Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

blog.sia.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 199 posts

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#111

Post by mtlynch »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #6
yasp wrote: post #2

How do services like Sia handle illegal content?

All data is fragmented and encrypted, so it's impossible to know whether a particular host is storing a fragment of illegal content or not. I suppose if you somehow _did_ find out you were hosting a fragment of illegal content you could breach the storage contract (and pay the resulting penalty) but that's very unlikely because, again, all content is encrypted.

Encryption on Sia happens on the client-side, so the host has no guarantee that the file is actually encrypted.[1]

For encrypted data, I think it will be similar to the situation with other storage providers. If law enforcement searches your computer and discovers that you've uploaded illegal content in encrypted form to S3/GCS/Mega (especially Mega because they make it so easy to upload client-side encrypted data), then law enforcement will order the provider to destroy all copies of the data.

It will be interesting to see what happens if the provider is a Sia host. Law enforcement entities have standard processes for reporting illegal content to Amazon/Google/Mega/etc, and those companies have teams responsible for handling those requests. Casual Sia hosts currently wouldn't know how to handle such a request. The outcome might be that the compliance costs are too big for casual home users, so hosting on Sia becomes a specialized task that only dedicated companies can provide.

[1] https://lukechampine.com/irresponsible.html

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#112

Post by bin0 »

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.

Backblaze's failure/longevity stats are indispensable when considering which drive to purchase: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#113

Post by bin0 »

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.

This still leaves problems:

1. Now I have to trust two providers, each of which could have problems.

2. Now I have to pay for encryption, then pay for storage, and probably have higher ingress costs, too (I can probably trust AWS/GCP/Azure/Backblaze/whatever; not sure about random-blockchain-guy #67812).

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#114

Post by Taek »

carlosdp wrote: post #105
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 a…

> 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

Sia today running in the default configuration gets as much as 300mpbs upload and download, which I believe is comparable to S3. Latencies are several seconds, which is not comparable to S3 however this is a matter of software optimization, not a fundamental limitation of the network architecture.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#115

Post by gnode »

pmlnr wrote: post #64

These ideas are all the wrong direction to decentralize. We don't need more layers and more complexity and more blockchains, we need simple, reliable, accessible household appliances. For storage, for sharing, for posting. Please stop adding layers and layers of calculations, it's a waste of energy.

> Please stop adding layers and layers of calculations, it's a waste of energy.

The trend in electronics is that this has become less true over time. As transistors have shrunk, the relative cost of calculation has diminished compared to the cost of transmission over distances. A cryptographic operation can be cheap compared to accessing main memory because the distances signals travel within the crypto logic block are tiny.

Complexity (as in more to understand) does not equate sensibly to higher power consumption.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#116

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

Obviously you're paying for more than the drive. That doesn't make it a bad comparison. There's no great reason for the drive to be more than half the cost, so even with 3 copies amazon still comes out as making a whole lot of profit. There's a reason that multiple competitors can provide all those things at significantly lower prices.

And more importantly, if you're focused on storage then don't pay for features you don't need.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#117

Post by Ajedi32 »

mtlynch wrote: post #111
Ajedi32 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All data is fragmented and encrypted, so it's impossible to know whether a particular host is storing a fragment of illegal content or not. I suppose if you somehow _did_ find out you were hosting a fragment of illegal content you could breach the storage contract (and pay the resulting penalty) but that's very unlikely because, again, all content is encrypted.

Encryption on Sia happens on the client-side, so the host has no guarantee that the file is actually encrypted.[1] For encrypted data, I think it will be similar to the situation with other storage providers. If law enforcement searches your computer and discovers that you've uploaded illegal content in encrypted form to S3/GCS/Mega (especially Mega because they make it so easy to upload client-side encrypted data),…

I think someone technically skilled enough to run a Sia host would also be skilled enough to know how to delete delete a specific file off their hard drive. Sia could even provide a UI to make that easy. Though if Law Enforcement has access to the client's encryption keys, I think chances are it'd be way easier for them to just issue a delete command to the Sia network directly.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#118

Post by zherbert »

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 foster competition between hosts on the network and maintain prices that are an order of magnitude cheaper for storage and two orders of magnitude cheaper for bandwidth.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#119

Post by rolltiide »

carlosdp wrote: post #104
rolltiide wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, pinning IPFS files is good enough FOR ME.

there are also services and nodes which will maintain pins for you, and the capacity for decentralized encrypted shards is fine.

There may be circumstances where I want the piece of mind to pay multiple nodes to store/retrieve encrypted shards of data. SIA nor STORJ seem to be it.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#120

Post by zherbert »

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…

I would also add – give Sia a try, especially if you have tried it before our v1.4.0/v1.4.1 releases! https://sia.tech/get-started
Post reply on HN