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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
What is the explanation for the steady rate of storage growth combined with apparently high churn [0] of peers on the Filecoin network?
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.)
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?
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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
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)
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
And precisely none of those things, even in aggregate, support whatever semblance of a point you're attempting to make. Maybe you ain't in the best of positions to be lecturing others about shitposting, eh bud?
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.
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.
The answer is: nobody knows, because nobody pays for anything with FileCoin. The services that get pointed to, like estuary, have the price of "free," and most of the incentives in the system are pumped in automatically to "reward suppliers" rather than there being any value transferred between people paying for storage and those providing storage.
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, 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
What is the value FileCoin is providing in this scenario though? I feel like there's a bait and switch here: proposition 1 is: FileCoin lubricates storage provider transactions by providing proof of storage, such that you can easily transact with a gigantic marketplace of vendors.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Two sources of storage provider revenues are block rewards (minting) and deal fees (paid between storage clients to storage providers). Indeed, there are real fiat hardware costs to providing storage/related services (cost of hardware, computation etc). Given that the network is fairly new, we expect that currently storage provider revenues come primarily from block rewards, and deal fees are minimal (as you noted, storage is cheap). In short, the network is subsidizing capacity onboarding through block rewards; FIL as a utility token has some intrinsic value (storage providers would not incur fiat operational expenses if they did not receive commensurate rewards in FIL). As the network matures and becomes more robust and trusted, rewards from block reward minting will naturally taper, and storage deal fees will constitute a growing share of storage provider revenues.
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.
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.
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.
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 :) )
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?
* 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.
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).
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.
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.
