jimpick
Joined 18 years ago
Karma
285
Submissions
112
Member since
Feb 7
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
Dr. Booth (her late husband) was one of my engineering professors back at the University of Victoria back in the early ‘90s. It’s amazing that modern CPUs still use the multiplication circuits he created (along with his wife). Also one of several people that can claim to have created the first spinning magnetic storage!
Comment · 5 years ago
People hating on IPFS DHT performance probably aren’t using the experimental accelerated DHT client. https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/experimenta...
Comment · 5 years ago
“Disrupting data” sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.
Comment · 5 years ago
You can see the live file storage deals here. https://filfox.info/en/deal
Comment · 5 years ago
There isn’t really a single price. Each miner sets their prices dynamically (off-chain). Some miners set ridiculous prices to scare off load and some even set their prices to zero to attract test deal traffic. Miners have different reliability and business strategies too. If you look at average prices for asks or deals, it can be very misleading.
Comment · 5 years ago
You can mine under 10TiB. You aren’t eligible for block rewards until you are proving at least 10TiB. Filecoin+ verified data deals count for 10x power. There’s a lot of power on the network, so the frequency of winning blocks at the threshold is fairly infrequent.
Comment · 5 years ago
For long term archiving, it’s essential practice to move data from machine to machine over time anyways, as machines get old and obsolete and can’t be repaired after a certain age.
Right now there’s a maximum deal term of 1.5 years. Potentially that could be extended as the system matures and miners become capable of taking on longer commitments.
Comment · 5 years ago
Security, mostly - if the proofs fail, it’s not just the data that could be corrupted - bad actors could attack the consensus itself and steal unlimited funds. The params for the proofs could be loosened, at the cost of extra risk of an attack. They’ve gone the safe route and picked challenging parameters that would be uneconomic to brute force attack.
Comment · 5 years ago
Take the total storage size on the network, figure out the number of spinning disks, multiply by the power consumption per disk + typical overhead for servers and switches, etc. There’s power consumed by the processing for proofs on data ingest (bigger miners are more efficient at this), but not much afterwards.
Comment · 5 years ago
Everything is in a grain, but I think the Earthstar applications could be decomposed to just handle a single document at a time.
I made a quick demo recording and updated the README with a link.
Video is here: https://bafybeih6kkv4rgmfada4kfc5thmtzheiurq7ck5uz4rchqkrxw7...
Comment · 5 years ago
I've been doing some experimentation along the same lines ... I've got a small proof-of-concept working where I can sync Earthstar databases between multiple Sandstorm instances - each "grain" acts as a pub, and you can use "webkeys" as pubs. I'm using powerbox-http-proxy to request capabilities for connections, so it works even with fully sandboxed client-side networking (ALLOW_LEGACY_RELAXED_CSP=false). It's maddeningly complex to do simple networking, but it's amazing to have the security layer there. I'll put together a blog post / video soonish.
https://github.com/jimpick/sandstorm-earthstar-foyer
Sandstorm is very interesting for privacy-focused peer-to-peer because it has the tools in place to sandbox networking. The networking security model is designed to prevent things from talking to each other without user approvals - so it's extra tricky to do peer-to-peer things with it.
I'm excited to try to stick some of my old IPFS/IPLD/libp2p/Dat/CRDT things into Sandstorm - there's a tonne of interesting things that could be done with it.
Comment · 5 years ago
I joined a set-top box startup in 2002 based in Palo Alto (Digeo) that ran out of the former Altavista offices - same building as PAIX.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/11/paix...
I ran a build cluster in the server room in the basement where Altavista used to be located. The server room was actually pretty small - just a few rows of racks. We still had a sign in our office that said "Altavista Operations". It's pretty mindblowing just thinking how small internet-scale things were back then compared to now.
Comment · 6 years ago
I made a minimal web API for some experimental stuff I was trying:
https://github.com/jimpick/magic-wormhole-service
Not really hardened for production usage.
Comment · 6 years ago
This is terrible...
I have a copy of my “DAT Shopping List” demo I last opened about 6 months ago saved to my iPhone home screen... I opened it, and the data was still there. I’ll be really sad when I open it again after iOS autoupdates and the data will be nuked.
https://jimpick.com/