Point 1: Your personal success, or anyone’s at anything in particular, does not mean that whatever it is that was successful at the time will remain viable in the future.
Point 2: At the moment there are a total of around 750 Filecoin providers. That’s not very many. The Filecoin network is decentralized but siloed into massive servers. The incentives encourage those running massive servers to become more massive. I seem to remember that Filecoin has a bonus for more capacity.
Point 3: If one was deciding on the viability of a data storage network solely based on the raw capacity, AWS wins. So, the metric needs to be something else.
Point 4: The de-duplication of data on IPFS is also its weak point.
Storj and IPFS are not drop-in replacements. IPFS is really neat, but so is a Logical Volume that spans 200 spare drives. If one wishes to store a lot of data inexpensively, one could simply run an IPFS node… there’s no need to mess with a entire blockchain dedicated to a contractual agreement.
If you had used your STORJ to buy 15 ENS domains using 15 different addresses instead of letting the tokens sit, you could have earned a few hundred thousand USD during their airdrop too…
Financial success in the crypto world is still quite a lot of luck. However, my prediction is that Storj is one of those rare projects that will continue to grow and find success for a long time to come…
EDIT:
This post is as true today as it was in 2020:
https://forum.storj.io/t/storj-vs-filecoin/9760/4
Centralized Silos are baked into the reward system:
https://spec.filecoin.io/systems/filecoin_blockchain/storage_power_consensus/
Quality-Adjusted Power is the number of votes a miner has in the Secret Leader Election and has been defined to increase linearly with the useful storage that a miner has committed to the network.
More precisely, we have the following definitions:
- Raw-byte power: the size of a sector in bytes.
- Quality-adjusted power: the consensus power of stored data on the network, equal to Raw-byte power multiplied by the Sector Quality Multiplier.
Summary:
Storj has decentralization baked in. Data pieces are distributed throughout the network in such a way as to flatten data storage across the network. This generally means that large storage nodes are somewhat as likely as small nodes in obtaining traffic. Since the Storj network has duplication of data and error correction capabilities, the “filesystem” is more like ZFS than a RAID 0.
Filecoin has centralized baked in. Data are stored in ever increasingly lower numbers of larger nodes. Since there are no error correction capabilities, the “filesystem” functions more like RAID 0 or a LV spanning a odd collection of drives than something robust like ZFS.
STORJ as a token exists on one of the most popular blockchains in existence. And is directly portable to secondary blockchains running Ethereum.
FIL as a token exists on a dedicated blockchain. While wrapped tokens can be used to track the value, FIL only has “utility” on its dedicated blockchain. This means that FIL is susceptible to being trapped by on or off ramp pathways… Centralized crypto exchanges may arbitrarily shutdown FIL blockchain access. This is also true of Polygon. However, Polygon is not a dedicated blockchain with a singular purpose in mind. So, the likelihood of Centralized Exchanges shutting down access to Polygon becomes less likely over time - while access to FIL blockchain becomes more likely to be shut down if the network becomes stagnate.
All things considered, it’s far more likely that Storj will have long term success than Filecoin. Only time will tell.
I wish @stuberman and any other FIL enthusiasts much success in Filecoin. However, I like the fair distribution and ease of participation of Storj. I strongly suspect that the differences I’ve pointed out above between Filecoin and Storj will mean steady growth and success of Storj and stagnation of Filecoin.