Edit for clarity: This is the closest I was able to find, and is short on details. https://github.com/filecoin-project/specs/blob/master/proofs...
For example, if there is a loophole in "proof of spacetime" then you might be paying for your data to be backed up 8 times and have it only backed up once. You find out that was the case only when that node disappears and your data is lost.
A multi-account attack (sybil?) can just store the file once, and pretend to store it N times, inflating the cost (attacker revenue) by N fold. I can't see how this is avoidable other than being an authority with insight into most of the internet traffic structure. ...Maybe it is designed to only work within china?
last question was a joke, but note that every single multi-account protection requires a breach of anonymity. That's why most modern distributed protocols try to completely work around any benefit of having multiple accounts. Storage, by definition, can't.
> Filecoin is a decentralized storage network that turns the world’s unused storage into an algorithmic market, creating a permanent, decentralized future for the web. Miners earn the native protocol token (also called “filecoin”) by providing data storage and/or retrieval. Clients pay miners to store or distribute data and to retrieve it.
Filecoin is a project of Protocol Labs which also created the DAG based hypermedia protocol IPFS.
"In order to comply the with law, a miner who agreed to store the bad data must not serve it, and delete the data from its hard drive as soon as possible."
Of course, you have to do this using incentives to avoid breaking the protocol. This is actually one of the reasons it makes sense for storage and retrieval markets to be separate. If you’re being paid a fee to serve a file you have, you should rationally want to serve it unless there’s a compelling reason not to.
- Is the mentioned blacklist implemented?
- Will it be enabled by default?
- Will the legal entity responsible for the blacklist be US-based?
Storage miners can absolutely decline retrieval requests, at any time, for any reason.
Storage miners have to be able to access the data themselves for the purposes of the PoSt, but since the PoSt is a zero knowledge proof, none of that data ever leaves the miner. The PoSt simply proves to everyone else that they actually have the data, without revealing the data (thats how we keep it compact).
I found this interesting too. Could a miner save on bandwidth costs by just hoarding a bunch of data, but never serving it up? I guess that they must have a solution for that, but is the solution decentralized?
Hard to protect systems from irrational attacks like that (we know from building a similar system). They are quite transparant about their "unsolved-problems": https://github.com/filecoin-project/specs/issues/63
*EDIT: and not just for serving it, but for serving it quickly.
from their site:
> Are you in the middle of a dense city? Do you have access to very fast Internet pipes? Have a rack in a carrier hotel? Perfect! In Filecoin's Retrieval Market, miners get rewarded for delivering content quickly. This makes the retrieval market good for miners who have low-latency, high-bandwidth connections to lots of users (but not necessarily the most disk space).
I've always suspected this will be the case with Filecoin. Whether or not it is profitable depends on the ratio between storage and bandwidth costs. If you can store stuff cheaply but your bandwidth is expensive, then it make sense to store junk data if your hard drives are not full.
Filecoin really has two incentive mechanisms: A proof-of-storage-hardware mining scheme similar to proof of work which does not preclude storing useful data, along with a retrieval market which should make storing useful data more profitable than not in most cases.
One of the use cases I'm looking forward to seeing from Filecoin though is for regular folks with desktops that have extra storage capacity to just rent that capacity out. Right now the extra 500GB of storage space I have is just an unutilized resource waiting to be made use of. Additionally, it allows people to basically swap data capacity so I'll store 500GB of data for other people, and in return I'll use that Filecoin to pay other people to store my data. This is could be very useful for personal data backup where my primary requirement is that my data live somewhere else that is not on my computer.
Being undercut by Amazon running Filecoin on their own?
https://github.com/solana-labs/solana
Kudos to filecoin! And choosing Apache 2.0 as the license.
Filecoin is great!
We are also building a blockchain that is based around Verifiable Delay Functions and has been open source from day one.
VDFs can be used to track time in a permissionless network in a way that works before consensus. Which opens up a wealth of distributed systems optimizations that involve a synchronized clock. If that sound interesting, check out https://github.com/solana-labs/solana