Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network • Hacker News Board

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#101

Post by AdamJacobMuller » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

leetbulb wrote: post #97

jchw wrote: post #74

> 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…

Off topic, but: I purchased three refurb 6TB HGST He HDDs in Jan. from a reputable shop. All three failed last month. I was so happy that the shop completely refunded all of them because the warranty is generally very limited on refurb HDDs. Normal RMA is 5yr on this specific model. There's no way refurb drives are cost effective for these environments.

On balance, I purchased 45 refurb 4TB SAS drives around the same time. I had two DOA with 0% failure rate since then.

Also, very anecdotal, I know.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#102

Post by buildzr » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #84

buildzr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends largely on your bandwidth usage if that's beneficial, for me personally I'm talking home/small business backups where the additional reliability of B2 is great and the price actually works out better than putting that system in RAID1.

(EDIT: PSA) Remember, redundancy (RAID) is not a replacement for backups.

Of course, I'm talking about using the system to host personal and small business backups like I do with B2. I backup all the important content off my home RAID nightly. Definitely a good warning to put out there though.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#103

Post by rolltiide » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:07 PM UTC

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.

> that just syncs other people's stuff instead of yours and pays you monthly.

with VC money? with a fickle settlement system that requires 5 layers of financial institutions before you get a REST API? where you probably still need 50+ money services licenses and compliance department anyway? where any of those financial institutions can still cut you off for any reason? to maintain operations in a single country?

why do all that when you can just print money, or more accurately create a scarce digital asset of value to the market you create, available internationally on day one

you don't have to agree with it, but the pendulum has swung waaay in this other direction and thats the answer for "why" before you even get into the implementation that the founder wrote.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#104

Post by carlosdp » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

rolltiide wrote: post #96

tempsolution wrote: post #94

This reads like a typical blockchain non-sense hype article. Before you even go down the road of comparing sia to S3, what about some unbiased benchmarks? Show us the 99.999999999% durability, the pretty much unlimited bandwidth, the single digit milli-second latencies, the practically unlimited capacity. If you want to compare Sia to anything, compare it to Dropbox or OneDrive. S3 was made for an entirely different…

coming from someone who is not a fan of Siacoin from when I last used it in 2017, I think you miss the point what I like and want is encrypted distributed data that I can store and retrieve quickly and cheaply I also like an economic model that aligns the hosts to maintain the data, and how the proliferation of that economic model lets me invest in its growth from merely being a passive non-productive speculator, and…

IPFS isn't decentralized cloud storage though. Unless you host your file yourself on your IPFS node, your file is not guaranteed to be available. Hence why Filecoin is a thing they are working on.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#105

Post by carlosdp » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:18 PM UTC

tempsolution wrote: post #94

This reads like a typical blockchain non-sense hype article. Before you even go down the road of comparing sia to S3, what about some unbiased benchmarks? Show us the 99.999999999% durability, the pretty much unlimited bandwidth, the single digit milli-second latencies, the practically unlimited capacity. If you want to compare Sia to anything, compare it to Dropbox or OneDrive. S3 was made for an entirely different…

I agree in that they are probably comparing the wrong aspects of S3.

You're not going to be able to compete on the speed anytime soon probably, and maybe even the capacity if it really takes off. But, anyone here that works on an Amazon-based internet company knows that S3 is the most unreliable (in terms of availability, not storage) universally used product they have, next to EC2.

A good chunk of incidents can be attributed to S3 downtime in some AZ. With a decentralized storage network, the probability of actual downtime in terms of availability go wayyyyy down. If Amazon us-east-1 has a bad deploy or a network event, you lose access to those buckets, full-stop.

With something like this, you'd need a much larger network event, and if the app is fully decentralized itself, blast radius can be contained to individual customer regions instead of where you host your servers.

Probably more useful to compare to GCS Storage honestly, since they have multi-region buckets.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#106

Post by simonebrunozzi » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

tempsolution wrote: post #94

This reads like a typical blockchain non-sense hype article. Before you even go down the road of comparing sia to S3, what about some unbiased benchmarks? Show us the 99.999999999% durability, the pretty much unlimited bandwidth, the single digit milli-second latencies, the practically unlimited capacity. If you want to compare Sia to anything, compare it to Dropbox or OneDrive. S3 was made for an entirely different…

You are being deceived by Amazon's PR machine at its finest. The 11 9s of durability are a "design", not a guarantee. The official PR line at the time was "S3 is designed to provide 11 9s of durability".

There's still no SLA on durability AFAIK.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#107

Post by carlosdp » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:21 PM UTC

fghtr wrote: post #79

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…

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

Yea but afaik, they don't address data privacy. You should only deploy code that deals with public data.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#108

Post by gnode » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:28 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #74

> 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…

> What a refurbished hard disk does not give you: [...]

The whole point is that a decentralized storage network can add such features on top of the 1TB refurbished hard drive.

The refurbished drive may not be reliable, but if you replicate your data amongst many separate drives with independent failure (geographically distributed; different providing entities) then you can create a system with greater reliability. By using erasure coding schemes (similar to RAID5/6), it's possible to reduce the storage overhead which supports reliability to a fraction of the principle amount. Thus, providing 1 TB of storage to the network could earn slightly less than 1 TB of reliable storage in return.

Comparatively, a single cloud provider has the disadvantage that, because they are a single legal entity, they can decide for whatever reason to not continue your service.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#109

Post by Ajedi32 » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:29 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #72

Ajedi32 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, bad example. AWS is a paid service so obviously they have more information about their users than most. What about Dropbox or OneDrive? Both of those services allow files to be stored and shared with no requirement to identify yourself when you're creating an account, beyond providing an email address.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#110

Post by zherbert » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:30 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #74

> 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…

Appreciate your response. My comparison to the cost of a hard drive today is not meant to be a direct comparison, but instead to demonstrate that traditional cloud storage is actually quite expensive. Sia is able to bring down storage costs by an order of magnitude and bandwidth costs by two orders of magnitude. While most HN readers understand the nuances of cloud storage costs, most non-technical readers are unfamiliar with the high costs of S3 storage and egress.