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All files are encrypted on the hosts and only can be decrypted with the key, usually present only on the storage buyer's machine. All files are uploaded to 3 di

All files are encrypted on the hosts and only can be decrypted with the key, usually present only on the storage buyer's machine. All files are uploaded to 3 different hosts to avoid issues if someone flakes out, and could be to more if needed and every hoster puts some money on the line if they fail to host the files, providing a sort of financial insurance policy. This may not be good enough for every scenario, but I think for most it offers the possibility of covering things quite well. There are only a few major cloud storage providers around, the market just isn't that big and they're all quite expensive comparatively - for long term storage of backups and low-value data I find it quite a good concept. Publicly accessed data like S3 is often used for, not so much, that's more of a target for a traditional cloud provider or something like IPFS in the distributed world. Sia's more creating a new market for extremely cheap, reasonably reliabile storage rather than replacing one for expensive very high reliability storage in my view. But by nature of the way the network works, it should be possible to tell the # of hosts needed to match Amazon or Google in reliability - it's not in a state where all of that's possible yet though. > facing significant legal repercussions. There's nothing illegal about price discrimination, it's a common buisiness practice and something companies strive for - they want to make sure you pay the maximum price you're willing to. To do otherwise is essentially a failure to their investors.

acdha 9y ago
How do you protect against correlated failures - i.e. does separate hosts rule out the same person operating multiple servers? Any geographic requirements so the same power outage, hurricane, etc. doesn't take out multiple copies? That latter point seems especially relevant if you're promising protection against legal threats: say someone uploads banned data and this becomes known. Does the system allow those specific encrypted blocks to be removed or does that turn into legal action against every host subject to that legal authority, potentially taking large portions of the network offline at the same time? > There's nothing illegal about price discrimination, it's a common buisiness practice and something companies strive for We weren't talking about price discrimination, however, but anti-competitive practices which are illegal in many places. If AWS advertises storage for $0.02/GB/mo but tries to charge Netflix $0.05 or refuse service, they're going to hear from a state AG.
- Taek 9y ago
  > especially if, say, someone has infrastructure issues or decides to stop participating and removes their capacity? The network uses Reed Solomon erasure coding to prevent against failures. You can pick your own redundancy scheme, but the default is 10-of-30 today. (3x overhead). > Does the system allow those specific encrypted blocks to be removed Hosts have the ability to remove specific blocks if law enforcement informs them that they are storing illegal material. The host must make the choice to remove it though, you can't just choose to take down data. > How do you protect against correlated failures - i.e. does separate hosts rule out the same person operating multiple servers? Any geographic requirements so the same power outage, hurricane, etc. doesn't take out multiple copies? A combination of proof of burn and ip address lookups help us guarantee diversity.
  - problems 9y ago
    > The network uses Reed Solomon erasure coding to prevent against failures. You can pick your own redundancy scheme, but the default is 10-of-30 today. (3x overhead). Oh wow, I misunderstood that completely. Very cool. Will this be a user configurable setting when uploading in the future? Would it also be possible to calculate a sort of "odds of safety" using historical transactions of the whole network? If so, please consider implementing some sort of slider in the GUI between "cheap", offering whatever the failure rate of a single host may be to "safe", offering the failure rate of as many hosts as needed to match the guarantees of most cloud storage providers today.

acdha 9y ago

How do you protect against correlated failures - i.e. does separate hosts rule out the same person operating multiple servers? Any geographic requirements so the same power outage, hurricane, etc. doesn't take out multiple copies? That latter point seems especially relevant if you're promising protection against legal threats: say someone uploads banned data and this becomes known. Does the system allow those specific encrypted blocks to be removed or does that turn into legal action against every host subject to that legal authority, potentially taking large portions of the network offline at the same time? > There's nothing illegal about price discrimination, it's a common buisiness practice and something companies strive for We weren't talking about price discrimination, however, but anti-competitive practices which are illegal in many places. If AWS advertises storage for $0.02/GB/mo but tries to charge Netflix $0.05 or refuse service, they're going to hear from a state AG.

Taek 9y ago
> especially if, say, someone has infrastructure issues or decides to stop participating and removes their capacity? The network uses Reed Solomon erasure coding to prevent against failures. You can pick your own redundancy scheme, but the default is 10-of-30 today. (3x overhead). > Does the system allow those specific encrypted blocks to be removed Hosts have the ability to remove specific blocks if law enforcement informs them that they are storing illegal material. The host must make the choice to remove it though, you can't just choose to take down data. > How do you protect against correlated failures - i.e. does separate hosts rule out the same person operating multiple servers? Any geographic requirements so the same power outage, hurricane, etc. doesn't take out multiple copies? A combination of proof of burn and ip address lookups help us guarantee diversity.
- problems 9y ago
  > The network uses Reed Solomon erasure coding to prevent against failures. You can pick your own redundancy scheme, but the default is 10-of-30 today. (3x overhead). Oh wow, I misunderstood that completely. Very cool. Will this be a user configurable setting when uploading in the future? Would it also be possible to calculate a sort of "odds of safety" using historical transactions of the whole network? If so, please consider implementing some sort of slider in the GUI between "cheap", offering whatever the failure rate of a single host may be to "safe", offering the failure rate of as many hosts as needed to match the guarantees of most cloud storage providers today.