I got a question on how one can "outcompete" without focusing on financial return: an example of the pattern I describe is wikipedia, which has replaced most search results on the internet but has no profit. If your benefit is strong enough you can eventually replace an industry entirely: cloud storage instead of encyclopedias.
Note the proposed idea is vulnerable to malicious crucial data change a little more than a blockchain (even if the protocol rejects it, system compromises could alter what is expected), which could be patched by some clients plugging into a blockchain to produce proofs-of-existence for now. On Sun, May 24, 2020, 7:25 AM Karl <[email protected]> wrote: > This is just a small part of outcompeting blockchains, but it's a big one > to me. (I'm using here the survival trait of sustaining everyone else > giving you community support, to plan the outcompetition.) > > If people got together and made a globally usable filesystem using > something like ceph, lizardfs, tahoe-lafs ... we could together replace the > role of storage history in blockchains. This would help soften the global > shock around them, letting more people run nodes and making fewer people > need to. > > You'd want to make a small patch to the system preventing deletion of > important stuff. Siacoin (which I only remember because I use their web > interface) actually has enough storage to back thousands of terabytes on > FUSE for reasonable cost if we wanted to preserve everything entirely. I > would let anybody mark something crucial with some kind of rudimentary spam > detection (e.g. low entropy in file, only so much data from single source) > to start with, and not let crucial things be deleted by anyone. The open > source community that would sprout as usage grew could handle the spam > detection breaking. > > You'd shift your sense of security such that the ability to write to the > filesystem is shared publicly and directly, via e.g. a public private-key. > > Once it got going, storage-based chains like storj and siacoin would pay > such a network for providing storage. > > Any thoughts? >
