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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 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.