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Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

blog.sia.tech

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Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#41

Post by toomuchtodo »

idlewords wrote: post #40
hanniabu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-reliant on central services or entities.

Except for the software developers.

So exhausting watching people argue that trust is no longer necessary when they're simply pushing the trust around. You have to trust someone at the end of the day, and it's more practical to use the law to trust them (and enforce that trust) than cryptography.

If I want to decentralize my storage, I would replicate data between multiple cloud object stores (Backblaze, S3, Wasabi, etc, a library to abstract PUTs and GETs) and pay them for their service. I trust them, but can verify each is holding up their end of their commercial agreement (similar to RAID block scans, but with object hash verifications). They aren't randomly going to yank their storage node of the network like a home NAS device or other consumer level storage device, because it's their business to be available.

A superior solution has yet to present itself.

Sidenote: The blog post is holding cloud provider data egress fees up as an example of exorbitant bandwidth pricing; this is true, but only from cloud providers. You can get bandwidth extremely cheap from non-cloud providers or through other means[1].

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ (random example picked from Google search)

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#42

Post by buildbuildbuild »

Abuse concerns and “does it need a blockchain” cynicism aside I find all of these “crypto” cloud computing projects fascinating. I highly recommend playing around on their testnets. Storj and Filecoin are also competing in the storage space, and BitTorrent is vying to be a CDN alternative.

SONM aims to be an EC2 competitor, and interestingly requires ID verification to participate in their testnet due to the clear abuse potential of unattributable internet-connected VMs. (which exist in plenty of other places anyways since at present date, hosting providers have no KYC requirements)

Will the sharing economy extend to computing resources? I’ll stay tuned.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#43

Post by asdkhadsj »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #6
yasp wrote: post #2

How do services like Sia handle illegal content?

All data is fragmented and encrypted, so it's impossible to know whether a particular host is storing a fragment of illegal content or not. I suppose if you somehow _did_ find out you were hosting a fragment of illegal content you could breach the storage contract (and pay the resulting penalty) but that's very unlikely because, again, all content is encrypted.

Depends on how it's implemented though, does it not? Eg, I can encrypt a file and give it to 10 people and they'll be clueless of what is in it, yes. But, because of how I encrypted it it is clear that the contents are the same on those 10 people.

So if I am busted and my key/etc compromised, it is possible that those hosts are compromised as well.

This says nothing of Sia's implementation, just that encryption itself does nothing to prevent a party from being prosecuted from illegal content.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#44

Post by galaxyLogic »

yasp wrote: post #2

How do services like Sia handle illegal content?

I find the concept of "Illegal Content" conceptually questionable. Authorities do not care much, I assume, if you possess illegal content. What they care about is if you share illegal content.

Say you have a pro-democracy pamphlet on your hard-drive in China. If they find it they would imprison you no doubt but they don't care so much to look for it, and it is hard to find if you never share it with anybody.

SIA provides private storage so if your only crime is possessing illegal content but never sharing it with anybody no big deal (I would assume). But if you share it then SIA can not protect you because the exchange must happen somewhere outside of SIA.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#45

Post by antpls »

uwuhn wrote: post #7
yasp wrote: post #2

How do services like Sia handle illegal content?

It doesn't. The last real application of Sia that I heard of during the previous crypto boom basically sounded like renting your HD space out to people who would potentially use it to store illegal content.

The next step is to fight the idea of "illegal content". Bits are just bits, some just upset the elites, just like nipples.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#46

Post by buildzr »

snarf21 wrote: post #36
hanniabu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-reliant on central services or entities.

This also cuts both ways. Your business needs a file but your customer can't connect to that node because of some political blocking of internet connections. Who can you rely on? What central service can you call to get this fixed asap?

The idea with Sia is you upload to not one, but several people, you pick the level of redundancy you want and if you can't get the file you want from any given one of them, they pay the price and you get it from someone else.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#47

Post by arcticbull »

hanniabu wrote: post #31
arcticbull wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the biggest risk of permissionless / decentralized -- you learn quickly why permissioning and centralization are important.

Can you provide some of the reasons?

Otherwise encrypted illegal content is stored on everyone's computers, and technically makes them potential felons. And thanks to the magic of the blockchain, it's indelibly recorded forever.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#48

Post by Ajedi32 »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #43
Ajedi32 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All data is fragmented and encrypted, so it's impossible to know whether a particular host is storing a fragment of illegal content or not. I suppose if you somehow _did_ find out you were hosting a fragment of illegal content you could breach the storage contract (and pay the resulting penalty) but that's very unlikely because, again, all content is encrypted.

Depends on how it's implemented though, does it not? Eg, I can encrypt a file and give it to 10 people and they'll be clueless of what is in it, yes. But, because of how I encrypted it it is clear that the contents are the same on those 10 people. So if I am busted and my key/etc compromised, it is possible that those hosts are compromised as well. This says nothing of Sia's implementation, just that encryption itsel…

Couldn't the same thing happen with AWS? You encrypt an illegal file, store it on AWS, then get busted? Why would those 10 people in your example get in trouble but not AWS?

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#49

Post by jonas21 »

> Hosts on Sia do not have to worry about building and maintaining enormous datacenters, employing thousands of employees, and marketing their services. They only need to worry about providing reliable storage capacity to renters on Sia.

I would expect that building large datacenters and employing people to manage them is exactly how you go about providing reliable storage capacity.

And while it's true that providers don't have to worry about marketing or branding, well... the flip side is that they can't do any marketing or branding and need to compete in a market where the product is completely commoditized.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#50

Post by Taek »

SimianLogic2 wrote: post #25

Can someone ELI5 why you need a blockchain for this? Another startup could make a non-blockchain version of this that uses similar syncing technology to GDrive / Dropbox file sync that just syncs other people's stuff instead of yours and pays you monthly.

Founder here. The blockchain gets you a couple of things.

The key thing in our blockchain is the storage contract, which is something like a blockchain-SLA. The host has an obligation to store some data, and the host also puts up money out of pocket as a promise that the data will be stored faithfully. The blockchain will occasionally challenge the host, and if the host cannot create a proof that the data is still being stored, the host's collateral is forfeit.

The renter also puts money into the file contract, this money is used to pay the host if the host is honest/keeps the data, and the money is destroyed if the host is dishonest or loses the data. The money gets destroyed so that the renter has no reason to interfere with the host, nothing to gain from seeing the host fail or working to make the host fail.

Thanks to the blockchain, the host has a guaranteed payment if they store the data, regardless of whether the renter sticks around for the duration of the contract or not. And also thanks to the blockchain, the renter knows that the host will not get paid until the end of the contract, and that they will actually lose some of their own money if they lose the data.

There's another great benefit though to cryptocurrency, which is that payments are super low friction. Every time you upload data to the Sia network or download data from the Sia network, you make hundreds to thousands of tiny payments to the various parties over state channels. This wouldn't be feasible using more traditional payment systems, we'd have to track everything in a centralized database, and that actually doesn't scale very well.

Sia is both low cost and high speed, but these are side benefits over the primary goal of uncompromising decentralization. Storage just happens to be an application where the decentralized version is actually highly competitive to the centralized versions.

I'm glossing over a fair amount here, if there's anything that doesn't make sense or seems off feel free to ask, I'm happy to clarify.

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