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Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

blog.sia.tech

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Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#141

Post by Taek »

buildzr wrote: post #128
Taek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct that the failure rate for contracts is somewhere around 9%, and you are also correct that you need over 10 contracts to get 11 9's of redundancy, however this doesn't translate to needing 10x redundancy on the Sia network to get high reliability. Data is uploaded to Sia (per-default, it's configurable through the API) in a 10-of-30 scheme using Reed-Solomon coding, which means that each piece of data…

> Data is uploaded to Sia (per-default, it's configurable through the API) in a 10-of-30 scheme using Reed-Solomon coding, which means that each piece of data is held by 30 hosts, and out of those 30 hosts any 10 of them are sufficient to recover the original data. This sounds good - I'm just trying to understand how this is counted - are you establishing 30 separate contracts to achieve this?

Sia maintains 50 contracts with hosts at all times, and uses 30 of them for each file segment that gets uploaded. We use state channels, so we can use the same contracts each time you upload a new file, minimizing the total amount of on-chain activity.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#142

Post by Taek »

SimianLogic2 wrote: post #87
Taek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

How do renewals work? With S3 I upload something and then pay for it + bandwidth until I delete it. Would I need to know how long I need storage for ahead of time? Estimated bandwidth? I run a video rendering service that currently uploads previews (call it 5-10mb) to S3 for ~3 days and then deletes them. Finished renders (~50-200mb) are stored for 2 weeks. I upload 500-1000 new files a day. Amazon just bills me for…

You give Sia a budget and it does a pay-as-you-go with the budget. You can set how long you want the contracts to last, by default it's 3 months. That means you budget for 3 months of storage, and then you don't need to pay into Sia again for 3 months.

Anything that you paid for but didn't use will be refunded in full at the end of the 3 months.

Right now Sia does not support filesharing of any kind, however that's in the mid-term (6-12 months) roadmap.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#143

Post by Taek »

modeless wrote: post #24
Ajedi32 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data is encrypted by the client, so that's theoretically impossible. Neither you nor the authorities have the ability to determine what file fragments (whole flies aren't stored; just fragments) are on your PC.

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.

US has strong third party protection laws. If it doesn't, HN could be held accountable for illegal files that were converted to base64 and then posted in the comments.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but as a third party you are not responsible for illegal data uploaded to your server/machine so long as you are not aware that it is illegal data. Once you are informed that there is illegal data on your machine, you have 24 hours to remove it.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#144

Post by rossjudson »

perlgeek wrote: post #9

> and their prices are suspiciously similar at about $20 per TB per month. 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! Really? That's the argument? That you could store your files cheaper on a single, refurbished disk without considering the cost of housing, electricity, n…

I think the pricing information should probably be updated. The current public page for Google One says $99/year for 2 TB.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#145

Post by txcwpalpha »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #109
modeless wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both Dropbox and OneDrive scan your content to determine if it matches known illegal content (be it illegal pornography, DRM content, etc) and will remove it and remove you from their service.

See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna

If someone pre-encrypts data and then uploads that to Dropbox, it gets more complicated and AFAIK involves more of monitoring the IP addresses that things are coming from and/or being shared to.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#146

Post by solidasparagus »

zherbert wrote: post #118

Hi all, author here, just wanted to say I am thrilled to see the HN community discuss decentralized cloud storage in more detail. There are many drawbacks today and narrow use-cases, but our goal is to continue to improve Sia – and over the coming years we will prove that decentralized storage can compete directly with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We feel confident that the marketplace dynamics, in particular, will…

Pretty arrogant to say you're going to make cloud storage providers obsolete when you haven't even built a competing solution. You can't even share data yet...

And what about all the other features that cloud providers offer? You say "[the] Sia software is exponentially improving, and performance and featureset is quickly approaching Amazon S3", but I see absolutely no evidence of even the most basic features of cloud storage providers.

Authorization? Regulatory compliance? High-performance bandwidth? High-reliability public API/URLs? Customer support? Private cloud peering? Zero effort integration with many (most?) major data-related open source projects? Versioning? One-click, no-knowledge reliability?

How much do you need to grow to hit cloud scale? 1,000,000x? More? And you're already claiming that you're going to make S3 obsolete?

Your blog would hold more weight if you weren't so over-the-top, bullshit-level optimistic.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#147

Post by fitzroy »

zherbert wrote: post #118

Hi all, author here, just wanted to say I am thrilled to see the HN community discuss decentralized cloud storage in more detail. There are many drawbacks today and narrow use-cases, but our goal is to continue to improve Sia – and over the coming years we will prove that decentralized storage can compete directly with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We feel confident that the marketplace dynamics, in particular, will…

Gotta say, the fact that the installation instructions consist primarily of getting around the "unknown / unidentified developer" restriction doesn't inspire confidence.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#148

Post by dymk »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #126
dymk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Child porn is the emotional argument, the only possible case where most people might agree that some content can be illegal. A more representative scenario is illegal copies of music or a political pamphlet in China.

Sorry, how is child porn only an appeal to emotion?

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#149

Post by miguelmota »

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 requires redundant computations for verification which seems like a waste for most applications and not to mention latency added to each request.

I'm sure there's use cases for this that require more sophisticated compute than what smart contract platforms like Ethereum offer but I'm not sure what those are. If someone is being prohibited from using a cloud platform and needs to resort to a decentralized hosting platform, I can see them simply using a VPN and hosting the application on a different platform that's not censoring them. SONM requiring KYC for their decentralized platform sounds like an oxymoron.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#150

Post by b_tterc_p »

Taek wrote: post #92
b_tterc_p wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they verify that a host can actually store all of the data?

Ajedi32 is not correct. Data is verified probabilistically on the Sia network. The blockchain has access to the Merkle root of the data that the host is supposed to be storing. The blockchain will request that the host provide a 64 byte segment of the data (chosen randomly) along with a Merkle proof that the data is part of the Merkle root. If the host can provide the data and the proof, the host is rewarded as thoug…

How does punishment work? What stops one bad actor from agreeing to collect infinite data from a variety of sources and tanking both the trust and profitability of data hosts?

Also what about bandwidth constraints on the host end

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