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Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

blog.sia.tech

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Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#71

Post by xur17 »

ukd1 wrote: post #67

Long time user and follower of Sia. It's always surprising to me that it's overlooked compared to filecoin (which is similar, but seems like $250m+ vaporware to date). I use it to have tertiary backups. Weird caveat I found: the smallest chargeable size is actually pretty large.

> Weird caveat I found: the smallest chargeable size is actually pretty large.

This and the cost to form contracts is is large enough that it doesn't make economical sense until you are storing > $1gb.

That said, they seem to slowly be working through a number of these concerns. They very recently released seed based backups, one of the biggest issues I had last time I looked.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#72

Post by modeless »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #35
modeless wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not theoretically impossible for law enforcement to discover the encryption keys to some illegal files on someone's computer. Then they could go around arresting people who host the chunks. Of course those people wouldn't have known about those files in particular, but they were knowingly running software that enables hosting illegal files. A judge would have to decide if that's OK.

Doesn't AWS also have the same problem? Someone could upload encrypted illegal content, then later law enforcement could discover the key. Why hasn't AWS gotten in trouble for that yet?

No large cloud provider allows anonymous usage. They take down content on request and assist law enforcement in catching the non-anonymous people doing illegal things on their platforms.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#73

Post by nisten »

There is one missing piece to all this, I/O.

Given they publish their apps on all platforms they could probably add this in the future as an ssd or PCIe storage tier by doing regular disk benchmarks.

However it seems like a major limiting factor, given that random access speeds on spinning drives or even cheap ssds can drop drastically by an order or two of magnitude (i.e. from 130MB/s to 2MB/s). Given how they're doing error correction in a distributed manner, having a fast storage tier would be a major advantage for them which would eliminate any problems from flash storage wearing out and fully gain the benefit of throughput, random access times and cheap new prices of nvme drives.

At the moment I probably can't use this for streaming my own 4k videos to myself because an up to 300mbps network is not good enough for that, the slowest storage in it would be a bottleneck for a significant amounts of the experience of watching the streamed file.

And I definitely can't use it for application storage given how important response time is to the user experience and user growth.

That all aside, those 2 are relatively extreme examples and there's a lot of usage scenarios in between them.

I do admire how far they've gotten this given all the blockchain hyped products that have failed. They seem to have a solid system here that will only improve on performance and put pressure on bringing online storage prices down.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#74

Post by jchw »

> Today it is possible to purchase a refurbished 1 TB hard drive for about $20 — so buyers are essentially paying Amazon each month the entire cost of the hard drives used to store their data!

What a refurbished hard disk does not give you:

- Redundant storage

- Redundant power/network/etc.

- Geographic distribution

- A network API

- Any networking, or uplinks at all

- Access control

- A team ensuring the reliability and security of your data

- Global network of datacenters and pops

- Integration with other cloud services

All that and Amazon et al. do not store your 1TB of data in a single refurbished hard disk. This is beyond non-sense.

Sure, some of these costs are amortized, but I still think this is a lame comparison. If all you wanted was at-cost block storage with crappy reliability and speed, you could probably accomplish that in easier ways.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#75

Post by rjeli »

wmf wrote: post #55
Taek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SGX has always seemed like the Netflix DRM problem to me.. eventually, pixels have to show up on a screen somewhere, right? Am I mistaken in this line of thinking?

Homomorphic encryption solves this, but it’s throwing an awful lot of performance out the window.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#76

Post by ukd1 »

xur17 wrote: post #71
ukd1 wrote: post #67

Long time user and follower of Sia. It's always surprising to me that it's overlooked compared to filecoin (which is similar, but seems like $250m+ vaporware to date). I use it to have tertiary backups. Weird caveat I found: the smallest chargeable size is actually pretty large.

> Weird caveat I found: the smallest chargeable size is actually pretty large. This and the cost to form contracts is is large enough that it doesn't make economical sense until you are storing > $1gb. That said, they seem to slowly be working through a number of these concerns. They very recently released seed based backups, one of the biggest issues I had last time I looked.

Ya; that's another one - the same wallet on multiple machines = different set of contracts. Didn't notice that was fixed though...

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#77

Post by dymk »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #44
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 prov…

> Authorities do not care much, I assume, if you possess illegal content. What they care about is if you share illegal content.

You'd be wrong - people get nabbed for having or creating child porn, not just distributing it.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#78

Post by dymk »

antpls wrote: post #45
uwuhn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And some of it is child porn. Does that only upset the elites?

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#79

Post by fghtr »

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…

https://golem.network is the project to make decentralized computing possible. They already have beta version released.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#80

Post by q3k »

Taek wrote: post #58
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 yo…

> 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.

This is already the case for cluster storage systems like Ceph.

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