Unfortunately there's no guarantee that the files will stay around forever. While cheap and useful, I don't think it will be "robust".

Freenet offers P2P file sharing as well, but much like this project there's no guarantee the data will survive for long.

If well configured, the system should be fault tolerant (i.e if any node drops off the network there are other copies available elsewhere. Many systems already implement this (including Bitcoin itself). To be more robust than Dropbox, all you have to do is have more system uptime than AWS (or whatever service they're using to store all that data).

One of the things that people tend to underestimate is datacenter outages. When an Amazon datacenter goes down it takes out many sites with it. We're working toward a world where data is redundantly kept in many different datacenters/locations. In those almost-total failure cases, latency is better than no availability.

Cheaper and more robust isn't really what Dropbox has been competing on.Great UX, feature set, support, and general marketing is what will make the difference.

Of these I think UX is the most significant. UX is where the proprietary walled gardens and centralized services always win.

Good UX is unbelievably, grindingly hard. If you want to make a product with a good user interface and overall experience, 90% of the work is going to take you about 25% of the time and the remaining 10% is going to take you 75% of the time. Most hackers decide a product is done when it works, but in reality they're not even half way there.

Apple is probably the overall king of UX. If you look at their process and their culture, they obsess and obsess over tiny little details that are irrelevant to core functionality as understood from a purely technical point of view.

Closed silos have a clear revenue model. That enables them to invest in pushing product quality and user experience the rest of the way, past where hackers and enthusiasts would take it and into the realm of polished usability that real customer bases demand.

Who's going to pay entire teams of designers to obsess over the filecoin.io client's "experience"?

That's why the next bitcoin or filecoin like payment system should reward people who contribute to open source / free software.

Mastercoin pays its developers using currency created in the first block, in a system of bounties managed by the Mastercoin foundation. You can contribute a patch and get paid. Go read on their website, it's interesting.

Why the next? ;) We're definitely thinking about this. One dream I have is to move Open Source out of the "Tragedy of the Commons" example list.

Is it possible to help on this?

Yes, all that will be open source. Sign up on the Filecoin mailing list to keep in touch.

Yeah, UX is critical. We're already working hard toward this.

But it's absolutely not more robust! What if all the 'servers' having your files go into limbo at once? Dropbox will make a big splash and you know who to go after, but with filecoin you're on your own. :-)

Well Dropbox/Gdrive/Skydrive etc. all offer free storage in the range of 15-30gb, which is enough for most normal users. For professionell use there is S3,glacier, box etc. and they all offer known security and redundancy.

Most businesses won't touch anything related to bitcoin and things lacking a reliable SLA.

While a lot of people have unused storage space, many lack usable upload bandwidth and have low availability, so I would assume a lot of copies would be needed.

It's gonna be very interesting to see if stuff like this or storj, which was posted earlier today, can compete with current services.

But as someone with a lot of servers with unused space I sure hope so.

One has to wonder how much unused disk space is sitting on the generic Dell boxes in various cubicle farms, libraries, etc. Could be decent trickle revenue, and it wouldn't impede usability/performance the way mining does.

Yes. There's so many computing resources going to waste. We're changing that.