Hello Factom community. Back during the factoid crowd sale, I heard about this tech and bought some factoid on a whim (good choice
). Now with the recent surge in price I have been researching Factom and I have some questions:
1. First I need to get something straight. As far as I can tell, Factom is not for storing data. Is this correct? It seems to me that one could store data in entries, but it would only be stored on the Factom full nodes and it would supposedly be expensive, and so rather than storing data, users are intended to store hashes of data. Please correct/validate/enlighten me.
1.1 I couldn't find in the whitepaper how much space 1 entry credit purchases. How much space does it purchase? I'm trying to figure out how realistic it is to store data.
2. If Factom does not store data, but more likely data hashes, how does Factom secure information? In one of Factom's YouTube videos a use case for Factom is described as preventing the Sony hack; however, I fail to see how Factom could prevent such a hack. Sony's data is still on their servers and if a hacker breached those servers he would still be able to acquire sensitive information and do with it as he pleases.
3. Another question about data. If I lose the data that I have secured with Factom, I, nor anyone else, can prove whether or not it existed. Correct?
4. Related to the last question. As far as I understand it, anyone can submit entries into a chain, correct? If so, data loss becomes an issue again. I watched another YouTube video where Paul Snow is speaking at a conference in Dubai I think. In this video he explains how Bank of America could have reviewed a Factom chain to insure all the records were present and correct. I don't understand how Factom can prove if all the records were there. If all the records were hashed into "Countrywide Mortgage Records" and after review there were hashes that were unaccounted for, how does Bank of America know if these unaccounted hashes are important records or just spam?
5. It seems that Factom becomes successful and widely used it will be storing impressive amounts of data. In a world where millions or billions of entries are being submitted every year I can't help but think that the amount of data a full node will have to store will simply be too much. This is especially true when one considers that Federated servers are not being rewarded for their storage; they are only being rewarded for further entry submissions. This means that as time passes the ratio of the amount of data being stored compared to the reward will get bigger and bigger. While normal data centers, say Amazon Cloud Services, receives constant compensation for the continued use of storage, Factom Federated Servers don't. Please help me better understand the economics of Factom and how this problem (if it even is a problem) will be overcome.
5.1 It also seems inevitable that data centers will be the only ones capable of being full nodes. Is this correct? intended?
6. How come the amount of Federated Servers and Audit Servers are fixed? It seems to me that the more there are, the better. So why not just have all full nodes be in the pool of possible Federated and Audit Servers and then split the group in two according to the mentioned voting system?
7. After reading the whitepaper, it is still unclear to me whether directory blocks are made after every one minute or after every 10 minutes. The whitepaper states they are made after every minute, but on examination of the protocol through the block explorer, I get the idea they are made every 10 minutes. Please elaborate.
If answers to these question are posted somewhere else, forgive me. I couldn't find any. I also hope that this isn't overbearing, I just want to better understand how Factom works as I really hope it succeeds. Thank you for your time.
EDIT: One more question
8. How is the decentralized Federated Server model better than a centralized company that does the same thing? Since everything is validated client side, Couldn't a central entity assemble hashes and stamp them into the blockchain?
