing to
| explain further.
|
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| > or useless in comparison to centralized alternatives
|
| 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.
| davidatbu wrote:
| In this case, I'm happy to use another adjective like
| "traditional cloud" or something. My inquiry is into why
| @sub7 thinks FileCoin is a money-grab.
| momack2 wrote:
| Hm, I've taken a look at some of the Storage Provider ROI
| dashboards and AFAIK numbers aren't anything like that -- so
| not sure what timeframe or cost of goods you're extrapolating
| from. (ex https://fgas.io/)
|
| 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)
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| I'm sorry, but you'll need to explain this a lot more.
|
| 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.
| sub7 wrote:
| My comment had no questions, but thanks for making yourself
| available. I'll be happy to share all kinds of details from
| 2017 onwards, but only with someone from the SEC/CFTC. This,
| sadly, is very correct. I am the source.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > I am the source.
|
| And the rest of us should believe you despite your refusal
| to articulate any sort of rationale for your conclusion...
| why, exactly?
| greatpostman wrote:
| Word on the street is that the low filecoin price, and low future
| price prospects mean that this crypto isn't profitable for miners
| and will eventually fail. The coin economics also mean that VCs
| vest slowly, with constant selling pressure on a coin that no one
| uses. The economics don't work out, it's a money scheme
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| Can't respond to "word on the street" (i guess my streets have
| different words?), but I am more than happy to respond to any
| detailed questions you have! There's also a ton of public
| research (for example
| https://twitter.com/MessariCrypto/status/1546894197671821320 -
| amount stored on Filecoin grew at 128% quarter over quarter).
|
| Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at
| Protocol Labs.
| greatpostman wrote:
| Appreciate your response and my apologies if I am incorrect.
| But what I have heard is the following:
|
| 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.
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| Unfortunately, I can't comment on the price of the coin -
| it's determined by the market, and we/the Filecoin
| community is just focused on delivering useful stuff. If
| you want market speculation, there's tons of sites out
| there that will do that for you.
|
| 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
| [deleted]
| davidatbu wrote:
| Interestingly, @sub7 had the opposite impression (if I
| understood them correctly), which is that miners got
| compensated way too much. But they _also_ concluded that
| FileCoin a money grab.
|
| 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?
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| There's no wheat. The entirety of web3 is a series of ponzi-
| like schemes to pump up the price of some token and dump it
| on unsuspecting users. When someone is trying to sell you a
| currency, they're not trying to sell you a product. They're
| trying to get you to inflate the value of it so the miners
| can realize their profits, while you get stuck holding the
| tokens that will then change value randomly. And even if
| there were any merit to any of the claims made by web3
| companies (there isn't), by definition most of these web3
| projects/startups would fail and collapse to nothing anyway,
| making the token worthless, and losing everything the holders
| have.
|
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| Fundamentally, Web3 is a suite of technologies to solve
| problems that are irrelevant to most people. But the
| technology is cool, interesting and new.
|
| 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.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| Fundamentally, Web3 can't actually solve any of those
| problems because the technology doesn't actually do
| anything, besides money laundering, and siphoning money
| away to miners and whales. The technology also isn't new,
| distributed databases are several decades old, proof of
| work was originally developed for email spam filtering,
| etc. I've found it only "cool and interesting" from a
| purely entertainment perspective, like if the money was
| fake video game money and you didn't actually care what
| happened to it. But even then it gets boring real quick
| because you'll easily find that the trading patterns are
| all either completely random or are heavily manipulated.
|
| 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.
| ETH_start wrote:
| Web3 provides distributed consensus that enforces the
| immutability of a virtual machine protocol. 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.
| davidatbu wrote:
| Sincerely appreciate your comments!
|
| 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.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > There's no wheat. The entirety of web3 is a series of
| ponzi-like schemes to pump up the price of some token and
| dump it on unsuspecting users.
|
| 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).
| psKama wrote:
| Smart contracts + decentralized storage is a great idea but since
| the beginning to this date, IPFS has been totally
| unreliable/unstable for me. Whenever I try to load a web page
| hosted on IPFS or whatever app which uses IPFS as backend (e.g.
| audios), 80% chance it simply doesn't load. I just hope this
| update addresses stability issues as well as introducing smart
| contracts.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The Pinata paid account gateway has worked pretty well for me.
| The $1000/mo for 100k pins screwed me though. But I may keep an
| account for the gateway since I am under 100k now.
| capableweb wrote:
| Have you always tried to run it on the same network? Might be
| something in your setup. I agree that it can sometimes be
| flaky, but usually adjusting the settings for the daemon solves
| the issue for me, either it's connected to too many peers
| (basically saturating all my available bandwidth) or too few.
|
| 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.
| traverseda wrote:
| I've stored over 1PB to dev/null over the year's. Retrieval
| is the real problem :p
| yellowapple wrote:
| The infinite compression ratio is unbeatable.
| capableweb wrote:
| I guess we have wildly different expectations of what
| "stored" means :)
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| One of the things we're well aware of is the huge
| opportunity/need for better gateways. What you're seeing is
| actually the gateway failing (not IPFS) so _technically_ ipfs
| is doing fine. NOT THAT THAT MATTERS IF YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO
| LOAD A WEB PAGE - WE KNOW! WE PROMISE! :)
|
| 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.
| easrng wrote:
| Using a local IPFS node doesn't usually work much better. Or
| at least it hasn't for me. Been a little while since I
| deleted IPFS desktop since I wasn't using it enough to
| justify its resource usage.
| cowtools wrote:
| I would reccomend just using go-ipfs with the browser
| addon.
| naillo wrote:
| I've the same experience roughly. The one recent happy finding
| I found though is that using the 'ipfs.io' link on library
| genesis is generally much faster (and as reliable) than the
| other mirror links. Kinda gave me hope that there's something
| to the ipfs idea after all.
| davidatbu wrote:
| Can someone explain to me what potential applications are
| unlocked by the addition of on-chain execution (the FileCoin VM)
| to a proof-of-storage backed blockchain (ie, FileCoin)?
|
| 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?
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| Your best bet is to browse through here -
| https://fvm.filecoin.io/ - there are A TON.
|
| 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.
| davidatbu wrote:
| Thank you!! I'm super intrigued by the potential applications
| listed under "Data DAOs"(coming from an ML background :) ).
|
| 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).
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| Yup! Your best bet is to check this out -
| https://github.com/filecoin-project/ref-fvm. Our
| documentation is still SUPER raw, it's very early. But
| there are lots of tests and examples in there.
|
| Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at
| Protocol Labs.
| momack2 wrote:
| You have 2 main pathways for building on FVM: 1. (available
| sooner) Building an EVM smart contract that then interfaces
| with Filecoin's built-in actors. This will use existing EVM
| smart contract dev tools like HardHat, Truffle, Remix,
| Metamask, etc - and most contracts will likely be written
| in solidity (or any other EVM compatible language) 2.
| Native Rust smart contracts (or any language that compiles
| to run directly in the wasm FVM runtime). There is less
| tooling available for this today (though there are a few
| WIP SDKs being built in the Early Builders program), but
| maybe more accessible if you don't know solidity.
|
| 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
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Are you still with MS?
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| No :) I'm at Protocol Labs
| vosper wrote:
| So how much does it cost to store 1gb of data for one month
| on/with filecoin? I looked all over the site and there was a lot
| of talk about it being cheap but no prices. Is there some way to
| compare cost and reliability to S3?
|
| On account of the word "coin" being in the name, I have a feeling
| the answer isn't simple.
| madsbuch wrote:
| https://file.app/
|
| 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 :) )
| ilaksh wrote:
| Take a look at web3.storage and Filebase for IPFS pinning.
| Pinata if you know it will be a small amount of if you are
| rich.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There is virtually no way to really answer that. People quoting
| the nominal dollar cost are misleading you. Nobody can buy hard
| drives and keep them running and connected to the Internet for
| $0.10 per PB per month. The fact that they're willing to offer
| you that price anyway presumably means they're actually getting
| paid in some shitcoin they hope will go to the moon. If it
| doesn't, then you'll find out what it was really costing. The
| other possibility is the global demand is so low that hard
| drive owners who already found some other way to fund their
| capex are just charging peanuts for the slack in otherwise idle
| disk space, but that is inherently a pricing model that can't
| scale, like airlines giving away seats on a plane that is not
| going to meet capacity but needed to fly anyway to keep a route
| alive.
| davidatbu wrote:
| I think it's currenlty free? https://web3.storage/
| squishy47 wrote:
| currently seems to be $0.0000001 USD for 1GB for 30 days
| https://file.app/
| compsciphd wrote:
| so it costs 10c a month to store 1PB?
| dannyobrien wrote:
| My back-of-the-envelope calculations put it closer to
| $2-$10 per petabyte. The network is most attractive right
| now for clients who have large amounts (>1Pib) of archival
| data, although it's also good for acting as a cache-of-
| last-resort for IPFS. Think Amazon Glacier.
|
| 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.
| vesinisa wrote:
| How do you plan to independently verify storage
| retrieval? A neutral party? How many?
| dannyobrien wrote:
| With the proviso that I am _woefully_ behind on reading
| up on the retrieval market developments, I understand
| that there 's a few projects being built in parallel with
| different emphasis. One model is essentially a P2P CDN,
| where the verification would be distributed across,
| essentially, IPFS nodes: https://pl-
| strflt.notion.site/Filecoin-Saturn-efc122f123f344...
|
| 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.
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| This is broadly correct! It's remarkably cheap. As other
| commenters have noted, you'll want to handle
| reproduction/etc, which is a bit more work, but still many
| orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else out there.
|
| 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > for free forever
|
| Translation: Free for maybe about 5 years if the company
| doesn't fold or less if it does
| dpe82 wrote:
| > many orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else out
| there
|
| How does this work? Are other providers earning many orders
| of magnitude in profit, or are filecoin's storage costs
| being subsidized somehow?
| apatil wrote:
| It seems to me that, at some level, they must be
| subsidized by new buyers of filecoin. It's hard to
| imagine anyone providing storage so cheaply even if they
| didn't make any profit at all. Miner revenues have to
| come from somewhere.
|
| 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?
| dannyobrien wrote:
| So the initial capital investment is supported by the
| value of the coin, and that's what gets the network to
| its current capacity of c.17 EiB
| (https://dashboard.starboard.ventures/dashboard ) .
| Committing storage to the network gets increases the
| probability of gaining new filecoin, so there's always an
| incentive there to grow the network's size, and once you
| have that storage available, there's an additional
| incentive to seek out deals to use the space.
|
| 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
| dpe82 wrote:
| The network doesn't exist in a vacuum and that 17EiB
| isn't free. People had to buy real hard drives using
| dollars (or whatever) and they have ongoing opex to keep
| them spinning and connected to the network. Those dollars
| come from _somewhere_. If you 're getting storage from
| the network for less than the amortized capex and opex of
| those drives then it's being subsidized, either by the
| owners of the hardware (if they're mining at a loss) or
| by people buying filecoin for purposes other than paying
| for storage.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Apparently that does not include data redundancy. You must
| take care of that yourself by buying the same storage from
| multiple vendors: https://docs.filecoin.io/about-
| filecoin/faq/#after-i-made-a-...
|
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Apparently that does not include data redundancy
|
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| The problem here is end-hosting transparency. How Amazon
| and S3 and the other providers structure themselves to
| ensure redundancy is fairly well known.
|
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Pin on IPFS with vendors using totally different
| networks. There is also Sia and Storj.
| TheIronYuppie wrote:
| Interestingly, this is PRECISELY what FVM will help
| enable.
|
| 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.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| A few things work in the network's favor in this
| situation (disclosure: I work at the Filecoin Foundation:
| I guess David and I are tag-teaming this). Firstly, the
| proofs that storage providers have to provide to the
| network are designed to work per replication. So you
| can't store just one copy, and claim you're multiple
| providers storing multiple copies.
|
| 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.
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