Ben Fish, a Stanford PhD researcher studying cryptography, explains the fundamental mechanics of Proof of Replication protocols in decentralized storage networks.
Insight
Fish: Decentralized networks give anonymous devices Amazon-level cryptographic trust
“You don't have to spend, you know, millions of dollars on PR to you know, to garner a name like Amazon. Right. You just have a device. You join the network. Nobody knows who you are. But yet everybody should be able to have the same trust in you that they have…”
Opinion
Fish: Bitcoin's proof-of-work energy is largely wasted computational work
“The thing about Bitcoin is that all that work is just sort of computational energy that is, ah, that is, say, somewhat wasted, although it maintains the system in balance.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fish: Governments can easily force centralized cloud providers to censor files
“If you have Amazon in charge of all the storage, then maybe Amazon is not intending to censor Individuals, but say a government is, it's much easier for a government to prevent Amazon from serving files to their country than, you know, a amorphous internet of,…”
Insight
Fish: Bitcoin is a decentralized storage network for a single file
“You can think of a, you know, decentralized accounting system, Bitcoin being the first example of such as a example of a decentralized you know, storage network. It's just that the one file that the entire system has decentralized the storage of is the ledger …”
Insight
Fish: Standard proofs of retrievability are impractical for decentralized storage networks
“But then when you start to talk about, you know, the economics of an entire decentralized storage network, it seems quite impractical to say, okay, well, you're a user. If you want to store your files in this network, then you have to constantly ping the netwo…”
Insight
Fish: Proof of storage turns environmental footprint into practical file storage
“In a decentralized storage network that is based on proof of storage, the footprint is something useful. It's file storage itself.”