There needs to be an incentive for users to host other people's data. Centralized servers and advertising is the current model. Blockchains with tokenized value is another model.
I don't think you need to incentivise people to host each other's data. People will host their own data, and they may host others' data for free like in BitTorrent.
I am skeptical of the need for filecoin-like systems in the first place. If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
The hammer here is both. Cryptocurrrency is solving an incentive problem here that doesn't really exist. If anything, File hosters should not be the ones that pay for the hosting, it should be whoever is retriving the file, and those funds should go towards relay nodes and hosting nodes. filecoin's incentive structure essentially replicates that of the existing internet, where file hosters will have to find some other form of income like advertisements or tracking to cover their costs.
Here is a comment I made yesterday on the matter:
>Instead of "liking" or "upvoting" a post on a centralized forum, why not "rehost" or "forward" a post on a decentralized forum: essentially seeding it like in BitTorrent or "pinning" it in IPFS. "Followers" of a user donate their storage and bandwidth to them, combating bureaucratic attacks like delisting and DDoS against popular users.
Yes they do. See: bittorrent and webtorrent-based streaming services.
My friend uses private trackers and his download speeds are unbelievable. But even on public trackers the download speeds are quite good. It does not take that many seeders to serve even a giant video file like an HD film, because even if upload speeds are a fraction of download speeds, the total upload bandwidth will be multiplied by the number of seeders. In fact, even an adequately-seeded torrent is orders of magnitudes faster to download than a youtube video or HTTP file for example.
People like to keep backups of their favorite creator's works. On youtube, when a popular youtube video is taken down, it will usually be reuploaded by fans. From this, we can probably surmise that maybe 1/100000 viewers will archive a given video. That's basically enough to keep a video alive forever on bittorrent, even throughout times of peak viewership as downloaders will also seed the chunks that they have.
> Yes they do. See: bittorrent and webtorrent-based streaming services.
No, people do not have crazy upload bandwidth. A private BitTorrent tracker group is immaterial. They're maintaining ad hoc infrastructure just by leaving a machine on 24/7 and maintaining favorable U/D ratios. Many groups also maintain seed boxes.
This doesn't apply to the population at large. Most people are on phones or laptops on WiFi. They're not running 24/7 and in the case of phones a background service isn't even viable. Many people are on CGNAT and can't "serve" data without some intermediary infrastructure.
As for retention, that's a pipe dream. A torrent more than a few years old may as well not exist unless it is extremely popular and maintains its popularity. There's innumerable dead torrents with no seeders.
>This doesn't apply to the population at large. Most people are on phones or laptops on WiFi. They're not running 24/7 and in the case of phones a background service isn't even viable.
They don't need to serve 24/7, they just need to be available 24/7. Do people not have their phones on and connected to the internet 24/7 in case they receive a message? For social media, most people just share text posts, pictures or a few small videos. BitTorrent is a worst-case scenario where it would be only used for large files like movies.
>Many people are on CGNAT and can't "serve" data without some intermediary infrastructure.
There are ways to get around CGNAT without STUN/TURN.
>As for retention, that's a pipe dream. A torrent more than a few years old may as well not exist unless it is extremely popular and maintains its popularity. There's innumerable dead torrents with no seeders.
This is desirable behavior in social media. Popular content will have longer retention, unpopular content will have shorter retention. Web forums like this one emulate a "fake" version of this with the weighted voting/time system that favors upvoted posts and disfavors old posts.
> Do people not have their phones on and connected to the internet 24/7 in case they receive a message?
A device able to receive a notification is not the same as listening on a socket 24/7. Push notifications on mobile go through the platform's push notification system lest they kill the device's battery. A push notification doesn't wake up a device and power up all the radios to stream masses of data.
Apps on mobile devices can be killed at any time, they're extremely unreliable as servers of content. Laptops are little better as servers of content.
I don't understand why you'd want social media content to only favor popular and recent content. Why would you want a built-in memory hole in the system?
> I don't think you need to incentivise people to host each other's data.
Bitcoin is worth a trillion dollar. Meanwhile 20+ years of effort into creating P2P networks has resulted in pretty much nothing. No Linux distributions are hosted on P2P. No source control is on P2P. No messaging. Nothing of significance. Just a few tech demos here and there.
Proper incentives can make all the difference and given the utter failure of getting any non-incentivised P2P off the ground in the last two decades, I think it's safe to say, it will be necessary. I don't see much point in repeating what hasn't worked in the past.
> and they may host others' data for free like in BitTorrent
BitTorrent isn't free. All the fancy piracy sites have share ratios. The public stuff more often than not has 0 seeders, lots of leechers and is just a lot of dead torrents in general. You are better off just using a centralized share hoster. Even your average Linux distribution agrees. BitTorrent might still be offered for ISO downloads, but it's hardly ever the default anymore, it's all back to plain old HTTPS.
Bitcoin is """"worth"""" a trillion dollars. It's not a free money machine, It's is a shitty payment system, not a P2P network unless you are sharing your blog over OP_RETURN.
>Meanwhile 20+ years of effort into creating P2P networks has resulted in pretty much nothing
IDK bittorrrent and IPFS just work without inventing a free money machine.
You can download linux install disks over BitTorrent.
>No source control is on P2P
With a system like Git there is no need for such a centralized system. Each user has their own copy of the tree.
>BitTorrent isn't free
Bullshit. It is free. Go on TPB, it's still up. I use it every day and it is leagues faster than any alternative.
If someone sells 100 billion USD of bitcoins, the rest won't be worth 900 billion USD any more. A market price does not work that way. The rest would probably be worth another 100 billion or nothing at all. The price would drop even while selling off the first 10%, so even getting 10% of the nominal value out could be impossible when owning every last one at the start.
Or to put it another way: No one, at any point, put that much money into the system.
Also, it costs our environment a lot. Soon I would join the ranks of luddites, if science and anything digital was not that much more interesting to me than plainly surviving.
Server offering person Alice: If I want to use the service, I want to use the service, not get cryptocoin shares. And I usually want stuff on the internet for free.
Server or service using person Bob:
If I want to make money by hosting, I need someone to pay for my hosting-mined coins.
I don't understand as to who in this overview is willing to pay for a place on the blockchain with fiat currency? Someone needs to pay Alice for the efforts she has put into hosting, but who transfers something worth real money to here?
Even the author stated that he wants to use a blockchain for user identification, not monetary incentive. But perhaps he means identification is what is granted to you, no money involved.
But that can't be it either: So you can host a server, to gain the right to use the server? No, that is the status quo.
Lets take a look what happens if you do not run your own server:
So you host a more or less public server for others as the scenario proposed here. A client connects, and sends that that shall be stored in a blockchain (i.e. append only, publicly distributed database) to upload [1] and later confirm their identity. When not running the server, who says that the server is not malicious and uses a different identity for the federated network than it displays to the client that connected to it?
[1] Something like the the Web of Trust exists between existing servers, or the server will have to spend a resource like having coins or a history of already signed up users to gain the right to add user identities to the blockchain?
The Proof of Stake/Work paragraph above probably now again applies for true "trustless" systems, that require full client (i.e. technically server node) equals user identity.
The incentive for me is that the information becomes off-line first. I've been on Scuttlebutt for 5 years now, and all of my discussions are available to me to go back to and expand upon whenever I want, no matter if I'm connected to the internet or not.
Necro-posting (bringing up old discussions) becomes a viable option, as does scouring through old information.
What is more interesting to me, is utilizing this functionality for something beyond a social network, something more productive like an ERP system, yet allowing the social aspect of collaboration improve such a platform.
