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The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

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Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#31

Post by regularfry »

frabcus wrote: post #28

I think the main thing that this misses is the potential benefit of an open protocol. We still don't have a standard open equivalent of Dropbox.js (deprecated). That is, a user controlled account which a browser or phone knows about that can store files, and that every app that needs to store files can read and write to . Proprietary solutions and B2B solutions will never meet that need - it needs to be something tha…

I honestly don't see the need for it to be distributed. A zeroconf home file server that handled giving you access when you were out and about would solve the 80% problem.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#32

Post by jrumbut »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #5

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is different" Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. The big…

I don't think the author is arguing against the entire concept of P2P networks (though if I read correctly he does make an off hand comment saying they can be difficuly, which is probably true of anything), just the idea that cryptocurrency backed distributed storage is likely to be widely adopted and profitable.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#33

Post by acdha »

frabcus wrote: post #28

I think the main thing that this misses is the potential benefit of an open protocol. We still don't have a standard open equivalent of Dropbox.js (deprecated). That is, a user controlled account which a browser or phone knows about that can store files, and that every app that needs to store files can read and write to . Proprietary solutions and B2B solutions will never meet that need - it needs to be something tha…

I don’t think it’s missing so much as being realistic about the costs of developing a production grade service.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t really up to that since it’s unlikely to lead to the kind of lottery returns VCs are chasing — the most people are going to pay is capped at Dropbox/iCloud/etc. rates — and the volatility makes it hard to sustain years of development to make something stable enough to trust and easy to use.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#34

Post by wpietri »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #5

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is different" Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. The big…

Aren't you just replicating the same mistake he's describing as being made over and over again? Where people express a reasonable desire but don't think through the issues before deciding it's worth pursuing?

In tech we have this habit of going from, "Wouldn't it be cool if X..." to "Let's build X right now!" I think that's a fine instinct if it hasn't been tried and it's something that runs on the author's machines. Something will be learned.

But when we're talking real money and real work from a lot of people, I think it's worth stopping and asking some questions. Yes, sure, X would be cool. But are there perhaps subtle reasons why X has not happened yet? As with jetpacks and 3D video, sometimes cool things are impractical or don't pay off as much as you'd first think.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#36

Post by walshemj »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #5

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is different" Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. The big…

why is your edit any more or less "confusing to read"

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#38

Post by bhouston »

> But that's not the worst of it. Suppose P2 storage became profitable and started to take business from S3. Amazon's slow AI has an obvious response, it can run P2 peers for itself on the same infrastructure as it runs S3. With its vast economies of scale and extremely low cost of capital, P2-on-S3 would easily capture the bulk of the P2 market. It isn't just that, if successful, the P2 network would become centralized, it is that it would become centralized at Amazon!

That is exactly what I said about a year ago, although I predicted centralization on BackBlaze instead of S3 because they had lower costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14988800

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#39

Post by filecoinp2throw »

I disagree with his argument that for anyone to use P2P storage, it has to be less expensive than S3. It's true that this will be hard to do, for all the reasons he listed. But some amount of people will be willing to pay a premium for P2P storage, because it can't be censored or ordered to be deleted as easily as data stored on S3. Pirates, journalists, and activists will appreciate this use case.

There's also another economic reason for why people would pay extra to use P2P storage. I'm sure there's some sort of term for this, but many people have stacks of cryptocurrencies that they can't or don't want to exchange for their day-to-day currency. Maybe their government restricts exchanges, the funds came from a questionable source, they have some philosophical issue with "fiat" currency, or they're just avoiding taxes. If you need to store 50TB of data, and have $900 in your checking account and 400 ETH in your wallet, you'd probably choose P2P storage over S3.

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