Thread by @bramcohen

Now might be a good time to explain that Filecoin uses 'proof of replication' while Chia uses 'proof of space' (thread)

https://twitter.com/NicoDeva_/status/1317689811046522880

Proof of replication is when the network archives data which users request it to, so there's an archival service which the network performs. Filecoin not only uses proof of replication for service auditing but also for mining.

This is a worse version of what's an already a dubious idea. The technical details of why this is and what tradeoffs can be done to mitigate the issues are very technical and involved. Suffice it to say that Filecoin has failed to find the nonexistant sweet spot.

At the highest level the big problem is that there isn't much of a market for dodgy storage which has no credible guarantees of long-term availability, but Filecoin has many more walls to smash through before splattering against that steel one.

This was already well established many years ago with Mojo Nation, which was the project I worked at before I went on to make BitTorrent based on experiences there. You might notice BitTorrent does no storage whatsoever. There are reasons for that.

Mojo Nation isn't going to happen. Stop trying to make Mojo Nation happen.

In any case what we use in Chia is proof of space. We have no remote storage facility whatsoever. If you want to farm Chia (the equivalent of mining) you can do it off any space you want, with hardly any bandwidth required.

You can farm on spare hard drive space on anything, including your laptop. You can farm using a raspberry pi plugging as many drives of as large a size as you can find which will physically plug into it.

You can reclaim the space you're using for farming at any time simply by deleting the plot files. The only part of it which requires non-negligible resources is the initial plotting (because it has to go over the data a few times, \

obviously you can't plot more quickly than the drive can write) and we recently more than doubled the speed of plotting with more improvements on the way.

So please come check us out at chia.net! We won't require you buy a huge rig which doesn't even work in order to farm! Our testnet up out and running, with mainnet coming soon.