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Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

filecoin.io

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Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#131
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think AWS would be necessarily be faster or more reliable? If done correctly, think a decentralized system could be significantly faster and more reliable than even the best centralized storage solution. For example, with a decentralized system files could be broken up into shards and distributed across multiple nodes, so unless a significant percentage of computers on the planet all melt down at once…

Bittorrent at least has has much higher latency than a protocol like HTTP with simple auth. As for price, AWS has some of the cheapest operating costs due to scale, something which smaller players will have trouble competing with. Moving data within AWS is fast and sometimes free. Smaller players also pay the highest cost for bandwidth. If some plans don't have bandwidth caps yet (many already do), they will get caps…

> Smaller players also pay the highest cost for bandwidth. If some plans don't have bandwidth caps yet (many already do), they will get caps as soon as serving bandwidth as an individual becomes profitable.

Isn't it the other way around? Small providers offer low traffic costs while the big cloud providers (Google, AWS, Azure) charge significantly for bandwidth.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#132
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siacoins calculator at http://sia.tech/ is claiming a price of $2/TB/month vs $23/TB/month for Amazon S3. However it neglects to include Backblaze's B2 storage which is only $5/TB/month - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html That is maybe a not a big enough price saving to convince conservative corporations to switch. Imagine going to your accounts department to request they purchase a cryptocurren…

I don't know how using Sia works in practice, but comparing it with regular S3, which is connected to the entire AWS ecosystem (including EC2), is absurd. Amazon S3 also offers "glacier" for longterm storage with few accesses, which is $4 per TB.

But that's the problem. S3 is cheap if you use it with other AWS services and it's designed to be only cheap that way. Bandwidth is expensive to avoid that people pick services from a combination of Azure/AWS/Google.

If you're just looking for storage, S3 is certainly not the cheapest provider. Glacier is a bit different but clearly just for archives.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#134
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torrent hosts do not have a monetary incentive to host files. Filecoin (and other decentralized storage systems) provide monetary rewards and penalties for storing or failing to store files. This is introduced in Section 4.1.1 of this paper.

Exactly. As long as there's demand to keep hosting files in the network, there WILL be providers hosting your files. Even if a hosting company who hosts 5% of the network (that's a lot) decides to exit the and stop hosting, your files are spread between enough computers and you only need about half of them to be online to recover your files.

Unless some parts of your data happened to be replicated across multiple shards on that same hosting company's hardware. Then you would have a partial loss of data.

The bad thing is that you would not be able to hold them responsible.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#137
post #117

Unfortunately, one of the important citations ([5], "Proof of Replication") does not appear to be available. (Or, at least, Google cannot find it.)

Yes, citations 5, 14, 15 will be published latter. There is a possibility that some of them will be published next week.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#138
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how using Sia works in practice, but comparing it with regular S3, which is connected to the entire AWS ecosystem (including EC2), is absurd. Amazon S3 also offers "glacier" for longterm storage with few accesses, which is $4 per TB.

But that's the problem. S3 is cheap if you use it with other AWS services and it's designed to be only cheap that way. Bandwidth is expensive to avoid that people pick services from a combination of Azure/AWS/Google. If you're just looking for storage, S3 is certainly not the cheapest provider. Glacier is a bit different but clearly just for archives.

I'm comparing just storage prices, because I have no idea how Sia works in terms of latency/bandwidth/access. Being distributed, I suppose it will fare worse in most (if not all) these respects compared to Azure/AWS/Google and maybe even glacier.

As for bandwidth cost: I don't believe Sia can be successful and stay that cheap. Why would providers of bandwidth for Sia be able to offer it magnitudes cheaper than the biggest tech companies in the world? Answer: It's offered by a bunch of individuals with no caps on their data plans. If Sia takes off and lots of people start using terabytes of bandwidth, the ISPs will put an end to it.

Re: Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

#139
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bittorrent at least has has much higher latency than a protocol like HTTP with simple auth. As for price, AWS has some of the cheapest operating costs due to scale, something which smaller players will have trouble competing with. Moving data within AWS is fast and sometimes free. Smaller players also pay the highest cost for bandwidth. If some plans don't have bandwidth caps yet (many already do), they will get caps…

> Smaller players also pay the highest cost for bandwidth. If some plans don't have bandwidth caps yet (many already do), they will get caps as soon as serving bandwidth as an individual becomes profitable. Isn't it the other way around? Small providers offer low traffic costs while the big cloud providers (Google, AWS, Azure) charge significantly for bandwidth.

Small providers pay the most for traffic to their ISPs, because they get smaller volume discounts. What Google/AWS/Azure charge is a different topic entirely, they themselves pay much less.
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