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Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

blog.sia.tech

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Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#191

Post by b_tterc_p »

Taek wrote: post #156
b_tterc_p wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When a host agrees to accept data, they put up out-of-pocket money. This makes it expensive for a bad actor to accept an infinite amount of data, as each piece of data requires more collateral to be put forward by the host. Before a renter creates a contract with a host, the renter will perform some measurements on the host and determine if the host is suitable. A renter in China will chose different hosts than a ren…

Is there somewhere I can read about the punishments in more detail? E.g. how often the quizzes are, what the penalty is for getting it wrong / not being available for the answer?

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#192

Post by mtlynch »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #171
solidasparagus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clou…

I went and tested this after reading the article https://filebase.com/ Only took me a couple of minutes to get a file uploaded using the aws-cli. It’s the only decentralized object storage solution I’ve ever seen that seems to actually work.

Filebase is not decentralized.

Filebase uses a decentralized service on the backend, but the service itself is centralized. If Filebase shuts off their servers, you lose all your data.

As an analogy, email is decentralized but Gmail is not.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#193

Post by solidasparagus »

peterkelly wrote: post #168
solidasparagus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clou…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I'm not saying it won't work (I have no idea - there's no reason someone can't replicate all of s3's features eventually). I'm just saying that this "we're going to replace run s3 out of business" optimism is pretty unfounded right now. And on a factual level, "featureset is quickly approaching Amazon S3" is pure bullshit.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#194

Post by AmericanChopper »

mtlynch wrote: post #192
AmericanChopper wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went and tested this after reading the article https://filebase.com/ Only took me a couple of minutes to get a file uploaded using the aws-cli. It’s the only decentralized object storage solution I’ve ever seen that seems to actually work.

Filebase is not decentralized. Filebase uses a decentralized service on the backend, but the service itself is centralized. If Filebase shuts off their servers, you lose all your data. As an analogy, email is decentralized but Gmail is not.

Interfacing with these decentralized storage networks requires cumbersome client side software, that handles things like the smart contracts and utility coin transactions.

All of the projects I’ve seen appear to be quite far away from being easily accessible by ordinary users.

Based on where the technology is currently at, if you want to compete with traditional could services, you need a service provider like this to build a platform on top of the underlying network.

My point is that this service seems to have achieved that. People talk about storj a lot in this space, but go and try upload a file to storj right now. You can’t because they don’t actually have a product in the market. This is the first time I’ve seen a press release like this, gone to a web page, signed up for a service, and uploaded a file immediately. Which is a refreshing change from an industry that tends to talk big about the impact they’re going to have for months or years on end, without ever releasing a functional product to the market.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#195

Post by mtlynch »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #194
mtlynch wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filebase is not decentralized. Filebase uses a decentralized service on the backend, but the service itself is centralized. If Filebase shuts off their servers, you lose all your data. As an analogy, email is decentralized but Gmail is not.

Interfacing with these decentralized storage networks requires cumbersome client side software, that handles things like the smart contracts and utility coin transactions. All of the projects I’ve seen appear to be quite far away from being easily accessible by ordinary users. Based on where the technology is currently at, if you want to compete with traditional could services, you need a service provider like this t…

Fair enough. I agree about there being huge value in services providing abstracting away the complexities of Sia and making it accessible to more casual users. I'm just bothered by the fact that Filebase seems to be deliberately implying that they're a decentralized service, when they're, in fact, just as centralized as Google or Amazon.

The player that I prefer in this space is Goobox.[1] I think their goal is to build a Sia-based service similar to Mega, but they have an S3 API as well. They've been around longer than Filebase, and their marketing comes across to me as more honest.

[1] https://goobox.io/

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#196

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…

Okay, so after some reading: Sia uses Reed-Solomon coding in a 10 of 30 configuration. This means that as long as any 10 out of the 30 hosts you upload to are available you can download your files. There's a quite high failure rate for contracts at the moment as it's not very profitable, around 9%. In order for this to be a problem, over 20 contracts would need to fail. If my math is correct we're talking about that should achieve approximately "20 9s" of reliability. Now there's one major catch with that, which is that your hosts must be chosen in a properly random way, but there's some cool tooling for Sia to help with that available like Decentralizer.

Overall, given this, while I'm not 100% confident in their software and cryptocurrency yet, given time I think this could prove to offer an even higher guarantee of reliability than traditional cloud storage services at much lower prices.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#197

Post by jaclaz »

jchw wrote: post #124
zherbert wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unfami…

The issue I take is that the comparison is truly not meaningful. Yes, storage is cheap, but you are comparing the cost of a refurbished disk to a managed service. This may lead people to think cloud storage is a waste of money, which I personally think is untrue (though Sia certainly may be able to do it for cheaper than cloud storage, too. Both things can be true.) While the cost to us is certainly more than the cos…

Well, the actual comparison is between the cost (for ownership) of a 1 TB (refurbished) drive vs. 1 month of 1 TB of cloud storage.

The Author could have done it as the cost (for ownership) of a brand new NAS with 2x2 TB disk (which can be - just checked on tiger direct) around 350+65+65=480 US$ vs 6 months of 4 TB cloud storage 6x4x20=480, but the overall message would have been the same.

Imagine that you rent a car for 6 months and during the 6 months you pay rates equating the price of the car brand new.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#198

Post by b_tterc_p »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #19
b_tterc_p wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If I recall correctly, the client pre-computes hashes of random fragments of each file then "quizzes" the hosts on that information periodically. If they're not actually storing a copy of the data, they won't be able to compute the resulting hash. (I may be misremembering some of the details, but I believe that's how it works in principle.)

What if the client lies about the pre computed hash quizzes?

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#199

Post by hereme888 »

Just switched to backing my data on Sia. Was previously using Nextcloud, which is great, but more expensive.

Took a little time to set up, but renting 200 GB for 10 cents/mo, in a decentralized system that encrypts my data, has great uptime, and doesn't mine my personal or "aggregated" data, is unbeatable.

I heard Sia is not great at handling large number of files, so I'm using a backup software to create automated, compressed backups first, and Sia handles those larger files.

I'll see how it pans out over time.

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