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posted by martyb on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the 'flip'-a-coin? dept.

A blockchain-based cloud storage technology called Filecoin has already raised $52 million from investors. The company is poised to raise millions more on Thursday when it begins selling units of its bitcoin-like cryptocurrency to a larger set of wealthy investors.

Filecoin aims to disrupt conventional cloud-based storage platforms from Amazon and others. If it succeeds, the technology could be worth billions of dollars. But the company will need to overcome some significant hurdles first.

First and foremost, Filecoin's technology doesn't actually exist yet. The Filecoin team has done extensive research and planning, producing a series of white papers describing the technology it's building. But an actual, working Filecoin network is still months away. When it launches, Filecoin will compete with rival blockchain storage networks, including Sia, which has been available to the public for two years.

"Filecoin currently is just a white paper," Sia co-founder David Vorick told us earlier this week.

Have any Soylentils encountered or used blockchain storage, and if so what did you think of it?

Source: Ars Technica

Also at Medium, TechCrunch, and CoinDesk.


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  • (Score: 2) by drussell on Saturday August 12 2017, @08:26AM (8 children)

    by drussell (2678) on Saturday August 12 2017, @08:26AM (#552797) Journal

    Storing your data "in the cloud" is a risky endeavor to begin with, fraught with peril.

    After skimming that .pdf, I would say that "outsourcing" your data )as they call it) via filecoin is a complete WTF?!

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tonyPick on Saturday August 12 2017, @09:11AM (7 children)

    by tonyPick (1237) on Saturday August 12 2017, @09:11AM (#552804) Homepage Journal

    Actually it struck me as a fairly nice idea - the way I view it is that you're distributing storage amongst "many" storage providers, with redundancy, and using a cryptocurrency to run the market. The idea of distributed redundant storage struck me as way more reliable than a single entity handling the storage, even if the individual providers may actually be less reliable.

    Assuming the overall market is stable (big if) then managing the reliability woes of putting things on "someone else's computer" seems to be a big win for this model, and having the miners check the integrity of the data on a regular basis as part of the market function is a nice touch.

    Of course, in a world where I can buy 4TB for $100US off Amazon, then investing in this thing that doesn't exist to store data where most people don't need it when local storage is so cheap, and its harder to see how the cost of renting would compare to just buying? That would be the questionable part to me, but everybody's afraid of missing out on the next big thing I guess.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Saturday August 12 2017, @03:54PM (1 child)

      by hemocyanin (186) on Saturday August 12 2017, @03:54PM (#552876) Journal

      "blockchain storage"

      Does this mean that everyone in the world would be able to know where you've stashed your data, how much data you've stashed, and when you did the stashing. Even if the data is indecipherably encrypted (for a while at least), that would leave a lot of information hanging out in the public.

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:02PM

        by frojack (1554) on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:02PM (#552913) Journal

        I suspect its just to find your blocks in the swirling stew of blocks in the cloud.
        So instead of having them right at home in your own machines, you just put up a sign "hemocyanin-lakkjl/qi-iugu3jkahhhh3" and your photo collection comes home to roost. Taking not just the few milliseconds to access your NAS, but minutes, maybe hours.

        At best, it seems like a way to incentive-ize participation in a bit-torrent like storage hive.

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    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:55PM (3 children)

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:55PM (#552911) Journal

      Actually it struck me as a fairly nice idea - the way I view it is that you're distributing storage amongst "many" storage providers, with redundancy, and using a cryptocurrency to run the market. The idea of distributed redundant storage struck me as way more reliable than a single entity handling the storage, even if the individual providers may actually be less reliable.

      Well, DUH!
      We all know that, and distributed redundant storage has been a thing for a long time.
      The question is, why involve blockchains?
      Without a clear explanation of what features the blockchain part provides, security, privacy, encryption, read-tracking, write-tracking, etc, we are left wondering if we are playing another round of buzzword bingo.

      Then they add a bitcoin-esq feature and you start feeling like you are in a room full of used car salesmen.

      Is the currency aspect intended to attract all those people running terabyte hard drives or NAS boxes with nothing to store on them besides porn and pirated movies into joining the storage pool? If so THAT might be novel. way of federating under used excess storage.

      Would any small scale participant earn enough to pay the power bill? I'm guessing not. Lets rip off the peons and let them buy cheap, useless, or illegal crap on some dimly lit market that will redeem the bus tokens we hand out.

      It seems to me this is a way to spur sales of NAS boxes the way bitcoin spurred sales of GPUs.
      1) Buy a 4 Terabyte NAS. (or a couple thousand of them)
      2) Dump all your porn *cough* data on it.
      3) Join the federation
      4) Offer up your excess storage - maybe ALL of it.
      5) Watch your drive fill up.
      6) Notice that THEIR driver still says you have 4 Terabytes "free"
      7) Notice that THEIR driver says you have multiple petabytes for just a few filecoin a month.
      8 ...
      9 NOT Profit. (unless you sell NAS Boxes)

      No matter how cool sounding, or how much delicious techy paint you slather on the pig, you still can't get around the fact that you can sell something that costs REAL money to provide in exchange for imaginary money (that can't be spent anywhere else than the company store) and make ends meet.

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      • (Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:26PM (1 child)

        by frojack (1554) on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:26PM (#552924) Journal

        TFS should have included this single paragraph from the White Paper:

        Filecoin is a decentralized storage network that turns cloud storage into an algorithmic market. The
        market runs on a blockchain with a native protocol token (also called “Filecoin”), which miners earn
        by providing storage to clients. Conversely, clients spend Filecoin hiring miners to store or distribute
        data. As with Bitcoin, Filecoin miners compete to mine blocks with sizable rewards, but Filecoin mining
        power is proportional to active storage, which directly provides a useful service to clients (unlike Bitcoin
        mining, whose usefulness is limited to maintaining blockchain consensus). This creates a powerful incentive
        for miners to amass as much storage as they can, and rent it out to clients. The protocol weaves
        these amassed resources into a self-healing storage network that anybody in the world can rely on. The
        network achieves robustness by replicating and dispersing content, while automatically detecting and
        repairing replica failures. Clients can select replication parameters to protect against different threat
        models. The protocol’s cloud storage network also provides security, as content is encrypted end-to-end
        at the client, while storage providers do not have access to decryption keys. Filecoin works as an incentive
        layer on top of IPFS [1], which can provide storage infrastructure for any data. It is especially useful
        for decentralizing data, building and running distributed applications, and implementing smart contracts.

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        • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Monday August 14 2017, @01:40PM

          by Fnord666 (652) on Monday August 14 2017, @01:40PM (#553645) Homepage
          Fair point and I agree. I'll try to look at my submissions a bit better for points that could be clarified. Thanks for the feedback!
      • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday August 12 2017, @10:37PM

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 12 2017, @10:37PM (#553004) Journal

        ...you're distributing storage amongst "many" storage providers, with redundancy, and using a cryptocurrency...distributed redundant...more reliable...individual providers...less reliable.

        Well, DUH! We all know that

        While this view may or may not be the prevailing one, I would hardly say that we "all" know it. There are plenty of people, even tech people, who have little to no exposure to the idea.

        I personally, for example, don't have much of a handle on it.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 17 2017, @03:20AM

      by frojack (1554) on Thursday August 17 2017, @03:20AM (#555109) Journal

      I read through it, not totally fathoming all the math.

      But I did find a few things that I thought needed some work?

      As Driven [soylentnews.org] indicated below, there is no geographic region mechanism to enforce replication on widely dispersed storage. The required replication could actually be on the drive right next to the first copy. The client can specify the number of replicates desired, but can't specify they should be in different data centers or at least not in the same river valley.

      There is no way a storage provider can meet their replication requirement by pushing the replicates to other providers - because the mechanism for proving replication is all within one storage provider.

      There is a built in data hostage situation. Since the price of storage and the price of recovery are negotiated separately, it is entirely possible that a miner (storage provider) with ill-intent could low bid the data storage then high bid the data retrieval price, such that if the held all of the replicates across their several servers they could charge a high price.

      Storage providers can determine if they hold most of the replicates. They might not know you had stored the data in separate storage providers, but there is enough information in the block chain to know if they hold a lot of any one group of data.
      The public nature of all the storage deals means that anyone can determine if they (or any other storage provider) provided ALL or most storage deals to Client X.

      Storage providers that are LARGE, (Amazon, Google, etc) are heavily favored by the algorithm of deciding who will win the bid for the next block of storage. Should the US Government decide to get into the storage market they could game the system such that they end up with just about all of someone's data. (And perhaps have the brute force to decrypt it).

      They prevent data deduplication. Seems unlikely this would happen anyway, (encryption) but their explanation of why is not at all convincing.

      On the other hand, they do provide for "Smart Contracts" which could bundle X retrieval instances into the storage price so you could assure the retrieval price would not make data recovery too costly. Or a mechanism where one Storage Provider would provide replicates in other parts of the network, not necessarily restricted to their own data centers.

      (But then they turn around and suggest use of smart contracts for silly uses like DNS, unique asset keys for tracking property, etc.)

      All in all I think it has a lot of merit. It doesn't wast machine cycles just to make things hard to calculate. It uses physical resources to provide a service.

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