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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 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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