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 Back

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.