Market Research on market size and growth

Long term I don’t know how they survive. Currently sites like https://odysee.com/ and a couple of others are using it as a decentralized youtube-like storage system. Assuming they bought tokens early on, they may be flush with cash and are hoping the storage price comes down over time.

But they aren’t competing directly with AWS as their customers are looking for a storage solution where the contents can’t be taken down by governments or corporations with an agenda.

Edit: It could also be that companies like AWS and Google are involved here - and are working to break it. I am skeptical of this, but can’t rule it out.

Edit 2: further to the last edit, it could be that US govt. is involved here - working to control majority of storage so that they can actively force down material they don’t like … it true, it would explain a lot. I’m maybe less skeptical of this scenario as the PTB’s have shown themselves to be quite the paranoid lot - and willing to do anything to block the flow of leaked information - e.g. what they continue to do to Julian Assange, apparently to ‘send a message’ to others thinking of becoming leak publishers.

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Given the sites using it can be shut down easily by the authorities, what does this buy them? Users of these websites can also be tracked and traced, offering consumers little protection.

Are people really prepared to pay 71x more for this? Count me out.

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I believe you don’t have to use the sites at all to access the data - the site is just a convenience. I think you can even download the site and run a copy locally - at least in the case of one of these sites I’ve played with.

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Do they obscure who is hosting the data and/or who is requesting it or is it just like IPFS, where neither are assured?

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I don’t know, but assume that hiding is left up to the individual storage providers. The data itself is stored as torrents are, so taking one provider down won’t break the system and presumably they also monitor that and add more duplicates as needed.

My experience with it though isn’t so good. Bitchute, which uses actual torrents (not IPFS/filecoin), seems to work better for me more often than not. On Odysee and lbry, I often have to wait for video to load during playback (it pauses playback to load more).

Maybe one of us is confused here … to my knowledge, IPFS is using filecoin system.

EDIT:

Filecoin uses IPFS for addressing and moving data

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I don’t know about filecoin, but with Sia I had run free storage nodes (farmers set the price there) and there was traffic, but that was in the early days when there were more farmers and more stored data on Sia. They now have decentralized sites like their Twitter copy, which is free to use, but they have fewer farmers.

Yes, people want freedom and anonymity, but that doesn’t automatically mean they’ll choose something like Sia or Safe to find them. And why do they choose them?

These technologies need to be proven over time that they really are what they were designed for.

Once again, I urge you, David, to come up with a scheme in which the network grows even if there is not much interest from the masses in the first years. We need to be the largest Safe network, to be the most secure Safe network and to be the most useful Safe network.

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Yes, that’s what I meant - unless the IPFS libraries/design has been altered for Filecoin, it will have similar limitations.

IPFS is unable to disguise network traffic, including source/target IP addresses, afiak (from prior research on IPFS). This leaves clients subject to tracking/tracing and legal action. It also leaves host vulnerable to shut down and/or legal action.

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Grow what? Useful data? Farmers?

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I did a little research, it seems the sites I mentioned are NOT using filecoin, just IPFS.

Filecoin does use IPFS though as part of it’s system. But I now have no clue who is using it or for what purpose.

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David has an amazing brain, but he’s not a one man army. We are going to have to invest in app development in order to attract the masses to Safe. We can’t keep leaning on David forever.

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Filecoin have a scheme with which their network grows. People who don’t understand how this is possible don’t understand why bitcoin is 600 million% up even though it burns electricity without producing anything…

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Ok, so those sites are relying on nodes pinning the data and/or pinning it themselves? Given those nodes can be exposed and pressured, it is hard to conclude that it is censorship resistant.

Filecoin uses IPFS libraries and technology, but it does not share the same instance of the network. Data is stored on a completely separate network on Filecoin. Presumably, these IPFS libraries could be customised (I’ve not checked), but it would likely have similar limitations on security and privacy.

I originally thought that Filecoin was just using blockchain contracts to arrange pinning on data on the IPFS network. However, they didn’t take that route, for whatever reason. It would have seemed a simpler solution, but I’m assuming they hit issues with that approach.

EDIT: Thinking about it, IIRC the ‘issues’ with just pinning as that they couldn’t charge for data reads, as IPFS is free to read data by default. Filecoin wanted to charge users for data retrieval too, which made it incompatible.

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Grows how? What are they growing?

Using a farming analogy, they have a bunch of near empty fields, with loads of farmers sitting on expensive machinery, doing very little. Meanwhile, folks are speculating on how much the produce will be worth and how it will be 71x better than what is actually growing in fields around the rest of the country.

So, what is actually growing?

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The Social Consensus. This is the core of all decentralized projects. Bitcoin is Bitcoin not because it is the best blockchain, but because the social consensus is that it is Bitcoin.

  • The size of the network has an impact on achieving this consensus.
  • The price of the token has an impact on achieving this consensus.
  • The number of nodes / Hash rate has an impact on achieving this consensus.

To be the most user-used Safe network we need to have the social consensus that we are the best. :dragon:

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How are you measuring the size and growth of the social consensus as you call it?

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You can not measure it directly, so we have to focus on all its parts and you are right that good apps and valuable data also have a impact on it, but because of the huge speculation in the Cripto world at the moment this influence is very little and a Safe copy that starts after us has a chance to get to us and override us If focusing on what the mass of people look to achieve consensus…

Do not forget - the original Ethereum is Ethereum classic but the social consensus changed for money. Money is very important at this stage.

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Social consensus in the eyes of whom?

There are very few users of Filecoin. As outlined above, there seem to be a bunch of folks speculating with no intention of using it or caring about its long term usability. Are you suggesting these speculators are creating this ‘social consensus’ in some way?

Blockchain has social consensus not because it is the best blockchain. It is because of the network effect of the transaction data stored within it. Miners are just the middlemen, keeping Bitcoin running.

If you think that Bitcoin is successful purely because there are a lot of miners, I think you have the cart before the horse.

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Do you know that there is a copy of Filecoin? I am talking in this case about the social consensus which is the best Filecoin. Many things are involved in the social consensus, I have listed some of them above: network size, token price, number of nodes, of course, and whether you are the first on the block is important, but not as important as we saw in the bitcoin cash attack in 2017, it failed, but the attack on UniSwap was successful - SushiSwap wins at the moment…

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The attack on Bitcoin failed as users didn’t care about it. They carried on using BTC.

Re Filecoin clones, whether one set of idle farmers have more empty fields than the other doesn’t really concern me, tbh. Both seem a waste. What would interest me would be which one was actually gaining users, storing and retrieving data. That would illustrate some sort of social consensus to me and would start to build a network effect.

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Bitcoin is successful because:

  • it has one use-case (store of value) which is better than other traditional use cases.
  • it has the longest track record in crypto
  • it has the largest market-cap
  • it has an interesting story

It’s not the best coin technically and never will be. But because of the above it’s attracting investment as a store of value in a world of declining fiat value. Unlike gold, it’s not easy to manipulate the markets it exists on. So it is being preferred over metals by the big investors.

It is not like filecoin. Filecoin is looking like many of the competing coins in the space - they developed it too quick, has some use-case, but isn’t well thought out … AND they don’t care. The founders took over $US 200 Million in the ICO, and they get to vest a lot of tokens for foundation and company over 6 years … They had big money investors from Y-combinator behind them. I honestly don’t expect the project to go anywhere fast if at all. It makes sense to me that they want to keep the price of filecoin high so they can cash out over time.

And if that’s their “scheme” then I hope very much that we don’t duplicate it - as it’s a ponzi.

If we want a real long term solid network, then there are no shortcuts. We have to keep building solid products on top of it and attract the interest of long term users who appreciate good quality secure software.

Sure a lot of people are fools and won’t care. But I’m not in this just to make some $$, I want a network that I can happily use into the future, that fulfills my dreams. So that’s the “scheme” I’m going with. Maybe I’m a fool … I don’t care.

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