> I'm not sure about how consistently people in Filecoin need to be connected to the network, but that could prove to be an issue.
The initial release today focuses on Storage Mining, which requires the nodes storing the data to be online pretty much all the time to be able to submit proofs of that storage. This is because storage miners are the block producers, and we need to have high certainty that they actually have the amount of storage they claim. The requirements here will go down over time, we have a number of different proof constructions we are looking into that will improve things in nearly every dimension (zk-snark technology is still really young, and we're pushing its limits).
Filecoin (even today) has retrieval miners, that earn money for serving data as clients request it, but it needs a good deal of work still to form an efficient market. Its current state is more like Amazons 'Requester pays buckets' on s3, but is rapidly improving and many different groups are building out exciting things in this space. A retrieval miner doesnt really need to be online for any amount of time, only needs to respond to requests when it wants to get paid.
> a fairly large cloud storage provider, has a total network size of around 500 petabytes
Its worth noting that the current amount of 'committed power' (aka, proven storage) in Filecoin as of this moment is 572.8PiB, with significantly more than that waiting to get onto the chain. Most of this is just 'committed capacity', space that doesn't contain users data, but is proven to be there and ready to be filled with real data when it's demanded.
Thanks for the reply. And I did notice that Filecoin's committed storage was even larger than Backblaze's reported capacity, which was super impressive, even if it doesn't represent actual files yet. Congrats on the release!
The initial release today focuses on Storage Mining, which requires the nodes storing the data to be online pretty much all the time to be able to submit proofs of that storage. This is because storage miners are the block producers, and we need to have high certainty that they actually have the amount of storage they claim. The requirements here will go down over time, we have a number of different proof constructions we are looking into that will improve things in nearly every dimension (zk-snark technology is still really young, and we're pushing its limits).
Filecoin (even today) has retrieval miners, that earn money for serving data as clients request it, but it needs a good deal of work still to form an efficient market. Its current state is more like Amazons 'Requester pays buckets' on s3, but is rapidly improving and many different groups are building out exciting things in this space. A retrieval miner doesnt really need to be online for any amount of time, only needs to respond to requests when it wants to get paid.
> a fairly large cloud storage provider, has a total network size of around 500 petabytes
Its worth noting that the current amount of 'committed power' (aka, proven storage) in Filecoin as of this moment is 572.8PiB, with significantly more than that waiting to get onto the chain. Most of this is just 'committed capacity', space that doesn't contain users data, but is proven to be there and ready to be filled with real data when it's demanded.