91–100 of 170 posts
I'm still confused why I would want my storage to be decentralized. No I don't want my files spread on thousands or millions of computers no matter how encrypted etc.
I'm still confused why I would want my storage to be decentralized. No I don't want my files spread on thousands or millions of computers no matter how encrypted etc.
This sounds interesting academically, but what I don't understand (I have the same problem with Siacoin, StorJ and Swarm) is: You could build a Dropbox clone where users have the option of contributing storage to get rewarded with real currency. Why would anyone want to use the decentralized version instead, both as a user and as a contributor of storage? The decentralized version is going to be much harder to get ri…
This sounds interesting academically, but what I don't understand (I have the same problem with Siacoin, StorJ and Swarm) is: You could build a Dropbox clone where users have the option of contributing storage to get rewarded with real currency. Why would anyone want to use the decentralized version instead, both as a user and as a contributor of storage? The decentralized version is going to be much harder to get ri…
If you can build a Dropbox clone that is faster, cheaper and can hold your files longer than one single entity ever could, wouldn't you chose that one instead?
Welcome to branding / advertising / marketing.
Have they announced the ICO yet? Or has it already passed?
Token sale is gonna start on the 27th, here's more info: https://protocol.ai/blog/ann-filecoin-token-sale-and-new-pap...
1. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp
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It costs you the bandwidth (it's not a long term cold storage) and extra processing power (so electricity cost) for running filecoin. This may well be lower cost than the gain from hosting, but it's still non-zero.
Bandwidth is effectively free for many users (no data cap), and the amount of processing power required for something simple like file storage is pretty trivial. You're right that it's non-zero, but I'd imagine it's probably on the order of pennies a month.
It sounds lose-lose-lose situation: keep wasting your space or saturate your bandwidth or waste power on keeping HDDs spinning all the time due to accessing them every few minutes. It may vary with your usage patterns (if these disks are already always spinning and you have REALLY good bandwidth or two separate lines) but still, seems barely worth the effort.
And why couldn't it be optimized in a purpose built machine? Cheap Tibetan hydro and free cooling (altitude), low power CPUs, fast internet, fast switches and routers, 10 gigabit lan, many HDDs and SSDs (dug up from the Western trash piles even, it's not like failing once a month is a big deal). Chinese already have ASIC for bitcoin and this seems easier to make than that.
[1] I have no idea if I'm generous or stingy on USA power prices and network speed.
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What makes you think AWS would be necessarily be faster or more reliable? If done correctly, think a decentralized system could be significantly faster and more reliable than even the best centralized storage solution. For example, with a decentralized system files could be broken up into shards and distributed across multiple nodes, so unless a significant percentage of computers on the planet all melt down at once…
If the decentralised network is popular and stable and clients happen to be next to you and they happen to have parts of your files, then yes. It could be fast and reliable. On the other hand, you could spend some money and guarantee it instead: https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/
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"distributed, scalable, redundant" describes AWS pretty well, and if I can pay much less for a faster more reliable service but sacrifice "trustless and anonymous", I'll stick to it.
What makes you think AWS would be necessarily be faster or more reliable? If done correctly, think a decentralized system could be significantly faster and more reliable than even the best centralized storage solution. For example, with a decentralized system files could be broken up into shards and distributed across multiple nodes, so unless a significant percentage of computers on the planet all melt down at once…
You can setup any old distributed database to do this... If there was a benefit to breaking down a file rather than replicating it, AWS would be using this efficiency to provide a better service.
> the effect that a commoditized pricing system would have on the costs of a distributed storage solution
It'll always be cheaper for someone to sell their hard drive than to sell access to their hard drive, just like it is cheaper to buy bitcoin instead of mining it.
Here is why: let's say Alice is profit-driven and greedy and is making $1 profit for 1gb of space. She can use those profits to buy more hardware, make more profit, buy more hardware, and so on and so forth until she has 100,000gb of space being offered. At that point, because of economies of scale, it will cost Alice less to maintain 100,000gb then the total cost of 100,000 people hosting 1gb each (eg. reduce total electricity cost because of bulk purchase).
Now, Alice can grow her operation so big (say, 100 petabytes) that it actually becomes no longer profitable for Bob to host 1gb. Alice has so much lower costs per gb that she was able to drive the price per gb down to a point where the price is lower than Bob's costs.
This is basic economy of scale so far, right? And it's the same reason why data centers filled with ASICs make it useless for you to mine Bitcoin on your laptop.
OK now that Alice is hosting say 100petabytes and has priced out all the individuals on the network, she will be subject to data policy rules and will have to obey law enforcement to kick out users that are using her hard drives for illegal activity.
Alice is now AWS.
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What makes you think AWS would be necessarily be faster or more reliable? If done correctly, think a decentralized system could be significantly faster and more reliable than even the best centralized storage solution. For example, with a decentralized system files could be broken up into shards and distributed across multiple nodes, so unless a significant percentage of computers on the planet all melt down at once…
> files could be broken up into shards and distributed across multiple nodes You can setup any old distributed database to do this... If there was a benefit to breaking down a file rather than replicating it, AWS would be using this efficiency to provide a better service. > the effect that a commoditized pricing system would have on the costs of a distributed storage solution It'll always be cheaper for someone to se…
Are you suggesting that AWS is doing every possible thing that would increase efficiency, or in other words, that AWS' services are optimally efficient? That seems very unlikely.
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But with Apple and Google, I know my data won’t go missing because the p2p network decided to stop seeding my file. Torrents die all the time due to lack of seeding.
Torrent hosts do not have a monetary incentive to host files. Filecoin (and other decentralized storage systems) provide monetary rewards and penalties for storing or failing to store files. This is introduced in Section 4.1.1 of this paper.
And on private torrent sites, where there is an incentive (usually non-monetary) to seed torrents, torrents really don't die all that often.