[HN Gopher] Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet A...
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Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-04-01 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.archive.org)
| AnonymousOne wrote:
| is there anyway to track the total energy cost of the Filecoin
| ecosystem?
| cecida wrote:
| Wasn't this the coin that was subject to a 51% attack only last
| month. It's a classic pump and dump shitcoin.
| purplecabbage77 wrote:
| Filecoin is actually built by Protocol Labs and Juan Benet, the
| same team that works on IPFS.
|
| I'm not saying there aren't plenty of pump and dump shitcoins
| out there, or that FIL is deserving of its current price, but I
| don't think it's fair to call it a "pump and dump shitcoin" :-)
| donaldtrump2024 wrote:
| > And I am donating 100k bunglemudgeons as well, which is a
| currency that only exists in my head.
|
| > Today it is the largest single donation to IA. Tomorrow based
| on the value of FIL, it may be the smallest single donation.
|
| > It's a classic pump and dump shitcoin.
|
| No wonder HN has replaced StackOverflow as the go to dumpster-
| fire for hate and snark online.
|
| This is a $10,000,000 donation to a non-profit that should be
| near and dear to users of this forum, yet the comment section is
| filled with drivel.
| klodolph wrote:
| I like the idea of a decentralized Internet Archive in theory,
| but I'm very skeptical about the idea of decentralized (as
| opposed to distributed) filesystems, and tying the whole system
| to a cryptocurrency seems like this creates additional volatility
| exactly in a situation where you want stability.
|
| Buying hard drives and sticking them in data centers is a very
| cost-effective, efficient way to store large amounts of data, and
| with careful design (Internet Archive definitely qualifies) you
| get amazing durability. The failure rate of hard disks is
| relatively well-known or "mostly" bounded and predictable, so you
| can fine-tune your data encoding to get a good tradeoff between
| storage efficiency, CPU usage, network usage, and durability.
|
| With a decentralized system, you're adding intermediaries with
| some amount of additional risk that is difficult to model. The
| idea is that these intermediaries have "leftover" storage which
| is basically free, and Filecoin lets them sell it. However, the
| risk that these intermediaries lose the data is difficult to
| model and so you would likely choose a wider encoding
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasure_code) with poorer storage
| efficiency and higher CPU usage.
|
| Meanwhile, the cost of buying storage outright is already quite
| low, and the cloud providers are already busy selling storage (or
| using it themselves) in high-IO applications like active
| databases, and this subsidizes raw storage (with low-I/O
| requirements). Essentially, if someone in the cloud needs a 2TB
| drive, the cloud provider can buy an 8TB drive instead, split it
| in half, and sell it as "2TB + priority I/O" and "6TB + best-
| effort I/O".
|
| Finally, in order to be stable long-term, Filecoin needs to
| provide enough income to miners so they can be profitable. I
| don't see a good story for how this can happen. The most
| profitable thing you can do per-byte is to sell "leftover"
| storage on existing systems that are not full, but this doesn't
| give you enough to cover overhead, so you would want to run a
| large operation. Once you are running a large operation, your
| costs would be similar to that of a cloud provider, but your
| customers would be choosing wider encodings with lower storage
| efficiency. If Filecoin were to turn into a common market for
| larger storage operations, it would then make sense to vet those
| operations and develop business relationships with them, because
| by reducing risk you could increase storage efficiency and reduce
| costs. There is a de facto way to do this already: several cloud
| providers implement the S3 API, so you can shop around fairly
| easily, as long as you are willing to transport the data.
|
| Short story is that distributed storage is in a race to the
| bottom with or without Filecoin, it's already "hyper-
| competitive", and I'm unconvinced that Filecoin provides benefits
| that outweight the drawbacks.
| Hamuko wrote:
| This reads like an April's Fools joke.
| mdip wrote:
| Knowing nothing about Filecoin, just reading the quotes ("Holy
| Crow"), I assumed it is.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| So what happens when someone puts password leaks or other
| security breaches onto FIL or another decentralized storage
| system? Compromising photos of individuals (revenge porn)?
| Underage pornography? Stolen credit card data? Critical state
| secrets or other sensitive information?
|
| I generally dislike the "DAE crytpo is bad because illegal
| activity" argument, but in the case of distributed file storage
| the harm profile is very different than "but it allows you to
| spend money on illegal things" with payment-only cryptos.
| Anything seedy you can do with bitcoin, you can also do with
| cash. The same is not true for centralized vs. decentralized
| cloud storage.
| jowsie wrote:
| You can already do this with regular old bitcoin.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Neither Filecoin nor IPFS guarantee content is available
| forever. In the general case of IPFS, _someone_ must be pinning
| it or someone must have recently downloaded it (pinning keeps
| it around until you unpin it, if you download it you may share
| it out for a period of time). So suppose someone _does_ upload
| some illegal content, if no one pins it or downloads it and the
| original node hosting it were to drop off (as may be reasonably
| expected if law enforcement becomes involved depending on
| _what_ the content is) then it will disappear from the network.
| IPFS does not forcibly distribute the content across the
| network, only when it 's accessed does it become distributed.
| And even then it's only temporary unless it's pinned and the
| pinning node remains online.
|
| Filecoin, being based on IPFS, will be similar but with the
| added limit of the content requiring payment. Without payment
| it would, presumably, disappear very quickly from the network.
|
| It's a very different style than, say, Freenet (or at least
| Freenet in the 00s, haven't looked at it recently) which makes
| it deliberately difficult to discover where content is being
| hosted and to remove it.
| wmf wrote:
| What will happen is hosts will delete the offending data and
| lose their deposit on the contract (which will probably be
| small enough to write off as "shrinkage").
| [deleted]
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| Well sort of defeats the purpose if hosts can do that, no?
| wmf wrote:
| What's the purpose of Filecoin?
| rodiger wrote:
| Stealing this from Reddit as it summarizes my feelings about
| Filecoin's reward structure being a little ponziesque at current
| prices:
|
| _" The primary demand for Filecoin is from people trying to mine
| it. It requires that you deposit filecoin for every chunk of
| storage you want to "seal" for mining. It also takes a long time
| to seal and you have to get to 10tb or you can't even mine. So
| people trying to build filecoin miners are likely the primary
| source of demand for filecoin. Then as the price goes up more
| people try to mine, but they also need to buy a ton of filecoin.
|
| People are definitely not spending billions to try and store shit
| on IPFS. It's people trying to buy filecoin to mine more
| filecoin. Sigh."_[0]
|
| That being said, the tech is pretty cool. And the funding scheme
| is no different from most PoS coins out there. Proof of Stake
| works best when there's already wide distribution of a coin. In
| the initial stages the game theory is tricky. This is all a long-
| winded way to say it's overpriced right now but could have a
| bright future.
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mhpaar/file...
| duskwuff wrote:
| And what's worse, the mining process has some rather absurd
| system requirements: 128+ GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD _cache_
| storage (separate from the data being stored!), and a high-end
| GPU is "recommended". The sense I get is that it's impossible
| to casually offer up some spare storage from a typical home
| system, or even from a NAS -- the system requirements
| effectively limit mining to people willing to spend a couple
| thousand dollars on hardware.
|
| https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/
| colllectorof wrote:
| This raises a giant red flag for me. Storage is storage. This
| is not like hash mining, which is based on probabilities. You
| either have the data or you don't. If you have the data, even
| partially, this should be useful to the system. I can
| conceive of no reason why a reasonably designed distributed
| storage system would have such insane requirements.
| pradn wrote:
| If you take a look at the top storage providers, there's
| dozens who are providing 10 PB+. These are folks that have
| invested millions to earn FileCoin.
|
| https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-
| stats?o...
|
| Moreover, it's greatly disingenuous to claim that this system
| lets casual users let their HD space given the system
| requirements are so high.
| VectorLock wrote:
| If you want to use spare space to "mine" crypto, look at Chia
| from the creator of BitTorrent.
|
| The space isn't used for anything useful like IPFS though.
| arsome wrote:
| That seems crazy, especially considering Sia and others have
| functioning alternatives with no such insane requirements.
| Maybe they're trying to corner some certain performance
| oriented market, but that guarantees nothing about network
| performance which I suspect will be a much larger impact than
| any of it.
| rodiger wrote:
| Yeah seems like a weird combination of both PoS and PoW which
| gets the best of neither. Would've been cool to see a novel
| PoW here that actually translates into actual "work" for the
| network.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| or "borrow" the hardware and power from their school/employer
| either without any authorization or for the ostensible
| purpose of "testing/burn-in"
| swiley wrote:
| Is 10TB an arbitrary size or does it fluctuate like the bitcoin
| difficulty?
|
| If it doesn't change then the whole thing is probably just
| going to crash eventually.
|
| EDIT: after looking at the mining pdf in the child comment this
| whole thing looks goofy. idk what to say.
| rodiger wrote:
| No, you don't _need_ 10TB. But you do need a crazy machine
| with 128GB+ of RAM.[0]
|
| [0] https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/mining-
| architectures/#protocol...
| ac29 wrote:
| That link makes it makes it sounds like you need three such
| machines, one of which requires 256GiB RAM. To store 10TB,
| which a commercial NAS could do with acceptable performance
| with maybe 1 or 2 GiB RAM, tops.
| google234123 wrote:
| Are they aware that 10TB is about 160$ in Hard drives>?
| StavrosK wrote:
| > And the funding scheme is no different from most PoS coins
| out there.
|
| "Proof of stake" or "Piece of shit"? Unfortunately it's
| legitimately hard to tell what each person means with this
| acronym.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| Clearly proof of stake. "Shitcoin" has monopolized the
| verbiage for, well, pieces of shit in crypto.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Oh, you are correct, thanks.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Proof of shit coins are much more energy efficient than
| wasteful proof of work. There's already tons of shit going
| waste all over the world that could be used to build
| distributed consensus in a fair and equitable way!
|
| After all, everybody poops.
| swiley wrote:
| You would think HN would like FIL since it's one of the more
| environmentally friendly coins. Maybe the BTC hate really is
| everyone feeling butthurt about not buying it on #bitcoin-otc in
| 2011.
|
| EDIT: NVM the whole thing is a mess
| duskwuff wrote:
| > it's one of the more environmentally friendly coins
|
| I'm not convinced that's even true. It's still a proof-of-work
| coin; the only real difference is that the work is storage-
| intensive.
| wmf wrote:
| There's a huge difference between proof of useless work and
| getting paid for storing real data.
| duskwuff wrote:
| The storage is incidental. Filecoin "storage miners" are
| required to perform work to prove that they're still
| storing the data. This work serves no purpose beyond acting
| as a proof of storage, and performing this work has
| nontrivial costs.
| colllectorof wrote:
| I like the _concept_ of incentivizing storage through a self-
| governing decentralized system. I don 't like that it's named
| "-coin" and that its website clearly trying to ride the wave of
| blockchain hype without explaining the basic economics of the
| system.
| zelly wrote:
| Nocoiners have already lost all hope. They're not even trying
| to FUD anymore.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| As usual, HN is not one person. Also, I think most people are
| pretty skeptical of anything -coin / -blockchain - like AI and
| Cyber it sounds like a lot of the money is spent on marketing
| and there's a good chance the whole thing is just a cash grab
| or a pump and dump.
|
| This is not against Filecoin specifically - I don't know it -,
| but if you tried to sell me "AI generated code enhancements",
| I'm going to be skeptical based on that name alone, as well.
| argvargc wrote:
| Article posted 1st April. Hopefully it's real?
|
| Donating nearly 0.1% of the currently available supply to
| archive.org would be pretty cool.
| pluc wrote:
| And I am donating 100k bunglemudgeons as well, which is a
| currency that only exists in my head.
| Fern_Blossom wrote:
| I literally just did a huge rip on crypto currencies the other
| day, mostly regarding bitcoin. However, there's one aspect to
| Filecoin that I do see as... potential is a strong word, but
| maybe appropriate still. It's not entirely fair to lump it in
| with other cryptocoins. There is some value behind it, in means
| of distributed storage. While I would argue it's more
| efficient, easier and all around better to use standard
| alternatives since Filecoin adds a layer of complexity to
| marginal benefit... I can never argue it's completely useless.
| There is some economic value backing it since it provides a
| service outside of just being a cryptocurrency.
|
| If I woke up from a 15 year coma and was quickly told about
| Bitcoin and Filecoin, one had a value of $200 each, the other
| $50k. Then asked which one was the $50k one? I'd first say,
| "Filecoin obviously" and second, please just kill me I don't
| want to live in this bizzaro reality.
| lifty wrote:
| Are your 100k bunglemudgeons exchangeable for $10 million?
| peytn wrote:
| On bunglemudgeonexchange.ru, yes. I'm seeing a ton of depth
| on their order book. Why not buy a few bunglemudgeons from me
| and see for yourself?
| lifty wrote:
| If you guarantee 100x returns, I'm in.
| peytn wrote:
| I guarantee 100x returns as long as you never sell.
| umvi wrote:
| Sure - easy.
|
| 1. Find a rich person with money that needs laundering (this
| is the hardest step)
|
| 2. Sell the "bunglemudgeons" (could just be a .txt doc that
| contains the phrase "100k bunglemudgeons") to the rich person
| in the form of an NFT for $10M
|
| 3. 100k Bunglemudgeons are now worth at least $10M
|
| 4. Rich person can now re-sell it to an alias of himself (or
| a rich friend) for an even greater amount to launder his
| dirty money
| sneak wrote:
| That's not how money laundering works.
| umvi wrote:
| How do people launder money with NFTs then?
| sneak wrote:
| They buy them from themselves, not by sending millions to
| some random stranger, never to be recovered.
| Jaxkr wrote:
| Two important advantages Filecoin has over bunglemudgeons are:
|
| 1. Filecoin has a market with liquidity. Archive.org could sell
| their coins for roughly $9.7m.
|
| 2. Filecoin can currently be used to purchase reliable cloud
| storage at a significantly lower cost than AWS or GCP.
|
| I can definitely relate to cynicism towards crypto/blockchain,
| particularly in the defi sector, but Filecoin is doing good
| work.
| ac29 wrote:
| > Filecoin can currently be used to purchase reliable cloud
| storage at a significantly lower cost than AWS or GCP.
|
| I spent a little while looking at their site and docs, and I
| cant find any information on what storage actually costs.
| Where are you finding this information?
| yabadubakta wrote:
| They should take the 9.7 million and manage the storage
| themselves. The thing is they could host filecoin rigs which
| also provide the storage so it's a win win for Filecoin and
| also internet archive
| malux85 wrote:
| What's the market value of bunglemudgeons on CoinMarketCap?
|
| Because filecoin right now is at 194USD and the internet
| archive can sell them on the open market, right now if they
| want, today.
| brighton36 wrote:
| Is this prestigious?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Today, the Filecoin Foundation announced a 50,000 FIL grant
| to the Internet Archive - the largest single donation in the
| digital library's 25-year history.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Today it is the largest single donation to IA. Tomorrow based
| on the value of FIL, it may be the smallest single donation.
| liquidise wrote:
| Filecoin, at it's _lowest_ value since inception, traded
| for ~ $4, which would still make this a $200k donation. I
| hope we can agree such a donation is still worthy of
| praise.
|
| Any currency risks devaluation in some form. Cryptos are
| orders of magnitude more volatile than USD, of course. That
| is both a curse and a blessing. This donation is evidence
| of that, but belittling this donation because of
| disagreements with the underlying tech does little to add
| to the conversation.
| mholm wrote:
| To those curious, this is worth around 10 million dollars USD as
| of today.
| brink wrote:
| It looks like people are dumping on the news. lol
|
| Edit: nvm. Realized that was an entire market dip.
| mholm wrote:
| Yeah. Was worth nearly 12 million a few hours ago.
| [deleted]
| henvic wrote:
| Sad when even the Internet Archive fall for the digital tulip
| mania.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
|
| Crypto currencies might have space and maybe someday a good one
| might appear, but so far, it's all a Ponzi scheme.
|
| Why not just build an application to mirror their data in a
| distributed manner using Torrent and let people support their
| efforts by downloading it?
| anonporridge wrote:
| While there's tons of unfounded mania going on in the crypto
| space, to paint it all as nothing more than Tulip mania is
| really pretty ignorant at this point.
| vmception wrote:
| Non-profits can accept assets of any kind, and it takes fifteen
| seconds to sell $10,000,000 worth of FIL for USD.
|
| It is likely that a majority of charitable contributions (any
| donation to a non-profit or from a non-profit) are transfers of
| assets with a wide spectrum of liquidity, mostly illiquid.
| Accepting an asset is not an indication of interest or
| speculation or bullishness, any contribution towards a non-
| profit only tells you that the donor was accepted.
|
| You extrapolated a lot for something you will never have
| information on, as the subsequent transactions will never be
| reported.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| So this isn't an April Fools post?
| throwaway012919 wrote:
| Obvious PR stunt. Hope they cash out soon.
| ignoranceprior wrote:
| The idea of making the Internet Archive decentralized is a very
| good one. It would be a real tragedy if the IA burned down like
| the Library of Alexandria did. I know Archive Team/Jason Scott
| attempted this a few years back with the IA.bak project but it
| seems like that died, so I hope this time turns out better.
|
| That said, I don't actually understand how cryptocurrency or
| blockchains help with distributed file storage. Are these
| "filecoins" actually useful for anything, like incentivizing
| people to make copies of files? I'm by default skeptical when I
| hear about cryptocurrencies because the majority of ICOs seem to
| be get-rich-schemes riding off the Bitcoin buzzwave that then
| fizzle out over time.
| [deleted]
| thebean11 wrote:
| > Are these "filecoins" actually useful for anything, like
| incentivizing people to make copies of files?
|
| Yes, that's exactly what they are. They incentive making
| copies, then periodically proving you have the copies.
| djwhitt wrote:
| People have to keep renewing the contract to pay for those
| copies though. Afaik there's nothing that guarantees people
| will maintain them indefinitely after the contract expires.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Yeah that's right, I'm not sure how you could possibly
| value or incentivize indefinite storage. All storage
| mediums are consumable and require upkeep, a "one time"
| pricing model doesn't really make sense.
| djwhitt wrote:
| Arweave (https://www.arweave.org/) is attempting it. Of
| course, we'll have to wait and see if they're successful.
| thebean11 wrote:
| I would assume that eventually the cost of "old storage"
| will be too much and new payments wouldn't be able to
| subsidize it anymore (sort of like a failing Ponzi
| scheme) but to be fair I haven't heard of this. Thanks
| for the link!
| djwhitt wrote:
| You're welcome! I have some questions about how the
| network is going to play out over time wrt mining
| centralization and access incentivization, but their
| overall funding model seems sound to me. It's based an
| endowment that pays out over time to fund storage mining.
| Their yellow paper (https://www.arweave.org/yellow-
| paper.pdf) is worth a read if you want to learn about all
| the details.
| progval wrote:
| IPFS devs commented on IA.bak back then, saying he would write
| a proposal to store IA.bak on IPFS:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9148576
|
| AFAICT, there was no follow up at the time, according to
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/i...
| ; so IA.bak went with git-annex, but it had issues given the
| scale of the project
| pradn wrote:
| From what I understand, Filecoin contracts are fixed-term. This
| means you need to read data back from the Filecoin network at
| the end of the term and negotiate another fixed-term contract
| to store those files again. Though Filecoin storage fees are
| low, isn't this back-and-forth a big pain for real archivists?
| I suppose you only need 1/n of the storage on your side if you
| stagger the data "withdrawal" and "deposit" actions. Does
| anyone have insight into this?
| henvic wrote:
| Decentralizing it would be far more simple if they provided
| something such as an application you could download and
| partially mirror some parts of it, for example.
|
| Eventually, given enough interest, they'd mirror everything.
| Maybe they could even build this on top of Torrent.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Or even straight on top of IPFS since there are existing HTTP
| gateways for IPFS to access the content and most of the
| archive is static in nature. Provide a client which can be
| used to coordinate between the numerous volunteers to ensure
| a wide (ideally full) backup of IA distributed over IPFS,
| paired with volunteer pinning of specific portions by
| interest groups and individuals. Their self-hosted IPFS
| node(s) would become the permanent seeds for this system and
| broader use of IPFS would ensure wider (though not guaranteed
| sans pinning) availability.
| kevincox wrote:
| I agree, a better route would probably be exposing the archive
| via IPFS. I wonder if they could split the archive like this:
|
| - Sites are archived to IPFS.
|
| - The URL -> Archive mapping is published in a merkle dag.
|
| This way people can help mirror the archive (or subsets of it)
| by replicating the IPFS archive. You can also separately mirror
| the merkle dag which would be relatively small. If sites are
| fairly predictable you could even crawl it yourself and verify
| that it matches the data that archive.org reported (although
| there are probably many sites that change on every request so
| the hash won't match exactly, but you could at least do some
| analysis/manual inspection on the diffs to check that
| archive.org appears to be reporting correct data).
| Groxx wrote:
| They effectively are doing this, including with IPFS:
| https://dweb.archive.org/details/home
|
| I'm not sure what the current state is though. And IPFS is
| basically just a protocol for storage, it doesn't _ensure /
| encourage_ storage in any way - that's the point of filecoin.
| pradn wrote:
| You hit the hammer on the nail. IPFS urls point to content-
| addressable data. These URLs can be pinned by anyone running
| an IPFS node. However, what's missing is an easy way to
| "seed" lists of IPFS files with whatever storage you have.
| Ideally, there's a way for me to choose to contribute - say -
| 30 GB of space to a particular project, and the system will
| take care of pinning the most-needed files, up to that
| storage limit. This would be useful for any number of public
| archival projects.
|
| I've seen efforts where people bring up a web page that tells
| you which torrents to seed, based on how many seeds are
| active. But this is manual work, and not too robust.
| kevincox wrote:
| I was thinking that most people would just pin the content
| that is most interesting to them. But it would be also to
| pin the rarest content. There is no reason that both can't
| exist to capture multiple motivations.
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