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Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

blog.sia.tech

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Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#51

Post by buildzr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #41
idlewords wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> or less costly

They're definitely less costly. I could host over 10x the amount on Sia for what I pay for B2 at the moment, B2 is already one of the cheapest providers, plus that's just in storage, ignoring all bandwidth costs. I'm really curious what the numbers will look like in terms of reliability here. Theoretically you can figure out how often storage contracts try to retrieve and fail and the host has to pay a fee by looking at the block chain, anyone done the analysis on this yet?

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#52

Post by toomuchtodo »

buildzr wrote: post #51
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> or less costly They're definitely less costly. I could host over 10x the amount on Sia for what I pay for B2 at the moment, B2 is already one of the cheapest providers, plus that's just in storage, ignoring all bandwidth costs. I'm really curious what the numbers will look like in terms of reliability here. Theoretically you can figure out how often storage contracts try to retrieve and fail and the host has to pay…

But do you have the same level of durability and availability of your data? Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data? Can you pay with dollars instead of bitcoin?

I'm paying for trust, and it is a hard sell that a distributed storage system spanning worldwide jurisdictions is inherently more trustworthy (although it is possible that it can be as durable and reliable as traditional storage systems, but the proof is in the data).

I would like to be proven wrong.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#53

Post by Taek »

buildbuildbuild wrote: post #42

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 ab…

Decentralized computing is a challenge because unlike storage, it's very expensive to encrypt computation. You see something like 10,000x slowdowns.

With storage, we can encrypt and checksum everything client-side in a cryptographically secure manner, and we can have full faith that even though we are giving our data to someone else, they have no way to view the data or tamper with the data.

If techniques like homomorphic encryption gain substantial speedups, I'm sure that we'll start to see decentralized/trustless computing, but for now you really need to be doing your outsourced computing with someone you can trust and someone who is regulated, because it's possible to act maliciously.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#54

Post by wmf »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #41
idlewords wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're not necessarily wrong but it's not so one-sided. In Sia you are definitely paying, the storage is automatically verified, and the storage providers don't get paid if they go down.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#55

Post by wmf »

Taek wrote: post #53
buildbuildbuild wrote: post #42

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 ab…

Decentralized computing is a challenge because unlike storage, it's very expensive to encrypt computation. You see something like 10,000x slowdowns. With storage, we can encrypt and checksum everything client-side in a cryptographically secure manner, and we can have full faith that even though we are giving our data to someone else, they have no way to view the data or tamper with the data. If techniques like homomo…

Unless SGX works.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#56

Post by Nursie »

jonas21 wrote: post #49

> 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…

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

Further, I imagine that if there is money to be made providing reliable storage to Sia users, then those with experience of reliably providing low-cost, high-volume storage will corner the market pretty fast!

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#57

Post by buildzr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #52
buildzr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or less costly They're definitely less costly. I could host over 10x the amount on Sia for what I pay for B2 at the moment, B2 is already one of the cheapest providers, plus that's just in storage, ignoring all bandwidth costs. I'm really curious what the numbers will look like in terms of reliability here. Theoretically you can figure out how often storage contracts try to retrieve and fail and the host has to pay…

But do you have the same level of durability and availability of your data? Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data? Can you pay with dollars instead of bitcoin? I'm paying for trust, and it is a hard sell that a distributed storage system spanning worldwide jurisdictions is inherently more trustworthy (although it is possible that it can be as durable and reliable as traditional storage s…

> Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data?

No, I trust the cryptography to, I sure as hell wouldn't trust Backblaze, let alone Amazon not to do that either. I use Restic when using such services to encrypt before sending anything to them.

> durability and availability

This is IMO the only real question. I want to see some numbers and I think their blockchain should actually be able to provide values for this theoretically.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#58

Post by Taek »

jonas21 wrote: post #49

> 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…

Sia is built on a completely different assumption than most large datacenters - uptime requirements for hosts are around 95%, which equates to about 36 hours of downtime per month.

This means that you can run a much leaner database and require substantially less expertise to keep things going. If a rack goes down, you don't need someone on-site to bring it up ASAP, you can fix it the next workday without upsetting your customers.

95% uptime for hosts translates to 99.99+% uptime for Sia users, because users store data across hosts in a 10-of-30 scheme. As long as 10 out of 30 of the hosts are online, you will be able to access your data. The probability of losing 20 hosts when each of your 30 hosts have 95% uptime is exceedingly small; your practical uptime depends more on the reliability of the software than it does the reliability of the hosts you use.

As for commoditization: that's the goal! If we can completely commoditize data storage, prices should come down dramatically, and the market should be a lot more efficient. You won't need to be an Amazon or Google to have a stable and competitive data offering.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#59

Post by pmlnr »

buildbuildbuild wrote: post #42

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 ab…

Storj was a brilliant idea then suddenly someone put blockchain into it.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#60

Post by arbol »

pradn wrote: post #28
jameslevy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that censorship resistance is a key value proposition for decentralized file storage. So its agnostic handling of illegal content is a feature, not a bug.

I wonder about whether it's right to be renting your storage space away without knowing what it's being used for. I don't want to directly contribute toward bad things happening.

We need to move away from centralised internet.

You don't have any real proof that Company XYZ aren't using your money to do bad things.

You would stop participating if it turned out the Sia network was mostly used for bad things. In the same vein, you may choose not to use Amazon because it is unfairly treating warehouse workers.

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