IPFS is really just a mix of a torrent tracker with a torrent client, but once IPFS VMs start paying for themselves, people will sign-up in masses. I guess that's what Filecoin is about.
Edit: The way I see filecoin working is anyone can post a reward for a file and once the file is provided, the reward is paid. In other words, it's bit like a brokerage that connects downloaders with uploaders. The difficultly is that this brokerage needs to be distributed and resilient.
I am yet to write more about this, but one thing that bothers me with Filecoin: the economics don't add up. The price per GB stored will tend to reach an equilibrium around the commodity price - i.e, costs of disks+computers+electricity+internet. Unless I am missing something, if the price gets higher, more people would buy disks and put them online, bringing the price down.
If that is true, it means that a node can only be profitable if you are freeloading. And if you are freeloading, any price you get will be good which means that it tends to go even further down, perhaps even below the commodity cost. I may be missing something, but I really don't see this going beyond techies with spare disks playing around and definitely no way to run a Filecoin node on a VPS profitably.
That is actually the intent of filecoin. In perfect competition, which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. The reason Amazon and other companies are able to make a profit selling cloud storage is because there is not yet perfect competition.
Right now if I wanted to compete with Amazon, I could buy 2 or 3 petabytes of storage space and some bandwidth. But nobody would trust me not to lose their data. This is the differentiation that makes cloud storage less of a commodity than it could be. The goal with filecoin is to make it so you don't have to trust me, just some general guarantees about the filecoin network. If amazon for some reason was selling storage on this network, I could compete with them on equal footing (and whoever sold it more cheaply would win).
Many commodities are in close-to-perfect competition. For instance, I don't care if grain comes from England or France, just that it's cheap. While it is very hard to make an economic profit selling grain, many people do farm grain and make enough money to support themselves (The money you pay your workers to survive is one of the costs of producing grain. That's true even if the only worker is you)
If you could make a profit by running a filecoin node on a VPS, everyone would do that. By competing with each other you'd all bring the price down and down until it was no longer more profitable than selling any other commodity (and maybe even lower). So you're right to not expect to be able to do that.
> which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit.
No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded)
> While it is very hard to make an economic profit selling grain, many people do farm grain and many enough money.
The analogy here would be to get people to (a) "farm" disks (and electricity/internet) and (b) with some profit to justify their work. (a) is impossible (except for freeloaders) and you agree with me that (b) seems to be unlikely.
So the question is: who would be interested in taking the supply side of the filecoin network, when there is no profit to be made?
> > which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit.
> No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded)
You cut off the first half of my sentence. The full sentence was:
> In perfect competition, which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit.
Oil is not in perfect competition because of OPEC, a gigantic state-sanctioned cartel. Since there's imperfect competition, there can be economic profit.
> who would be interested in taking the supply side of the filecoin network, when there is no profit to be made?
If we assume the filecoin network is technically able to do what it's supposed to, there will likely be profit to be made. Just not economic profit. Economic profit is different from accounting profit because economic profit takes into account opportunity cost.
In the real world many people, such as grain farmers, do seem to be interested in taking the supply side of a transaction even when their economic profit is 0 (or negative). I don't see why filecoin would be any different.
I am sorry. Just like I am missing how someone would work on a farm without any expectation of return on their investment, I fail to see how "there is profit to be made", however you want to call it.
Also, with farming at least there is the notion of resource constraints. To be a farmer one needs to have access to land and dedicate some time to actually work on it.
With storage, unless the hard disk manufacturers start holding their production and use it to offer storage directly, what is the resource that other people can't have?
What would stop anyone to see that Filecoin network bids of (say) $1/TB-month and think "oh, I can buy some disks and offer $0.95/TB-month, and I will get my money back in 3 months", only to be outbid by someone who thinks they can offer $0.90/TB-month and recoup costs in six-months", until we get to the point where the time to break-even gets longer than the lifetime of the disks...
> No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded)
You could hardly say a market dominated by a giant state-sanctioned cartel was a good example of a commodity market in the state of perfect competition.
> So the question is: who would be interested in taking the supply side of the filecoin network, when there is no profit to be made?
There would likely be some short term economic profits at the beginning, which would attract market entrants. The economic profit would tend to zero over time, but keep in mind economic profit as a concept incorporates the notion of the entrepreneur paying themselves a competitive wage for their time.
Point still stands. All else being equal, oil from Saudi Arabia is the same as the oil from Canada or Denmark. If you don't want to use oil as an example, use coffee, milk, chicken meat, soy, cotton, oranges, electricity, potable water...
> There would likely be some short term economic profits at the beginning, which would attract market entrants.
The first market entrants are the ones selling extra capacity they have. For those that already have sunk costs of the disks, sure, they can make a profit on this. My point is that once that capacity is gone and there is more demand for data, people will have to actually go and buy disks and let them run 24/7, and this would cost more per GB stored than they will be able to sell.
The point is perfect competition, highlight on perfect. In oil business there are profits because competition is not perfect. Note that perfect here is rather a theoretical, economic term. In reality, market regulations and peoples socio-economic attitutes prevent a perfect competition.
The mentioned missing trust could be alleviated by IPFS becoming a widely trusted, distributed, unstoppable service.
My point is exactly that if Filecoin does get to be a place that gets "perfect competition" as you say, then there is no profit to be made. If there is no profit to be made, what is the economic incentive to spend on disks/internet/computers and be a storage seller?
Before you say "there is a market for those with excess capacity", answer me this: if the market is focused on those with excess capacity, what mechanisms are in place this "perfect competition" to remove all chance of profit and get the price of excess capacity to reach basically zero?
I get IPFS, I think. I do believe that it technically it makes sense. What I don't get is Filecoin.
That's the economic flaw in all of this - Amazon have economies of scale and access to cheap power and network connectivity and that means smaller competitors will be locked out of the market.
You're not going to be running a node on your spare capacity that brings in more than your costs, in fact unless you're a datacentre operator, you're going to be making a loss.
In the end it favours big centralised services, and IPFS (if it ever takes off) just becomes a rival API to S3.
Cryptocoin miners' profit is largely based on "access to cheap power and network connectivity", and many of them run fairly large-scale operations but nowhere near the same scale as Amazon. No reason why a "file coin" should be any different.
But they do centralise. And they do quickly go out of profitability for those with some spare compute power at home, into the hands of those with cheap power and specialised equipment who can undercut and outcompete them.
You are right - there is no reason this would be different. That specialised equipment is storage space here.
That is missing the point. No one doubts that it is possible to bring down the costs of storage and its infrastructure. The point is that no matter how low these costs are all nodes are driven to undercut each other until their profitability is zero.
There's a lot of spare capacity in personal devices, getting _anything_ out of that capacity is nice and means you'll have people gladly undercutting Amazon and friends. Maybe limited and not at the same level of availability but still competition.
Ok, now go tell that to the ones that put 257 million USD on the Filecoin ICO and are expecting profits on a growing network!
> undercutting Amazon and friends.
That is so short-sighted. Amazon storage is not priced only due to the cost of storage. If it were, Wasabi would be stealing all of their customers given they charge "only" $6/TB-month, and I could go steal all of their customers because I have a cluster of Minio Servers that cost me $3.50/TB-month.
People are paying Amazon and the other major players a premium is not due to lack of competition or collusion between them or because they are price-sensitive. If they are (like I am), they would figure out how to setup Minio/Ceph and run their own servers.
I think you're conflating different definitions of "profit". There's at least three important ones:
1) Accounting profit: revenue - expenses. This is colloquially what most people mean when they say "profit". To break even you just need to make enough money to cover your explicit expenses. In your example, you would need to make more in Filecoin income than you spent in disks/electricity/etc.
2) "Normal profit": this is a technical term in microeconomics. Basically this takes into account opportunity cost; the cost of not doing some other profitable thing with your time/money. By these standards, to break even you'd not only have to cover the cost of disks/electricity but also the "opportunity costs" of whatever else you could have been doing with those disks/electricity (like mining Bitcoin), or whatever you could have been doing if you never even purchased those disks to begin with (like investing in the S&P or whatever).
3) "Excess" or "economic" profits. These are extra profits on top of whatever you earn in #2. This is the part that goes to 0 for commodities like milk/gasoline/Filecoin but is non-zero for differentiated products like iphones.
For Filecoin specifically, I would expect that normal profits would probably be above the raw costs of disks and electricity, since it takes some effort to purchase and administer all that hardware, but probably below the cost of renting a VPS, since a VPS is typically used for more profitable things than just sitting around and holding stuff on disk.
Thanks for the breakdown of "profit" definitions, but I still think that all of these observations are largely missing the point...
> I would expect that normal profits would probably be above the raw costs of disks and electricity, since it takes some effort to purchase and administer all that hardware
No, it doesn't. Most of the people selling the idea of distributed file storage (Filecoin, Storj, Sia) are thinking about getting the excess capacity of everyone's disks and turning into a marketplace. Getting the hardware and administering are sunk costs. Participants are only supposed to download a client, indicate the payout method and ensure that they don't turn off their computers. It's a one-off effort. Even understanding (or pretending to understand) all of the crypto-babble in order to get paid is something that people are supposed to do only once.
This is the part where these different projects are working out their market dynamics and where I get lost about Filecoin:
- With Storj (and Sia, I believe) the price of the data is determined by the governors of the network. Storj last rollout was paying $5/TB-month for every client. There is no bidding war. As long as you could prove you held the data for that period, you would get the money. This makes sense for me - no matter if I am some dude in a basement with a disk on my laptop or if I am a datacenter and I get to charge more than $5/TB-month from my usual customers, my excess capacity can be sold for $5/TB-month and this becomes a simple matter of waiting for the demand to grow.
- With Filecoin the idea is to have a completely open market, where each node says how much they are willing to charge for the data, and what are the constraints (availability, time to retrieval, etc). This leads to possible (inevitable?) bidding wars. No matter the demand curve, there is always someone who will be willing to put the lowest price possible that gets them "something". For excess capacity, this "something" can be effectively zero or whatever is the lowest price possible in the bid. And if it can be zero, the only thing I see helping them would be if the nodes starting cooperating with each other and acting like a cartel.
To be honest, even Storj and Sia are hard sells for me. I wouldn't bet on these projects for a long run and I don't believe that they will actually threaten the current players, but at least I understand the incentive structure. With Filecoin, it can only be profitable when the demand for data storage grows faster than the storage capacity from the network, but no so profitable as to attract people from the demand-side to the supply-side. It's crazy.
If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks at home to offer enough disk capacity for everyone, then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts. If all that capacity gets used up, then supply and demand will cause the price to go up until more people add capacity. If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts, so the price of cloud hosting will be the upper bound on Filecoin hosting prices. Then anyone that can undercut the cloud hosts will be free to run their own Filecoin nodes, and the price will be pushed down as people do this.
That means average home user bandwidth costs will go up? The unlimited download, flat-rate, fair use plan your home lan connects to the internet can be provided because your connection is lingering 90% of its time practically unused (besides all sorts of home appliance phoning home).
If you are using this seemingly free connection capacity, internet access rates should go up, because there is no such thing as a free lunch?
> If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks at home to offer enough disk capacity for everyone, then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts.
Only if these enthusiasts are willing to take a loss on power.
> If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts
Or the cloud hosts themselves will enter the market. The upper bound on the market will be their costs, which will always be lower than the costs of enthusiasts using spare disks at home.
> An 8TB HDD doesn't use more power than a 100GB one.
But access to it by third parties does, it changes the usage model and increases your electricity costs. This may not be a lot but it doesn't have to be a lot to make your costs more than those of a datacentre operator, not to mention you also need to be online all the time.
The dream of edge-node storage utilisation has never survived in the face of economic analysis.
It is not a matter of size. It is a matter of availability.
If I only have my data on a disk, I can turn it off anytime. If I am hosting someone else's data and I want to get paid for it, I need to keep the computer running 24/7/365. That costs quite a bit.
> If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks (...) then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts
Ok. Agreed.
> If all that capacity gets used up, then supply and demand will cause the price to go up until more people add capacity.
Agreed.
> If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts.
Not necessarily. I can just buy more disks and run locally, whether for hosting my data or to sell the space on the network, which brings the price back to people-selling-spare-disk-space-for-cheap level.
> Then anyone that can undercut the cloud hosts will be free to run their own Filecoin nodes, and the price will be pushed down as people do this.
Yeah, but that is kind of my point. Everyone will undercut each other until the price hits the bottom. The equilibrium will be at most the commodity price.
This looks a lot like the common fallacy (in blockchain circles) that anything that is _possible_ is also _inevitable_. There is no reason at all why IPFS VMs would be profitable in the long term, especially since VM hosters are not stupid and would just dedicate their capacity to IPFS themselves, cutting out the middle man.
Of course, in the shorter term there are many different scenarios where the market is slower to adjust. The STORJ network has been subsidizing their node operators with VC money for example, leading to some excellent unit economics for the early adopters.
My interpretation of this message is that Google spends $20 billions/quarter and as the ad revenue has dried up, Google will have to spend its $100 billions of savings or consider other options. As far as employees are concerned, $6 billions goes to engineers, $4 to sales & marketing, $2 to administration.
It's more like which type of freedom do you want...right now we're anything but free. I mean you can freely move about w/ a privacy sucking app, or you can stay home in quarantine indefinitely but keep your privacy - but we know where you're at - you're at home, duh.
They need to tie these w/ an UBI at least then people are getting something for their privacy unlike FB which basically steals your data and sells it.
I'd rather let people follow the social distancing policy and stop this mental gymnastics about the necessity of tracking. P.S. I'm in the US, so I can actually freely move now.
...and it hurts America in the long term. It's a completely backwards idea to take away opportunities from the society members with highest potential. The inevitable outcome of this will be stagnation.
Cymatics. It's sound interference drawing some peculiarly complex, but cool looking patterns. Edit: I've tried to find actual math behind those pictures and only found piles of pseudoscience. There's a CymaScope app that draws them, but they are super secretive about it. I suspect that it's just the interference pattern in a tibetian bowl or a cup of tea. It's almost suspicious that wikipedia has detailed scientific articles with hardcore math on dumb topics, but not only wikipedia, but the entire math community seems to carefully avoid this topic. Edit2: I think the math behind this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mode. In this case, the picture can likely be derived by numerically solving the diff equation of a sound wave with a boundary condition on a circle. Edit3: This lead me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membr... with Bessel equations and all the good stuff. Solving it (numerically) would supposedly create the cool picture of the 432 Hz note. Edit4: And I've returned to where I began: cymatics, cymaglyphs and that cymascope. It gives an impression of a lazy pseudoscience at first, because of the somewhat sloppy language they use, but after watching a John Stuart Reid's presentation (watch it, it's only 40 mins), I had to change my opinion. The indeed capture the interference patterns created by sound in a bowl of water and a picture of that rapidly moving pattern is called a "cymaglyphs". I'd say, visualizing sound and music is a solved problem and the solution is called cymaglyphs. Obviously, an app can't use a bowl of water to solve the diff equations, but it can do that numerically with a decent precision, and apply some smoothing techniques to deal with the rapid evolution of these cymaglyphs.
Hi! Thanks for your comment! It’s interesting. I don’t think there is any magic about cymatics per se: it depends on how sound interacts with physical objects, and these objects have certain resonant frequencies, which is when the start to vibrate “interestingly”. I like it as a potential visualisation idea though!
That above isn't just an idea, it's the idea of sound visualization. It's a bijective projection between sound and shape that turns nice sound into nice shapes and vice versa. The analog sound visualizer would be an air filled glass sphere put next to speakers, if only we could see air. All you need is a performant software simulation of it. The only problem to solve here is visualizing the rapidly changing patterns in a comprehensible way. P.S. actually, we can see air patterns if we fill that glass sphere with dust. Edit: In fact, that's been done already. Find the "Yantara Jiro voice made visible". They used a cymascope (a water bowl in lab conditions) and captured the formed patterns with a fast camera. A water bowl is indeed a great music visualizer.
We only need to apply it to a circle and rewrite the solver in C. This will give us a visualizer for a single frequency.
Then we run FFT, run the solver for all frequencies, observe that the final solution is a linear combination of the individual solutions and apply the rainbow coloring to corresponding frequencies.
This solver needs to be kinda fast to run at 15 fps, but luckily, different frequencies can be solved in parallel. Most likely, changing the input frequency a bit will change the solution only a little, and so we could pre-solve the frequency range with sufficient density, cache them and rapidly derive actual solutions by interpolation.
Bonus points for using complex numbers. The boundary condition in a singing bowl is u(x0, t) = A sin(Bt) where x0 denotes the circular boundary. Since real numbers are boring, we could expand the problem into the complex plane: u(x0, t) = A exp(iBt). In this case the solution u(x, t) would be in complex plane also, where the absolute value |u| is the amplitude, or pixel opacity on our visualization, and the angular coordinate arg u would be maybe color of that pixel?
This seems certainly possible. But I don't know how would you display all of the frequencies that are present in music at the same time. Usually, they only play one or two frequencies and look at the result. Mash them all together? Maybe can be tried in the future. I was thinking to do something "inspired by" this cymatics instead (when I get around to it). Thanks for all the interesting thoughts!!
I'm pretty sure that interference pattern from a sum of two waves is the sum of individual interference patterns. This should follow from how the wave equation looks.
The real physical solver doesn't do FFT, though. It makes the boundary circle vibrate with the input sound wave and effectively solves the wave equation where the boundary condition is u(0,t)=f(t) - the input sound.
I've run some calculations that solving the wave equation in real time would be infeasible. The convergence depends on the Courant number, which basically says that the grid step dx must be c*dt, i.e. the sound must travel on grid step per one time step. Since sound travels at 1.5 km/s in water, the grid needs to be super dense and 1 second of sound would need around 1 petaflops of calculations.
Here's another observation from an armchair economist. Money flow upwards by forces of debt and contracts. If we short circuit the very top with the very bottom, money will start flowing inside this loop. If we don't form this loop, the powerful vacuum cleaner at the top will break this mechanism. In other words, the amount of money in the system doesn't matter much. What matters is that money form a steady flow pattern.
This sounds reasonable. Right now people need money mostly for rent and mortgages. So the solution is to pay people money so they can afford rent, I.e. loop money right back up to the banks and capital holders.
This is the good old trick often done by startups: founders & investors create and generously give themselves a lot of shares, diluting the share of rank-and-file employees to zero.
Here's some deep analysis from a armchair economist. $6T goes to the US "board members": their share of the company (I mean, the planet's resources) grows, but the share of rank-and-file American employees (I mean citizens), probably shrinks. My guess: $5T will be hoarded by the US elites, $1T will trickle down to citizens, the world's GDP will shrink from $80T to $50T and the US's GDP will shrink from $20T to $15T. If these hand wavy assumptions are correct, the US citizens' share will grow by 5%, from 20/80=25% to 15/50=30%, while the elites will get an extra 5/50=10% share of everything. Everybody outside the 12 mile zone around the US land is going to lose.
TBH, $10M per senator per year is only $1 billion/year - a rounding error for America. And when a senator has F-U money, there is little incentive for him to take dirty money (true sociopaths will take both, of course).
I would argue significantly better than our current system. It would allow more diversity as well as bring knowledge about government back into communities.
In research? Usually not much and thats if you can even manage to find a job. But Chemical engineers are usually well paid and can easily get a job out of college. Though maybe that is changing since the oil industry is usually a big part of the job market. And with most of the energy sector currently on the brink of collapse...
I don't get it. The Big Pharma makes some serious money and it needs qualified chemists to make new drugs. The complexity of making these drugs is so high that there should only few chemists good enough for the job.
If they don't have grants, $0. If they work in a lab for someone who has a grant, $0, but with credit on the papers (that's why there's 35 authors on the paper, 1 person got paid, the rest got name credit in the hopes that they get noticed by a commercial company wanting to monetize this process, so in the future they get their own gig). If they work in a commercial lab, maybe they make a little.
That's why I'm clueless at all the politicians and journalists claiming we have a STEM shortage, we need to boost STEM education, need more kids interested in STEM careers...
STEM = science technology engineering math
CS/software has huge demand and salaries to go with it (yay, ads)
Traditional (civil/mech/ee/chem/etc) engineering is OK. You'll never be rich but you'll always be comfortable. (I've had plumbers claim theye make more than me).
Science and math have really bleak career outlooks. Tenure track faculty jobs are a crapshoot. Industry jobs are scarce. Most people I know from college that went into the sciences are either still stuck in PhD or postdocs, or quit after BS/MS and now working as lab technicians or equivalent. Not even glorified, just plain old overqualified lab techs in QC departments and such.
"Information referred to in this report is derived from the Canadian National Census 2011 National Household Survey (NHS). According to the 2011 NHS1, only about 30 per cent of employed individuals in Ontario who held a bachelor’s degree or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers. Fully two-thirds of engineering-degree holders were not working in engineering at all. Many had jobs that didn’t necessarily require a university degree."
To be fair, plumbers do make more than the average code jockey doing maintenance type programming at regular computer jobs (outside of the faang universe, there are a lot of average paying computing/coding jobs - think programming forms for web stores, coming up with fillable pdf forms for ordering, etc)
Plumbing is an essential service, and in emergencies, hourly rates can go into $300+/hour. So why don't everyone go into plumbing? Cause it's a shit job (/s)
Jokes aside, my take on the science job contradiction is that current American society does not respect nor want the products of science.
Think vaccines - when we have an emergency, everyone wants one, but in "normal times", think about where the pockets of the anti-vaccination movement have taken hold: rich communities in California where science should have had the best chance of surviving, but is struggling.
Communities in the American Southern states who are having trouble keeping evolution and science curriculums in tact are another example.
The solutions to the "STEM shortage" are usually to ramp up training (BS/MS/PhD students, occasionally postdocs), without actually creating viable jobs for these folks when they finish. Many smart people don't want to get involved in a cutthroat job market, so either leave the field or never enter it. (The people who "left" science from my grad school cohort were all very smart; almost all of them could have cut it)
Meanwhile, cutting-edge research is mostly done by trainees who are learning as they go. This is important--we need future scientists as well as current ones--but it limits the projects and pace of research.
This is totally fixable too--fund more staff scientist positions and dial down the number of trainees. The NIH funds thousands of studentships and just a few (~50?) "research specialists."
You do get paid, though not very much ($15-30k for a PhD student, $40-65k for a postdoc), especially compared to a tech salary. The uncertainty is a lot higher too.
As for why people work at those salaries, there's more to life than money. Discovering stuff is fun and working on stuff that really helps people (not in the "expensive subscription juice service" sort of way) is rewarding. People teach for the same reason.
OTOH, taking a job at these wages is a luxury and chases good people out of the field. My spouse and I are both academic research scientists, but anything happens to one of us, the other's out ASAP.
Edit: The way I see filecoin working is anyone can post a reward for a file and once the file is provided, the reward is paid. In other words, it's bit like a brokerage that connects downloaders with uploaders. The difficultly is that this brokerage needs to be distributed and resilient.