Technology AND marketing of decentralized crypto

[TPTB_need_war]

Note this discussion began in the "Technology vs. Marketing. Which is more important?" thread. Please read that thread first before read this one. At least up until my last post in that thread as follows:

Thank you for your comments. Same respect back to you.

Edit: I think this thread wants to be about Technology vs. Marketing and I want to discuss more in depth Technology AND Marketing, so I think a new thread is more appropriate. Also I can't tolerate the personal attacks any more (because I am losing too much time explaining about myself...which is irrelevant to my research), so I need to operate from a moderated thread. Hope you understand my reason.

I am starting a new thread because I want to discuss more in depth the technology and marketing of decentralized crypto, because I think they are inseparable and not one more important than the other. And so I want to continue the analysis of which markets and technologies are valid for decentralized crypto.

This thread is self-moderated because I will delete any off-topic, time wasting trolling at my sole discretion. And that includes thus who attempt to obscure trolling in nonsense posts that don't many any sense whatsoever (which includes replying to a troll post). I won't waste time making any explanations as to why I deleted a post. Nevertheless, no one who is sincerely on topic will be censored, even if I disagree with their opinion or appraisal of the facts. I have been very tolerant in my other self-moderated thread, allowing endless trolling. This thread I will not allow any personal attacks on anyone and that applies to myself as well. Stay on topic please. If we reach a situation where a poster continues to repeat a myopia that I think should have been understood already, then after many attempts at trying to clear up a difference of viewpoint, I will ask that we stop discussing that viewpoint and that poster can create another thread and link to it. Just because we don't need to go on and on and on and on, as that won't help anyone understand. But normally we can resolve such multi-page (long-winded) misunderstandings such as this example.

I will also delete posts that quote a very long prior post. Please quote the relevant snippet of a long post instead.

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[enhu]

There are some great products which doesn't reached the market due to its failed marketing. Its all really about marketing and in fact companies just want to use the word "SUPER" even when their products aren't really super just because of marketing. but because of marketing, it worked and sold millions.

technology may be great but may also be useless without people using it.

[TPTB_need_war]

I agree technology and marketing are both required; and moreover the marketing research needs to be done at the same time as the technological design, because they impact each other (unless one is simply doing academic research with no requirement to necessarily tap a market). Note I am referring to more than just promotion. I am referring to the strategy about who will use the technology, why, and relative advantages and disadvantages compared to centralized options for the same markets. So I want to continue the analysis of various potential markets for decentralized crypto and the technologies required. And to analyze if those technologies have flaws. I will continue the direction I was on in my next post. And if anyone else raises any other prospective markets to discuss or investigate, then I may research those as well. Others should feel free to also discuss their research/analysis on these matters on any markets (and respective technologies) applicable to decentralized crypto.

[stoat]

Maybe you should market your coin to women?  Or Arabs? 

These are the 2 untapped markets of crypto.  Women and Arabs.

[TPTB_need_war]

Maybe you should market your coin to women?  Or Arabs? 

These are the 2 untapped markets of crypto.  Women and Arabs.

That is not an entirely invalid point, but I think we can also discuss marketing strategies that not just in terms of gender or ethnic demographics. We can also consider genres of applications.

[Xeelee]

I would even say, that unfortunately marketing makes a part of around 70% and tech just 30% if I check out the Top 20 crypto currencies. There is a lot of hype done by media and forum attention and the tech is often just the second thing.

[TPTB_need_war]

I would even say, that unfortunately marketing makes a part of around 70% and tech just 30% if I check out the Top 20 crypto currencies. There is a lot of hype done by media and forum attention and the tech is often just the second thing.

I am interested in analyzing the marketing and technology required to have significant quantity of actual users. Most of the Top 20 crypto currencies other than Bitcoin don't have any usership (zilch!), other than the speculators who are trading the coin.

Let's try to stay on topic. If you want to refer to a P&D marketed to speculators as a marketing strategy, then yes that is true but it is doesn't require any discussion. It is obvious that is what most altcoins are. I am interested in discussing real market strategies and respective technology for significant user adoption.

I still however think your point is valid even if we are not referring to the Top 20 altcoins, in that marketing strategy is absolutely essential (otherwise there is no market) and the technology is an implementation detail. Nevetheless technological flaws can render marketing a failure (but often not when the only marketing strategy was a short-term P&D because the technology never gets stress tested as there isn't any usership).

Marketing to speculators is easy. Perhaps I could have pocketed a $million doing it had I been so inclined in 2014. Simply make up a bunch of convincing bullshit and sell an ICO (and sneak in a premine after the fact as well). It would violate my ethics, but others are not so inhibited. Having a well respected forum member as one of the developers can also help the success. But this is getting somewhat more difficult now, because some speculators are becoming more astute and some of the mania from 2013 has worn off.

[TPTB_need_war]

It is necessary to quote this longish post from another thread to bring the context into this thread.

Note that any solutions to the problem of ISPs blocking P2P apps that involve a TURN (when STUN tunneling fails or is blocked), VPN, or other server in the middle, defeat the entire point of extracting the value of the bandwidth allocation of users provided by their ISPs, because then one is paying for the bandwidth of the server to relay the shards.

If Storj and MaidSafe max out the consumption of each user's upload bandwidth (thus leeching off users with higher allocations charging the costs to those users' ISPs), they will also be blocked by ISPs. Additionally STUN tunnelling often fails and thus a TURN relay server has to be employed (or using the other peers as relays thus leeching the upload bandwidth of those ISPs who don't block tunneling).

In short, P2P for bandwidth consumption between ISP hosted user accounts is not going to be reliable. Many users will have frustrations when trying to be a storage provider. It will not be the case that every user in the system can also be a storage provider. And it will probably end up being the case that the most efficient storage providers will be hosted on dedicated servers.

In other words, it is a fantasy to think we can get decentralized file storage without paying for it.

We can try to design decentralized, permissionless file systems that correctly incentivize the storage and bandwidth providers, and the users of the system need to pay for it somehow. Whether or not these can remain permissionless given the need to host these on servers is open to further contemplation and study. Most all hosting providers include in their Terms of Sevice a restriction on hosting illegal copyrighted content, so unless one can provide a mechanism for which illegal content is removed from the system, it seems to me that hosts will be forced to ban the protocol (system).

So where I am headed with this line of thinking is that we ought to just give up on illegal content and illegal uses of anonymity. It isn't going to work. It is a fantasy.

Continuing my analysis, the other advantage of decentralized storage is durability and availability. This is a facet of permissionless in the sense that no one entity has a monopoly on the storage. It is not permissionless in the sense of allowing illegal activity as explained upthread (because the storage will hosted on servers, even those are owned/managed by different entities, they all are regulated by the law reflected in the hosts' Terms of Service).

So I am envisioning the possibility to design a system for decentralized file storage where the users pay the storage providers, but the storage providers are decentralized entities (even though they are all high performance hosted providers and not ISP user clients).

In this case, I think microtransactions is the only way it can be done decentralized. If we instead attempt to aggregate a monthly use plan (or similarly analogous aggregations), then some centralized party will be in charge of paying the decentralized entities, so then it is not decentralized.

So therefor I have just identified a potential market for microtransactions that can't be offered by centrally owned cloud services.

Alternatively, Storj and Maidsafe are paying storage providers coins for proving they are storing data, then data is exchanged in a tit-for-tat[1]. If used with ISP user clients as storage providers, this will have performance weaknesses as well as being economically a theft paradigm in support of Net Neutrality oligarchy and taxation (for the reasons I explained upthread). But a user can't do a tit-for-tax exchange if user is not also a storage provider, thus afaics Storj and Maidsafe are forcing every user to be a storage provider. Otherwise they need to use some form of upload bandwidth theft model such akin to Bittorrent's optimistic unchoking. The only way to fix Storj and Maidsafe is for them to adopt a microtransaction payment model so users can pay for the upload and storage costs to decentralized providers.

So therefor I have explained why Storj and Maidsafe are fundamentally flawed. And I have explained why decentralized file storage can ONLY be done with microtransactions.

Next we need to reason about the viability of the markets for decentralized file storage and also the technical viability/tradeoffs. We need to not only think about ability to prove the data has been retained by some provider, but also about how to enforce against the storage of illegal content (otherwise I have argued upthread that the entire plan is flawed since hosts' Terms of Service will likely block protocols/systems which can allow copyrighted material to be stored without recourse by injured parties).

[1] Note Storj also alludes to microtransactions, so perhaps the tit-for-tat exchange only applies to Maidsafe. I will study this more.

Page 14 of the Storj white paper makes it clear they are relying on a propagation full node security model, which we have entirely discredited in public forum discussions I have had with monsterer and smooth over the past month or so. Storj, Maidsafe, and Sia are incompletely specified systems, and frankly Storj, Maidsafe, Sia, and Permacoin look like fantasies trying to sell speculators a bridge to no where.

Before exploring the potential markets for decentralized file storage, I would first like to analyze more deeply the technological viability.

Availability

First if we are not employing ISP user clients as storage providers, thus not stealing upload bandwidth from ISP user accounts (as I had explained in the prior thread where the quote above originates), and thus not able to use the unused storage space of user computers (i.e. we are using then decentralized/duplicated hosted server storage providers), then any redundancy of data storage will incur the increased cost of duplicated storage. However, note that duplicated storage would be required for a centralized storage provider as well (since it would require redundancy for durability of data) and with decentralized copies of data, each provider need not build in internal redundancy as it can require the data (after loss, e.g. due to storage drive failure) from the other providers in the decentralized system. Also with bandwidth costing roughly $1 - $2 per TB (e.g. hivelocity.net) and data center HDDs roughly $0.03 per GB ($30 per TB), a file accessed more than say 100 times is going to be dominated by bandwidth (and CPU) costs. Btw, this is why Google has created a pseudo-offline storage class for infrequently accessed files which reduces costs to $0.01 per GB probably by using recently invented higher latency drive technologies.

Durability

The goal is to insure a copy of the data is always stored and thus the data is never lost. A centralized storage provider maintains redundancy of storage to provide very low probability of loss, and might even back up files in cold (tape or optical disk) storage.

Storj, Maidsafe, Sia, and Permacoin are proposing to use Proof-of-storage to insure there are multiple copies of data stored, but I explained already that this is fundamentally flawed and can't be sound:

Warning I as AnonyMint proposed this in mid-2013 and referred to it as Proof-of-Storage. I also discovered it was fundementally flawed. If you continue, you will be wasting your time. Eventually I will come back and explain to you and Andrew Miller PhD why this is flawed.

Details are definitely needed here. I know about Proofs-of-Space and Proofs of Space-Time( http://eprint.iacr.org/2016/035.pdf ), Miller's Proof-of-Retrievability(Permacoin), and White's Proof-of-Storage in Qeditas. What's Anonymint's proposal about?

We found some possible drawbacks and attack vectors in Permacoin, but no fundamental flaws.

In my original analysis in 2013, I went down the same rat hole of flaws as in section "4.2 Local-POR Lottery" of the white paper. They assume so many things (including for example that Amazon bandwidth is 10 - 100X more expensive than dedicated host), and when you work through all the analysis, then the scheme does not work to prevent centralization of the mining, and thus the permissionless (uncensored) and robustness/durability of file storage attribute will not be sustained.

P.S. I also read these:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=186601.0 (this was an offshoot I think of my idea which was in my March 2013 thread)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=555375.msg6536798#msg6536798

For example, the storage nodes (providers) can be Sybil attacked such that all the attackers nodes share the same data store. Certainly this will be the outcome since the attacker can earn more coins for each Sybil node added to the system. IP addresses aren't that expensive. This is yet another reason I think Storj, Maidsafe, Sia, and Permacoin are bullshit and probably scams.

So now that I've explained why paying each node (for the copy of the data it holds) is not immune to Sybil attacks and thus not economically viable, I assert that the only ways to insure durability in the decentralized provider context are either of:

• keep a backup copy in a trusted centralized provider (this can be encrypted if not providing public access so that the centralized provider can't censor based on data content)
• trust a statistical incentive that at least one decentralized provider will be incentivized to store your data

In the first case, the decentralized copies serve the high availability function and the backup copy the durability guarantee.

The second case would be perhaps the incentive providers have to retain the file if it is frequently accessed (assuming they are being paid each time they serve a file) and then setting up a cron job to frequently request and pay for a serving of your files when they have not been otherwise served to the public interim. In this case the decentralized copies serve both the high availability function and the backup copy the durability guarantee.

Depending on the market use case, one of the other might be more economic.

Legality

With hosted content, the host provider holds the person on the account responsible for violating the Terms of Service which includes hosting illegal content. Hosts will likely ban a person for habitually violating the Terms of Service and for not having a streamlined policy for illegal content complaints and legal actions.

In the decentralized providers context there is suppose to be no centralized party to blame or send a legal action to. Storage providers can't know who to believe about whether a file must be removed. The legal authorities can't go serve action on all the decentralized providers, because the storage providers come and go (and are too numerous and distributed). So the only action that can be taken is to require the hosting providers do not allow the system to be run from their servers. Thus the decentralized system becomes essentially banned every where.

The only solution I can think of is to require each file submitted to the system to be signed by public key authorized by a trusted authority that verifies the identity of each signature authority it authorizes. Then the authorities can serve the legal action directly to the trusted authority to revoke the public keys (and all decentralized storage providers comply by removing those files).

So in conclusion, decentralized file systems could potentially provide some higher availability and scaling, but durability is more problemmatic (but probably can be acceptable) and authority over which files can be stored will remain centralized.

The higher availability and scaling is interesting. Not sure if it is compelling though. Users will still have to pay file storage, there is no way to reduce the costs.

And since they don't offer any centralized mechanism for legal actions, Storj, MaidSafe, Sia, and Permacoin will end up entirely illegal or run only from ISP user clients in which case they will be slow (low availability and/or high latency), blocked by many ISPs thus not reliable for users, in addition to the other fatal flaw I mentioned above about Sybil attacks.

@TPTB, what do you make of Sia tech for decentralised cloud storage? They're more advanced than either of Storj and Maidsafe, as they've already launched a live beta version.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.0

Storj, Maidsafe, Sia, and Permacoin (and any other decentralized file system that pays to store a file instead of only paying to serve the file) are all provably scams.

Include Ethereum in the list of scams (although they are still trying to fix the technology) and probably most every other shitcoin on this forum.

Here is the information about the flaw I had found in Bittorrent in 2008:

I think social media can possibly be taken over by cryptocurrency/decentralized/blockchain technology. Think about it... Facebook has a market capitalization of 266.3 billion. What if a portion of their net profit was distributed to its users instead? Which service would you use... one that makes money off of you providing you nothing in return, or one that pays you to use its service? There are likely a few projects attempting to capitalize on this space. The only one off the top of my head I can name is Synereo and I am on the fence as to whether it is is a legit project or a P&D... I am waiting on the sidelines for now. http://www.synereo.com/

One of the foundational technical challenges is decentralized, permissionless file storage (and databases); otherwise if a corporation is providing centralized file storage then they control the content and can monopolize.

Afaik, the current attempts such as Storj and Maidsafe have a fundamental economic flaw. That is they are selling for free that which is not free— the bandwidth (and most saliently the asymmetrically more expensive upload bandwidth) of the ISPs. I had warned Bittorrent about this flaw in their economic algorithm and had suggested a fix in 2008:

Did Bittorrent become popular without MSM coverage?

I'm not really sure.

Yes, it did.  The Bittorrent whitepaper was a breakthrough in p2p not matched until Satoshi came along.

All the cruft of Gnutella (anti-leech arms race kludges, supernodes, etc) was swept away by Bram's brilliantly elegant tit-for-tat algorithm.

Well someone did come along before Satoshi in 2008 and that was me (Shelby), but I was apparently ignored. I basically predicted the Net Neutrality shit we have now and was trying to improve Bram's concept:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130401040049/http://forum.bittorrent.org/viewtopic.php?pid=178#p178

Did Bittorrent implement my proposal? I never followed up (my life went on a tangent).

You can detect some more coherence in my writing back then because that was before I became so ill. I am amazed in hindsight that I understood the concepts of Bittorrent so well having absolutely no experience whatsoever as a developer in P2P.

Now what is really fucking amazing is that the link quoted above worked correctly a few days ago when I issued it. Apparently someone in the Monero thread communicated to Bittorrent folks and had the entire archive of the Bittorrent forum removed from the archive.org. I am not joking and I am not hallucinating.

What I had written there in 2008 (which luckily I reread a few days ago so my memory is refreshed) was I explained to the Bittorrent developers that their tit-for-tat algorithm was orthogonal to their optimistic unchoking algorithm, and that they could improve the tit-for-tat algorithm by have the two peers that exchange a shard of data to encrypt those shards. Then after the shards had been received by both peers, the decryption keys could be exchanged. The economic benefit is that the bandwidth has already been exchanged before each peer can use the data. Thus neither peer has any bandwidth cost reason to cheat. The reason this was important is because typically download bandwidth is much greater than upload bandwidth, so by forcing all peers to trade equally, it would mean that peers could only download as much as they could upload. Bittorrent didn't like this suggestion because they preferred to leech the upload bandwidth of those who have higher allocations with their ISPs thus forcing those ISPs to pay for the upload bandwidth that the other peers at the ISPs with lower upload bandwidth allocations do not incur.

I warned Bittorrent that without my suggested fix, then the ISPs would end up blocking and rate limiting Bittorrent, which is exactly what has happened as I predicted:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/145786/isp.html
http://guides.wmlcloud.com/windows/how-to-bypass-torrent-connection-blocking-by-your-isp.aspx
https://www.quora.com/My-ISP-has-blocked-all-the-P2P-downloads-Is-there-any-way-I-can-bypass-them

Note that any solutions to the problem of ISPs blocking P2P apps that involve a TURN (when STUN tunneling fails or is blocked), VPN, or other server in the middle, defeat the entire point of extracting the value of the bandwidth allocation of users provided by their ISPs, because then one is paying for the bandwidth of the server to relay the shards.

If Storj and MaidSafe max out the consumption of each user's upload bandwidth (thus leeching off users with higher allocations charging the costs to those users' ISPs), they will also be blocked by ISPs. Additionally STUN tunnelling often fails and thus a TURN relay server has to be employed (or using the other peers as relays thus leeching the upload bandwidth of those ISPs who don't block tunneling).

In short, P2P for bandwidth consumption between ISP hosted user accounts is not going to be reliable. Many users will have frustrations when trying to be a storage provider. It will not be the case that every user in the system can also be a storage provider. And it will probably end up being the case that the most efficient storage providers will be hosted on dedicated servers.

In other words, it is a fantasy to think we can get decentralized file storage without paying for it.

We can try to design decentralized, permissionless file systems that correctly incentivize the storage and bandwidth providers, and the users of the system need to pay for it somehow. Whether or not these can remain permissionless given the need to host these on servers is open to further contemplation and study. Most all hosting providers include in their Terms of Sevice a restriction on hosting illegal copyrighted content, so unless one can provide a mechanism for which illegal content is removed from the system, it seems to me that hosts will be forced to ban the protocol (system).

So where I am headed with this line of thinking is that we ought to just give up on illegal content and illegal uses of anonymity. It isn't going to work. It is a fantasy.

[TPTB_need_war]

The user submitting the files to a decentralized file system could create multiple copies of the same file, each encrypted with a different private key and then only one storage provider would be paid for storing each copy. Even if Sybil attacked. the attacker would need to store each variant, because attacker doesn't know the private keys. But this still doesn't resolve the issues entirely because at least two reasons. First, asymmetric decryption (e.g. public key) is very computationally intensive and normally public key cryptography is only used to interactively exchange a symmetric encryption/decryption key, but in this case the submitting user can't interact with every user that wants to decrypt the file. Second and more importantly, there is no way for a block chain to verify the Proof-of-Storage challenge wasn't replied to. The miner winning the block could simply ignore the reply to the challenge. Only the full nodes which are online at that time can verify the miner ignored the reply (if they've also received the reply), but they can't prove that miner winning the block didn't receive the reply so they can't penalize the miner by ignoring his winning block (for if they could then any one could revert the winning block by producing a late reply and then revealing it). This is analogous to the discussions that monsterer, smooth, and I had about why propagation can't be proved.

[TPTB_need_war]

Of course people pay for music... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_on-demand_streaming_music_services
This is a good article: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-rockstars-cryptocurrency-music-industry/

I think I have perhaps found an economic opportunity for microtransactions that demands the control be decentralized:

https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/limits#comment-2086111174
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-worth-more-than-spotify/
https://on.soundcloud.com/premier

This is an example of research that can possibly drive a marketing strategy.

This looks to be the precise sort opportunity I was looking for, but now I need to do a lot of deep research and analysis.

[TPTB_need_war]

http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/guy-kawasaki-on-startups-entrepreneurship-and-the-state-of-social-media/

[TPTB_need_war]

My discussion has been moved for the time being to a Synereo thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344997.0

[TPTB_need_war]

Here's a cool example of a useful smart contract app

http://www.blocktech.com

using ipfs/bitcoin/ether/florincoin/etc.

I'd use it anyway.

Sorry but afaics that sucks.

I can't find any mention of how it uses Ethereum? Appears it is using Florincoin. If it is using Ethereum, that doesn't mean Ethereum can scale decentralized (which I have already explained it can't!).

Nevertheless, there are other flaws in this Alexandria project.

1. It is relying on IPFS, which is a decentralied file storage system. IPFS is interesting for orthogonal reasons (which I will discuss below), but there is an insoluble flaw of decentralized file storage in that copyrighted content illegally distributed without compensating the copyright owner, can't be forceably removed from all nodes, and thus the protocol ends up banned by hosts[1]. Not only is it economically and technologically unrealistic to fight the enforcement of copyrights by having users stand up their own nodes connected over asymmetric upload bandwidth of home ISPs[1], but it also deprives all of us of the Knowledge Age decentralized economic ecosystem and social networking we will need to implement the Knowledge Age devolution of the corporation (see the last link in [1]). Note it might be possible to design a decentralized file storage system that enforce removal orders and enforced per-per-download royalties to the copyright holder, it is impossible for these decisions to be made without centralizing the control over these decisions. I suppose one could dream up a design where all the nodes voted and reached a consensus about each copyright claim, and the participants would be motivated to do the right thing so as to avoid the protocol being banned/regulated by government, such a design is going to suffer from unbounded preemption and thus will need to use centralized trust, so it is right back to being centralized after all.

2. In the video for Alexandria, note how he pins the files to his local computer in order to attain free access. But as soon as he has done downloading, he can unpin and thus he has given nothing to the network if no one has downloaded the pinned files while he was downloading them. For this and other economic/marketing/technical reasons, the aims of this project are unrealistic and insoluble.


Regarding IPFS, I read some of the white paper and viewed some of the video presentation (which I highly recommend) and about 17 or 18 minute point it gets into the key points I want to share my analysis on. So I entirely agree with the creator of IPFS (Juan Benet) that resources should be referenced by hash rather than by URLs. As even he points out in his presentation, that is orthogonal to whether there is a decentralized protocol for storing these resources (and add my point that storing on home user's P2P servers such that copyright and royalties can't be enforced). And I entirely agree with him that we need a way to declare resources as immutable so they can be cached nearest to the use, which is needed both by offline use cases and to minimize redundant transfer of content (and Juan makes the astute point that bandwidth is not scaling as fast as storage nor CPU computation ... and I would draw the analogy to that the Scrypt paper also points out the same for RAM latency not scaling as fast as RAM storage and speed).

So how to we reconcile these needs and the issue of needing to enforce copyrights? We need a decentralized protocol because we don't want to rely on any one host or federated collusion of them (and also to wrap high availability and optimization in an algorithm/protocol versus inferior/non-interoperable adhoc solutions), and we need to record the copyright parameters in a block chain. But how can the block chain verifiers determine whose claim to a copyright is valid? I don't think there is an algorithmic way yet to determine for example if two songs are close enough (including for example in the case of musical content, DJ mix songs that resample other songs) in content to be a copyright violation? If there was, we could have a rule that the first person to sign a hash of content (and submit it to the block chain) is the copyright holder. But change even one bit of the content and the hash of the content changes. I believe there can be an algorithmic solution probably drawing from existing technologies that have not yet been applied to this problem. So then we'd need a way for the copyright holders of existing works which are already public (so any one could submit the hash to the block chain) to prepopulate their hashes on this block chain.

[1]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1340057.msg13670558#msg13670558 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344997.msg13730325#msg13730325 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1342065.msg13782055#msg13782055 (alternate copy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg13782246#msg13782246)

1. It is relying on IPFS, which is a decentralied file storage system. IPFS is interesting for orthogonal reasons (which I will discuss below), but there is an insoluble flaw of decentralized file storage in that copyrighted content illegally distributed without compensating the copyright owner, can't be forceably removed from all nodes, and thus the protocol ends up banned by hosts[1].

[...]

[1]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1340057.msg13670558#msg13670558 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344997.msg13730325#msg13730325 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1342065.msg13782055#msg13782055 (alternate copy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg13782246#msg13782246)

I received a reply from Juan Bennet (author of IPFS) and he referred me to the following:

• IPFS has as a design requirement that nodes be able to only store and/or distribute content they explicitly want to store and/or distribute. This means that computers that run IPFS nodes do not have to host "other people's stuff", which is a very important thing when you consider that lots of content in the internet is -- in some for or other -- illegal under certain jurisdictions.
• IPFS nodes will be able to express policies, and subscribe to network allow/denylists and policies that express content storage and distribution requirements. This way, users and groups can express what content should or should not be stored and/or distributed. This is required by users to (a) comply with legal constraints in their respective countries, (b) required by users with stricter codes of conduct (i.e. content that is legal but undesired by a group -- e.g. a childrens website).

Question and Answers:

    Q: When I add content, what happens?
    A: It is stored in your local node, and made available to other nodes in your network, via advertising it on the routing system (i.e. the IPFS-DHT). The content is not sent to other nodes until they explicitly request it, though of course some content may already exist in the system (content-addressing).

I don't see how that solves the problem that IPFS is a protocol that enables people to advertising the availability of illegal content on the DHT, and then illegal content can move to new ephemeral nodes, i.e. Whack-A-Mole. Thus authorities are eventually very likely to regulate Hosts and tell them that by running IPFS they are providing hosting for a DHT which routes illegal content. IPFS can infringe the millions of indie artists who struggle to earn an income.

Also as pointed out in that thread, then there is very low guarantee that any data is backed up by the system or that the other desired properties of content being cached closer those who need it will be achieved.

Decentralized file storage requires fungibility of data, but this can't be attained without BOTH a block chain for recording the policies of content owners and algorithms that automatically detect which content infringes other content.

[...]

Decentralized file storage requires fungibility of data, but this can't be attained without BOTH a block chain for recording the policies of content owners and algorithms that automatically detect which content infringes other content.

IPFS looks great - and yes, I see the legal aspect - but once the idea is there & great, I just imagine the hunting - but then there will be an IPFS_1, _2,.... and you need to close the internet.

Huh  

And he will not also admit the following is why he incorrect about stealing content.

Governments are organizing now around controlling the internet. The illegal activity through Bittorrent (which also steals from ISPs which have higher upload bandwidth allowances) is helping the governments feel they are justified in regulating the internet via Net Neutrality and other measures. You young fellow feel free to pursue theft of music and other content which deprives the millions of artists of income to pay their rent. You are not going to create the new Knowledge Economy with your theft model. And by advocating theft, you are helping the NWO totalitarianism to take form by providing an economic incentive and political support from millions of artists who are violated by piracy. Dumb. But I expect that from you.

Kim.fat.com.idiot was a brilliant marketer

He tapped into the desire of millions of hackers/people to steal from themselves.

> Fat.com.idiot is a roly-poly savvy marketer and we should partner with him

Anyone can be a good marketer if they create a site to help steal via Bittorrent and then charge a small commission on that activity.

Fat.com had his 10 minutes of criminal fame. Now will receive justice for his crimes.

> As to 'theft' and 'copyright' we are obviusly in disagreement - and let us leave it at that, no need for us to spend energy on that.

Huh  

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1350711.msg13796388#msg13796388
Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 05, 2016, 03:45:47 PM
And he will not also admit the following is why he incorrect about stealing content.

Governments are organizing now around controlling the internet. The illegal activity through Bittorrent (which also steals from ISPs which have higher upload bandwidth allowances) is helping the governments feel they are justified in regulating the internet via Net Neutrality and other measures. You young fellow feel free to pursue theft of music and other content which deprives the millions of artists of income to pay their rent. You are not going to create the new Knowledge Economy with your theft model. And by advocating theft, you are helping the NWO totalitarianism to take form by providing an economic incentive and political support from millions of artists who are violated by piracy. Dumb. But I expect that from you.

You young fellow feel free to pursue theft of music and other content which deprives the millions of artists of income to pay their rent.

I view this in completely different terms.  Before file sharing existed, people would record songs off the radio onto their tape cassettes.  The music was already technically (but not legally) out in the public domain for anyone to hear, you were just bypassing the business model of ad supported revenue.  The music was even being beamed at you via radio waves against your own will, yet there's probably plenty of obscure laws trying to govern whether you can or can't record it and what you can do with it.

We have a similar situation with ad blockers on websites.  Their business model is starting to fail.  To me, the whole situation with music is just the state trying to prop up an invalid business model.  In the old days, entertainers were considered to have the lowest of social status possible.  This is one of the initial reasons Nero was ridiculed as an emperor, because he wanted to be an actor and emperor at the same time.  Even if entertainer's social status was garbage, they could still get paid doing it, they just had to do it through live performance.  There was no "record thyself and make millions".
 
Modern civilization elevates these entertainers from the social status of garbage men, to basically higher than the president of the country in both fame and wealth.  This is not to say they shouldn't get paid, but past history and current technology both point to the idea that they will likely be required to do so only through live performance.  If you're saying it's the government's job to make sure their invalid business model is still able to make them mega-millionaires without even having to do live performance at all, then that would be an extreme left wing view.

I really read your rebuttal with an open mind, because if I am incorrect I will suffer immensely. So I am not writing the following based in what I want to believe, but rather based on my sober analysis of the facts. I am eager to read any rebuttal which can teach me why I am wrong.

First of all, distinguish SUPER STARS from the average indie musician earning couple of $100 a month, or the more successful indie or small label outfit earning just above the poverty line. The former number several dozens to maybe a few hundred (active) whereas the latter number in the 100,000s to millions (and maybe much more if they could earn a bit more).

Depriving indie musicians of a decent income (not even wealth!) to pay their rent and food is not the way to build a new age Knowledge Age economy wherein we creative people create things and sell them direct to each other instead of being slaves to corporations. If you are going to advocate stealing music, and since we are moving into a digital age where all work will be digitized, then let's advocate stealing everything then including 3D printer designs, commercial software, etc.. so that we will be reduced an economy valued only by physical raw materials and energy production so the bankers will own and control all value in economy. Yeah nice.  

Afaik, the reason artists were devalued throughout history was due to two facts:

• Lack of abundance in the ancient economy which is required to produce a gift culture. The artists in a gift culture are on the receiving end of the gifts because they don't directly produce necessities of life that are thus in abundance in a gift culture.
• Economies of yore have been capital intensive, economies-of-scale (e.g. Rome road building, post Dark Age agriculture, Industrial Age factories) thus artists contributed no useful labor to the capitalists. The point being that the capitalists were in control. But I have explained this all changes in Knowledge Age[1]

Why you not want to pay an insignificant tip to indie musicians so they can flourish and you don't have to view ads? We are now in an abundance economy. There is no excuse to not tip the indie artists.

Would you prefer to have massive unemployment and social welfare system that will sink us into a Dark Age?

Do you want all those unemployed artists on welfare to vote to steal your money with capital controls because the economy failed them?

Not everyone wants to be a programmer or what ever.

If you enjoy or listen to a song regularly, then is absolutely no financial reason you can justify for not tipping the creator a penny. You will only destroy society, the Knowledge Age, and yourself by being so selfish and myopic. Perhaps you could justify it for other reasons such as micropayments being a hassle and subscription being a lockin (to one provider) paradigm.

What might be more convincing to me, is to argue that those people who are going to steal (or who won't bother to find the music in official venues) will do it any way (or at least will have been exposed to the music thus potentially being another fan for the musician to sell a T-shirt to), thus arguing there is no economic incentive to prevent bootleg copies from appearing on decentralized file storage systems. And thus to argue that the business model that works is give away free the downloads, and sell the fans trinkets and live performances. Perhaps that is your point?

Afaics, SoundCloud was supposed to be offering that model and the musicians pay SoundCloud to offer the downloads for free. In return musicians could afaics promote their music and gain fans for example on their Facebook page and then sell the fans stuff such as T-shirts. But lately SoundCloud has started to limit apps to 15,000 plays per day, apps that play SoundCloud content aren't allowed to develop social networking type features, and SoundCloud disabled their Facebook embedded player (changed it to a link to SoundCloud's website) so that SoundCloud could drive ad revenues and/or synergies on their own site. Appears SoundCloud was being hammered by the RIAA with DCMA requests and SoundCloud caved in to the major record labels. Now Universal has accesse to delete any song from SoundCloud.

So one could argue that a decentralized file storage could provide the function SoundCloud was supposed to be offering.

Musicians like to get statistics on how many plays their song has. They like to get feedback on their songs. Etc.

If society decides to adopt the decentralized file storage and end copyrights, then I will adjust to it. But for the time being, it is not clear whether that is the best model for the indie artists and for our Knowledge Age future.

For example, it is not clear to me that I need 150 T-shirts, one each from each indie band I like. And then how do I tip them for new music they create if I already bought a T-shirt? I don't have time to go to live concerts and what if the band is not in my area. We are moving to global economy (check out songdew.com for music from India). Wouldn't it make more sense for my music organizer to tip them automatically based on my plays? So I don't have to hassle with it making sure I take care of the artists who provide my music that I love.

So you could argue okay, but no reason to not let others steal it if they really want to. Well maybe true, but in that case the decentralized file storage can coexist with the micropayment model.

Which outcome do you think is realistically the most likely and why?

[1]	https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg13761518#msg13761518 (see the "Edit:")

The issue that is being ignored here is that when one pays for "legal" music the actual amount to goes to the artist is in most cases zero and in those cases where there is an actual net royalty to the artist *the very famous" artists it is a minuscule percentage.  The bulk of the revenue goes the "music industry" which has been made obsolete by changing technology. Digital distribution of music is fundamentally different than pressing vinyl or even pressing CDs, in that there is minimal up front up capital required so there is no need for a capitalist to provide this capital. A simple pay what you want approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_what_you_want will yield the artist way more by eliminating parasites such as "the music industry" or Apple with its 30% big brother tax. Of course the gross is far less, but would you rather as an artist receive 95% of say 2 USD or 0.0001% of 20 USD?

The same is also the case with book / ebook publishers and authors, and the parasitic scientific publishing industry, vs scientists in  University Industry or Government. These dying parasitic corporate players are causing a lot of damage with "technologies" such as DRM that attempt to protect "intellectual property". DRM and the attempt to protect "intellectual property" is among the greatest threats to civil liberties and individual freedom in most western counties. It is also the ultimate cause of a very significant and rising portion of China's greenhouse gas emissions.  

Edit: One only has to compare the relative Developer ranking in https://www.coingecko.com/en of Monero 81 (Pay what you want) vs Ethereum 74 (Traditional capitalist IPO model). Z.cash is following the Ethereum model with its 11% pre-mine to fund the venture capitalists. Those pictures of spinning diamonds did not come cheap.

ArticMine, one of my points is we need to enable fans to pay musicians directly for music without a middleman taking most of it (ditto other digital creations perhaps such as video, but video is quite different from music in usage patterns). This what for example Bandcamp is doing (taking a 15% fee, although the credit card companies take another 5+%) and btw the CTO/co-founder Shawn Grunberger used to work in Tech support at Fractal Design when I was a Programmer and I interfaced with him on my own initiative as a liason. I even was the one who encouraged him to become a programmer and I remember he was telling me his idea for Bandcamp back then in 1995. So he finally did it. Congrats to him. Unfortunately he did not reply to my attempt to contact him, so they may find soon they have me as a competitor rather than as an ally. C'est la vie.

Bandcamp has a weakness in their model in that one can only sample a few of the songs for free. (Also I found their app navigation and music finding UI is poorly designed, as well no social features!) Sorry but that is why Bandcamp doesn't have the wide distribution and 150 million musicians that SoundCloud has.

You don't put a paywall in front of your users and expect to achieve popularity. That is a fundamental tenet of marketing and attrition minimization. Perhaps they understand the market better than me, which is why I am very interested in this discussion.

I forgot to make the point in reply to r0ach that FM radio quality audio could indeed be distributed for free by musicians and this wouldn't necessarily destroy the musicians' ability to sell higher quality versions of the same songs. So I don't agree with r0ach that FM radio set a precedent for theft, because I remember I used to buy $9 - $18 CDs even though I could record from the radio station (and that even before I become rich as programmer when I was just earning a typical income as young man working odd jobs). The FM radio will have the radio DJ/host or advertising talking/fading in at the start or end of a song, it will have equalization added, it is of lower quality, and the paid CD may have additionally remix versions. I had in my 20s some hundreds of CDs and 1000s of songs that I paid for. That is why I was really pissed off when I had to buy the same songs again when I lost my CD collection due to my turbulent/adventurous life of travails and travels, so then I reverted to using means of obtaining the music for free. But still I did pay $0.99 per song over recent years at Amazon for songs I couldn't locate easily for free. And I would not prefer converting songs from Youtubes versus spending 5 - 10 cents to pay a musician directly, know I'm getting the high quality original, and have it all organized for me and so I never have to pay again for the same song and I can never lose my collection again (I am so incredibly overloaded and have not even enough time to replace the blown cigarette lighter fuse on my car, meaning I am apt to lose my song collection again because I can't keep track of everything in my life)!

ArticMine, I never understood the model of having researchers pay to obtain white papers (other than as a legacy from when journals were printing on paper and physically distributed). Researchers are not funded by their cohorts buying their white papers. I don't understand your point about DRM? Please make your point more cogent?

Btw (and entirely tangential/orthogonal to the discussion I added above), I like greenhouse emissions. If I obtain more funds, I will upsize my SUV and perhaps get a few dozen Hummers so I can make more greenhouse gases. I'll eat more beans (for farts) and cows (for their farts) too if I get healthy. The anthropogenic global warming (climate change redux/goal post moving) fraud is junk science and deception. Anyone who mentions that I immediately classify them as a kook, delusional, and incapable of researching scientific fact vs. fiction. Sorry to bust your bubble, but we are headed into a Mini Ice Age.

Bobby Jimmy & The Critters - Somebody Farted

[TPTB_need_war]

Decentralized proof-of-storage is always flawed, and that will include IPFS's Filecoin as well.

In addition to the insoluble issue of how to not infringe copyright in decentralized file storage (and thus per my prior three posts above not be at odds with the coming Knowledge Age creators and the government), another point is how are we going to pay for decentralized file storage for all websites and content on the internet  

If we say that we'll all host this content for free on our home computers and serve it via our home ISP internet connections, I have already pointed out insoluble problems:

• Last mile physics is such that home connections have asymmetric upload (less than download) bandwidth. Thus even if we all trade our bandwidth tit-for-tat equally, then we have collectively more download bandwidth than we have upload bandwidth. Not only does this steal from ISPs that provide more upload bandwidth, which is what I warning Bittorrent in 2008 would lead to the Communism of Net Neutrality (and they ignored me and just this month they ostensibly removed the archives when I raised this point again!), but it also is impossible to balance and thus we pay for it by hosting it on symmetrically backbone connected hosts as the internet is currently. So then how do we pay for that upload and hosting service if the owner of the files is not hosting them? Do we send microtransactions for each file we request, i.e. we put a paywall on the entire internet(!!!)? Or do we pay a Communist tax to the government (e.g. the plans for Net Neutrality) and it regulates a file store for us and also so the government can enforce copyright? I guess one can argue that bandwidth will become so cheap, we can afford to consider it free. But still someone has to pay for it and even as costs decline, bandwidth demands increase. And global bandwidth costs are I would guess in the $billions.
  
  
• There is no way to insure persistence unless one keeps a copy of the file hosted themselves, thus this sort of defeats one of the main point of decentralized file storage which is reliability of archival.

I do think we need smarter decentralized caching for the internet which pays for itself by saving bandwidth! I do think we need to reference files by hash (perhaps with a hint for primary source url where also blame can be assigned for promulgating copyright infringement, thus all such records would need to be signed with the public key for the HTTPS certificate of the site) for permanence of references.

So perhaps there is a way to do a decentralized overlay network on top of the URL paradigm that can deal with copyright blame and respect the policies so encoded by the aforementioned signature. I am going to email Juan Benet again and pass this idea along. I am urging him and others to be less ideological and more pragmatic.

Delusional leanings such as proof-of-storage (which I thought of in 2013 and discarded because it can't be sound) and wanting to attack the establishment at any cost of nonsensical economic, political-economic, and technological issues. Let's get back to standing on solid engineering work.

All decentralized file systems are doomed:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344997.msg13730325#msg13730325
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1340057.msg13670558#msg13670558
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1340057.msg13783053#msg13783053

Storj guy here. All of the actor vectors you described are addressed in the our whitepaper or a blog post.

I read the white paper last week.

1) Sybil - Bonds and unique pieces

There is no way to do proof-of-storage that is robust. The only way is to make some assumptions about latency of propagation to a centralized copy of all files, but that can be gamed. Propagation is not proof.

2) Illegal content - Greylists

The Storj FAQ confirms these are opt-in, and not forced. Thus I maintain my point that the Storj protocol can become banned (refused) by Hosts (and even ISPs). We are moving into totalitarianism and increased government control over the internet.

This direction of enabling theft of copyrights is begging for your project to be attacked and fail.

3) Bandwidth vs storage - pay for both

Pay how? Micropayments for each access to bandwidth?

How to pay for storage when it is decentralized with unbounded replications and can be Sybil attacked.

Sorry these decentralized systems are doomed. The concept can't work.

1) Sybil - Bonds and unique pieces

The mathematical models are right there in the paper. We are collecting live data from the network, which proves the models are correct.

"Its not going to work" in face of real data showing that is working is not going to cut it. Please provide some data or mathematical models that say otherwise. Latency doesn't matter for proofs.

Testnets do not prove that the Sybil attack resistance and payment model economics work (because game theory is fully incentivized in the wild).

Regarding case 1) in the quote above, the fact is the math models are often myopic[1] (and again that is so in this case), because it is impossible to prove proof-of-storage/retrievability:

These proof-of-storage/retrievability algorithms also employ a challenge/response to force the node to have access to the full copy of the data which should be stored, but this does not prevent the node from outsourcing the storage to a single centralized repository. So to attempt prevent that centralized repository attack (i.e. Sybil attack on the nodes) these proof-of-storage/retrievability algorithms “try to use network latency to prevent centralized outsourcing, but [that is impossible because] ubiquitously consistent network latency is not a reliable commodity”.

[1]

Meni Rosenfeld's myopic math, and note Meni is a widely respected academic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13633504#msg13633504 And my explanation of the myopia: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13797768#msg13797768 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13819991#msg13819991 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13763395#msg13763395 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13647887#msg13647887

All decentralized file systems are doomed:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344997.msg13730325#msg13730325
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1340057.msg13670558#msg13670558
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1340057.msg13783053#msg13783053

Of course decentralized file systems are not compatible with the 19th century business models of the MPAA and RIAA, such as placing music on Edison Cylinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder and then distributing the Edison Cylinders by sailing ship. That does not mean however that decentralized file systems are doomed, what it does mean is that decentralized file systems will serve to further accelerate the demise of these 19th century business models, and the corporations that promote them.

The political argument is irrelevant for as long as the technology and payment (economic) models are irreparably flawed, as I explained above.

[TPTB_need_war]

I am proposing a solution.

1. The DHT (a distributed database keyed on file hash that returns a list of repositories of the file) should be an orthogonal protocol to the storage repositories protocol. The DHT can be stored on users' computers operating P2P over the users' home ISP connections. This is a low bandwidth protocol, so won't violate the asymmetry of upload versus download bandwidth physics for home ISP connections which I explained dooms Bittorrent.

2. Creators of files must have a means to record their policies (and also perhaps/optionally their verifiable identity). I have suggested that before they publish the file, they create a record in a block chain. Policies could include for example the crypto currency payment per download expected (this record could be updated on the block chain by the signer of the original record). To record a verifiable identity, I suggested including a SSL/TLS enabled URL and signing it with the public/private key of the site certificate, so that governments can blame the site owner for copyright infringements. If the URL is taken offline, then storage repositories should remove the file if they want to be compliant with government edicts (of course decentralized providers can do what ever they want). The protocol for the DHT could either honor (or not honor) the URL removals, so perhaps there should be two versions of the DHT so that at least the one that honors government edicts won't be banned by ISPs. Users could run both versions (if they can). Note afaik DHT consensus is like a block chain in that all have to agree (c.f. David Mazières' work on Steller's SCP consensus protocol and the venerable Kademlia DHT), or if not the DHT could be combined with a longest chain rule of a block chain to enforce a global consensus on DHT policies.

3. Of course payment policies can't be enforced on decentralized storage providers and it is impossible to prove that files have been served and the crypto currency payment to the creator wasn't enforced by the storage provider, but content creators can't stop download theft by decentralized repositories any way. Note that any storage provider that advertises that it violates policies can thus be prosecuted by the State (and note this new design encourages storage repositories to be hosted not run from users' computers), so in reality the warez shit will remain non-mainstream same as for Bittorrent (e.g. fraudster MegaFatKimDotCom shit will always be shut down by the State) because also note my point that the DHT can honor policies and thus without advertising the theft-oriented provider can't be located by users. The storage provider might also be charging a crypto payment for serving the file (and to fund its operation including the storage). So that solves the issue of how to pay for this system, because the irreparable concept of proof-of-storage/retrievability is discarded.

4. As for IPFS's concept of moving the cache of immutable content closer to the request (to reduce bandwidth consumption × distance), I think this can be handled by algorithms running on a layer on top of the DHT.

So this provides the best of all worlds. We also stop the asymmetric consumption of upload bandwidth which Bittorrent is fucking up the internet with as I warned them in 2008.

Note afaik that none of the decentralized file systems currently proposed (and in development or near release) are implementing the above correct design. That includes MaidSafe, Storj, Sia, IPFS/Filecoin, etc..

I have emailed to Juan Benet, the creator of IPFS, a link to this.

Edit: so MegaFat deployed the fraudulent profits from reselling copyrighted content to buy himself a filipina prostitute[mail order bride] Monica Verga that he saw in FHM magazine (which btw is also technically illegal but mostly unenforced):