One thing I don't fully understand about Filecoin (or siacoin for that matter): can I utilize this as a service provider to directly host and deliver content to my users, or do I need to sit in the path of the traffic, and retrieve the content for them? Or does this not fit into the traditional hosting model at all? Filecoin mentions the retrieval market, but I'm struggling to find more details.
A concrete example would be a file or image hosting service. I can pay to store my content using Filecoin, but am I required to retrieve the content and transfer it to my users?
You won't have to sit on the retrieval path with Filecoin. Nodes participating in the retrieval market will probably simply expose a Filecoin-enabled version of the HTTP-to-IPFS gateway. The v2 paper will have more details very soon.
Interesting to note is also that, if you want to deliver content yourself, you can just run IPFS nodes on their own, without Filecoin. IPFS has been working fine for the past two years.
IPFS works but its not really fine - trying to use it on a small scale (home internet connections) has proven completely impossible for me. It reliably saturates my upload despite not actually serving any content - the DHT connection overhead in every mode is just too high.
This would be fine, but the whole point is decentralized internet - if I can't have a node running at home, or more specifically a node running on pretty much every device I have, its not practical.
Yeah I feel you, the management overhead is a big pain for many people at the moment, ourselves included.
There's a couple of improvements to this coming in the next two months: 1) a new transport (QUIC) which has less overhead, 2) smarter connection handling which closes unneccessary connections earlier, 3) more efficient announcements of who-has-what.
Sia has not finished this part of the code, but in Sia it's possible to operate like a CDN. The user asks you for content, and then you point them to the host that they download from.
The user still needs to be told where the file is, but this info is a few kb, and the file can be any size. The download is direct from host to user.
Very cool. That means you could have your webserver grab the URL from sia, and render it into the website (assuming users can download the content via normal http).
A concrete example would be a file or image hosting service. I can pay to store my content using Filecoin, but am I required to retrieve the content and transfer it to my users?