Opening the Filecoin Project Repos (opens in new tab)

I'm interested in this as well. Failure scenarios for their system are data and financial loss.

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.

The proof of storage is even trickier.

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.

If you add compression, it is pied piper.

Protocol Labs wont integrate filecoin use into IPFS?

@ianjdarrow from the linked thread here. To clarify a little – the idea isn’t that Filecoin would ever tell anyone they have to remove data of any type. Filecoin is open-source software that tons of storage miners will use across diverse legal and moral systems, and it’s important that those miners can make decisions about how what they store and to whom they serve it.

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.

From your link.

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?

Last I checked, FileCoin was just an incentive layer for IPFS, not a core part of the protocol. Close association between Protocol Labs and the Ethereum community doesn't inspire me with confidence, but as long as IPFS works without it, I'm happy.

it's possible that some miners choose to store their data on S3 or some other large/well known cloud provider. However, miners have other options as well. For instance, they could store their data in their own data centers or with more start-up storage providers without needing all the marketing resources that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. have.

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.

> What stops a filecoin miner from storing all replicas to S3?

Being undercut by Amazon running Filecoin on their own?

The fact that as a maintainer of a website with user-contributed content, you have no [up-front] control over whether someone stores illicit content on, and distributes it from, your server, seems like a dealbreaker.

Okay? You have... A thing? Probably a similar thing? If you must spam your own thing, at least tell us why we should care about your thing in contrast to the actual subject of the thread.