A better solution would be payment based on a minimum GB and bandwidth where the data is constantly being streamed back over the network with a payout period of ~5min. This way you can guarantee that you will get all your data back at least once a week. You can also guarantee via network latency that your data is not being collocated. Sounds crazy but it would be more energy efficient than bitcoin.
Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
111–120 of 123 posts
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#112> Another option is requiring service providers to put up a surety bond. Before they are allow to participate in the ecosystem, they must set aside a lump sum on the blockchain held in escrow. These funds would be used to compensate any customers harmed by failure to honor storage contracts. But this has the effect of creating additional barriers to entry and locking away capital in a very unproductive way.
If bonds solve the bad actor problem, then this use of capital would directly enable safe data storage. I guess it depends on your definition of “productive”, but that definitely feels like a good use of capital to me.
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s like the people who seriously touted Bitcoin as a cheaper payment mechanism in than credit cards 2013. Few of them explored how ~3% fees are a balance between customer rewards, regulatory priorities, and merchant convenience. In places like Australia regulators made other choices, largely eliminating rewards programs and capping interchange fees at around a tenth of what they are in the US. There are good argume…
Clearly the Bitcoin skeptics had the better of the debate ;) You must also think "scale" and "market pressures" keep down the price of Windows. Hint: AWS has wonderful margins because everything is tied together, and bandwidth charges to get data out are huge. S3 is a great solution for data used on AWS, but costs more than 30x Storj on bandwidth alone ($90/TB for outside access, plus the cost of doing cross-region r…
> but costs more than 30x Storj on bandwidth alone ($90/TB for outside access, plus the cost of doing cross-region replication).
Yeah but if use AWS S3 for off site backups, those huge charges cost me exactly $0/TB.
I agree with others - Filecoin and Storj have no meaningful commercial use cases.
Who wants to understand how those things work, let alone use it for anything that involves commercial use cases?
AWS S3: put, get, delete, pay. Done.
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#114Why is Sia overlooked every single time this topic is brought up? It is shocking to me that Filecoin, an example of an ICO darling with no working product, is always at the top of the list. I have used Sia and Skynet to build several useful decentralized media sharing applications with zero loss of data for over a year.
Sia currently costs 8$ TB/month, storj costs a fixed forever* 4$ TB/month.
* not counting usd inflation, because they don't lock storage price to coin value (with crazy volatility), they fix it against usd and covert it to their coin when paying their nodes.
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#115Since this was written, Filecoin is up about 10,000% or something stupid.
If you pay attention to the naysayers, you're gonna have fun staying poor.
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on how long ago you checked it out (relative to the ~9 years since Glacier was first announced) it might be worth another look. It's still quite expensive if you ever need to retrieve data in a hurry, but it used to also have a complicated and unintuitive pricing model that made it extremely easy to accidentally spend orders of magnitude more money than you intended to. They redesigned the pricing structure…
>It's still quite expensive if you ever need to retrieve data in a hurry The real killer is the $0.09/GB egress fees. That dwarfs the $0.00099/GB/month storage fee and the $0.0025/GB bulk retrieval fee.
yep, this is what I was talking about, didn't have the exact terminology
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data retrieval is broken into blocks so it's a repeated game with incentives to cooperate. AFAIK Filecoin uses payment channels so you probably lock some money, retrieve data, then unlock the payment.
Incremental transfer seems like it should give an incentive to cooperate, but I don't think so? If I pay you upfront for the first block, what stops you from then saying: actually I still want more money to start transfering the first block?
Nothing, but then you pay a peer. That peer will likely send you the data so that you pay them for the second block, and so forth.
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#118IPFS is mostly fine technology for storing data in a content-addressable way. FileCoin is, at best, an inefficient way to incentivize people to store your data in an imaginary trustless world. (At worst, it's an obvious scam.) You can imagine any hosting provider offering regular IPFS hosting. Sign up on our website, send us a list of data to store, pay us money, and we'll guarantee you can get it back or you can sue…
IPFS is not a storage technology. IPFS is a retrieval technology.
In fact the two technologies would complement each other really well. Imagine that you could pay someone to make content available on IPFS, basically a distributed pinning service. However this isn't trivial because IPFS generally assumes that people with files would like to share them, however a for-profit storage node would be incentivized to use as little bandwidth as possible.
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#119IPFS is mostly fine technology for storing data in a content-addressable way. FileCoin is, at best, an inefficient way to incentivize people to store your data in an imaginary trustless world. (At worst, it's an obvious scam.) You can imagine any hosting provider offering regular IPFS hosting. Sign up on our website, send us a list of data to store, pay us money, and we'll guarantee you can get it back or you can sue…
IPFS is not a storage technology. IPFS is a retrieval technology. In fact the two technologies would complement each other really well. Imagine that you could pay someone to make content available on IPFS, basically a distributed pinning service. However this isn't trivial because IPFS generally assumes that people with files would like to share them, however a for-profit storage node would be incentivized to use as…
IPFS includes both storage and retrieval.
I outlined in my post a specific, trivial way to pay somebody to make data available on IPFS.
Re: Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
IPFS is not a storage technology. IPFS is a retrieval technology. In fact the two technologies would complement each other really well. Imagine that you could pay someone to make content available on IPFS, basically a distributed pinning service. However this isn't trivial because IPFS generally assumes that people with files would like to share them, however a for-profit storage node would be incentivized to use as…
IPFS includes both storage and retrieval. I outlined in my post a specific, trivial way to pay somebody to make data available on IPFS.
I guess we are arguing semantics but your last paragraph sounds like you are asking someone to do storage and make it available over IPFS, I still see the storage part as quite disparate.
This is like saying HTTP provides storage because you can pay someone to host your files and allow you to access them over HTTP.