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It's an interesting idea to have a coin that is backed by something that has real tangible value in the industry (storage space)... I'd like to know whether or

It's an interesting idea to have a coin that is backed by something that has real tangible value in the industry (storage space)... I'd like to know whether or not the intrinsic value behind Filecoin (in terms of $ worth of storage space) will be worth the cost of operating the network (in $ terms). As a buyer of storage space, if you need storage, isn't it always going to be cheaper, faster and more convenient to use your own hard disks or a specialised service like S3? Will people actually have an incentive to use Filecoin as a storage service instead of S3? If they don't, then the coin has no advantages over Bitcoin.

sengork 9y ago
One thing that immediately comes to mind it: storage locality. S3 will by design always be at fixed (known) distances to the retriever. On the other hand distributed storage may end up having better locality (depending on where in the world you are accessing the data from).
zzzcpan 9y ago
Owning hard disks is the only way to get cheap storage today. Specialized services like S3 are pretty expensive in comparison, even the cheapest ones, like Backblaze or OVH. As I see it peer-to-peer storage could force everyone to compete globally on price and compete directly for the data, not the customers. Kind of like automatically choosing during upload the cheapest offering available on the global market at any given time, except that the players themselves are aware of the mechanism and know they are competing solely on efficiency, making them pursue efficiency. Eventually this could even put significant amount of storage into the countries with cheap electricity, labor and internet, making storage costs lower than otherwise possible.
- xfer 9y ago
  efficiency is not the only metric, reliability is a huge factor in any kind of digital resource.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    Reliability is what software is for.
DennisP 9y ago
It's more for public data than private. It's like p2p filesharing where you can pay for reliable storage. Judging by the title, it's also for web pages. That's also part of the vision for Ethereum's Swarm.

sengork 9y ago

One thing that immediately comes to mind it: storage locality. S3 will by design always be at fixed (known) distances to the retriever. On the other hand distributed storage may end up having better locality (depending on where in the world you are accessing the data from).

zzzcpan 9y ago

Owning hard disks is the only way to get cheap storage today. Specialized services like S3 are pretty expensive in comparison, even the cheapest ones, like Backblaze or OVH. As I see it peer-to-peer storage could force everyone to compete globally on price and compete directly for the data, not the customers. Kind of like automatically choosing during upload the cheapest offering available on the global market at any given time, except that the players themselves are aware of the mechanism and know they are competing solely on efficiency, making them pursue efficiency. Eventually this could even put significant amount of storage into the countries with cheap electricity, labor and internet, making storage costs lower than otherwise possible.

xfer 9y ago
efficiency is not the only metric, reliability is a huge factor in any kind of digital resource.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  Reliability is what software is for.

DennisP 9y ago

It's more for public data than private. It's like p2p filesharing where you can pay for reliable storage. Judging by the title, it's also for web pages. That's also part of the vision for Ethereum's Swarm.