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How does decentralized storage resist centralization? Backblaze B2 costs $0.005/GB/Mo (vs. $0.021/GB/Mo for S3). No reasonable person will have hardware at home

How does decentralized storage resist centralization? Backblaze B2 costs $0.005/GB/Mo (vs. $0.021/GB/Mo for S3). No reasonable person will have hardware at home that can compete with those prices. All it takes is a single person with a few unmetered boxes and a proxy to B2/S3/etc to effectively pressure the price down to cloud storage levels. As a user, how can I confirm that my data is being replicated properly if there are few big users? One of them might have multiple identities backed by a single cloud account, and if they stop paying their bill and run off with the coins all the data is lost. This will be those darknet market scams all over again. Aside from the oodles of money that the early adopters will make, what am I missing? Edit: Thought of another issue. The protocol replicates data, so if we assume a cloud provider does 3x replication, your data will be replicated again by the storage protocol. The extra overhead means that once the economies of scale kick in, only big players that can manage B2 style racks themselves will be able to host economically, just like how Bitcoin mining has consolidated on large mining operations.

woah 9y ago
From my reading of the whitepaper, the protocol forces the data to be replicated by scrambling it with the miner's public key. It's not possible to have two identities using the same backing storage. However, two identities could use the same account or even the same disk, in which case the data would be replicated on that disk, which is useless. At the same time, there is no benefit to the miner to doing things that way. As far as "running away", the miner is paid by the network for proving they are storing some data at a certain time. It's not like a storage contract for someone's individual data paid up front.
- xorcist 9y ago
  If it's scrambled by the miner's public key, why can't the miner un-scramble it?
  - kalmi10 9y ago
    The miner has to serve the "scrambled" data (or derived proof). The "scrambling" is slow enough that the miner cannot do it in realtime. It's in the whitepaper.
  - TrickyRick 9y ago
    It's probably encrypted with the owner's public key, just an educated guess though.
  - mappum 9y ago
    They can, the idea is that they can mine more efficiently by storing the scrambled version rather than storing it unscrambled and re-scrambling when they need to generate a mining proof.
Veratyr 9y ago
> Aside from the oodles of money that the early adopters will make, what am I missing? You're assuming that all the people selling storage will be buying hardware for that sole purpose. In reality, many regular people have some free space on their computer that costs them "nothing" and they can sell very cheaply.
- tommoor 9y ago
  There isn't really any incentive for these folks though, It's not worth the hassle, bandwidth, and electricity to give up remaining disk space for a couple of cents / month.
  - goldfeld 9y ago
    Except if a service facilitates it and aggregates folks' resources to get something nice collectively, like crowdfunding.
    - tommoor 9y ago
      That's exactly what Filecoin / Sia etc are doing, no? It doesn't make it any more worthwhile for the individual participants providing the storage though
- deegles 9y ago
  True, but my point is that it might not be worth your time to. I can earn money by recycling aluminum cans but it's not worth the effort to me. Is it possible right now to get some hard numbers on what a person would earn if they had say 1TB disk space and 25mbps available?
  - tim333 9y ago
    I doubt hard numbers but Backblaze B2 is $0.005/mo so if it was that much that would be $5/mo for the storage 22c/hr for up/downloads. I guess filecoin would be much less as B2 had 24/7 availability etc. So 2-3 $/mo ?
  - deleted 9y ago
Geee 9y ago
It's not just storage, but content distribution too. So, locality matters a lot, and it will be favorable to have storage close to users. Also, even if it was 'centralized' only to few players, the economics would be similar to the current situation; it's more profitable to keep the operation running than to close it. I'm not even sure what you mean by 'run off with the coins', as the hosts don't really have any coin to run with. They should only earn when they fulfill the contracts. I'm not sure about Filecoin, but in Sia hosts are required to put up a 'collateral' which they lose if they don't fulfill the contract. Edit: Running multiple accounts from a single datacenter will increase the hosts risk to lose the files and money.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
traverseda 9y ago
From their proof of replication whitepaper [^1] >We introduce Proof-of-Replication(PoRep), a new kind of Proof-of-Storage, that can be used to prove that some data has been replicated to its own uniquely dedicated physical storage. I'd be partial to a "proof of location" system myself. You know that two computers are physically far apart if they respond to pings in the right way, as limited by the speed of light. [^1]: https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf
- jacobush 9y ago
  Hm, you could always delay a ping. But maybe some sort of GPS-like system could be made to work.
  - traverseda 9y ago
    You can delay a ping, but you can't ping faster. If you build a geometrically constrained network of servers pinging as low-latency as you can, then delaying a ping will change your position on the (x,y) plane, but you'll get pushed "up". https://imgur.com/yK4RkHg https://imgur.com/yK4RkHg Due to the reality of internet-routing, everything is going to be a little bit "up", since we can't actually measure the distance between two points via speed of light. Probably also useful for routing things.
    - jacobush 9y ago
      Are you saying, that unless everyone cheats, one could tell which ones are artificially delaying their pings?
      - traverseda 9y ago
        Sort off. There are a lot of different ways people could cheat, but they all look "weird" one way or another. Weird in a way that a computer should be able to identify.
- sah2ed 9y ago
urbit 9y ago
The first question (economics) is one we've thought a bit about. Not affiliated with Filecoin/IPFS/Protocol Labs, so these answers may be wrong: Filecoin creates a market for storage. The price of B2 is an important variable in this market, because it creates an arbitrage opportunity where you can use B2 to mine Filecoin. But why not just use B2 directly? Three reasons. One, B2's replication isn't perfect (at least, not as perfect as S3), and both B2 and S3 have nonzero political risk (a sovereign could order them to destroy your data). B2 plus a layer of blockchainy replication could be quite attractive to some low-price-sensitivity customers. Two, to work with B2, you need a business relationship with B2. This is obviously no big deal in the normal world of multiuser, single-server apps that we live in today. However, if we can somehow migrate to a world in which users have their own servers, it's much easier for those personal servers to have simple, maintenance-free automated relationships with decentralized token-based services. Think about how many centralized service providers a typical startup has relationships with (and how much they cost). This design can't really be scaled down from industrial computing to personal computing. Three, Filecoin has an interesting consensus design in which the word "miner" is used in two senses: "miners" participate in storage transactions, and also receive block rewards based on proof of stake, where stake is defined as the storage of the whole system. The effect of this on the economics of Filecoin is extremely hard to predict, but it can only be positive. The one point that seems unresolved about the economics of Filecoin is this interesting interaction between FC as a cryptocurrency and FC as a payment mechanism in a storage market. It does seem that you could take FC's storage market and port it to an existing blockchain. But there may be more subtle technical requirements from a blockchain -- a storage market is certainly a demanding application.
luke0016 9y ago
> Backblaze B2 costs $0.005/GB/Mo (vs. $0.021/GB/Mo for S3). No reasonable person will have hardware at home that can compete with those prices. I don't get this. Suppose I have 1TB of data that I want to back up. That's $5/mo with Backblaze. I can get an external 1TB drive for ~$60. Some even have 3-5 year warranties. $60 buys me one year with Backblaze. There's a good chance the hard drive will last much longer. An external drive also gives me the benefit of higher data transfer rates. I could even splurge and for another $50-60 buy a small fireproof safe to store it in. Then I'm pushing two years with Backblaze. The external drive approach also has the side benefit of not having to trust a third party (yeah, I know, encryption). It seems like a much better deal to me. Does this mean that I am an unreasonable person?
- acid__ 9y ago
  Your external drive may fail or be destroyed in a number of ways -- protection against this is a portion of what you're paying for.
  - luke0016 9y ago
    Well, I did suggest a safe. But sure, there are other ways it could be destroyed. As for failure, presumably it's already a back up, so assuming the source didn't simultaneously fail, I can just replace the external drive. If this makes you queasy, you could always buy a second drive. Two 1TB drives and a fireproof safe, that's equivalent to three years with Backblaze. Still seems pretty reasonable to me.
    - keithwhor 9y ago
      Or spend five minutes uploading to the cloud and be done with it. This is such a ridiculous premise that wastes tens of hours (at least) just to save $10 that I'm pretty convinced you're trolling.
      - luke0016 9y ago
        I'm not sure how you come up with $10. Drives regularly last 5+ years. A single 1TB drive at $60 saves me $240 over Backblaze if it lasts 5 years. Throw in the safe, and I still save $180. Two drives and a safe? Still saving $120. I have drives that have gone well beyond 5 years too - so the longer they last, the more you save. And, what kind of connection do you have that allows you to upload 1TB in 5 minutes? That's spectacular. An ideal gigabit connection is going to take you a good two hours. Even that would be pretty amazing.

woah 9y ago

From my reading of the whitepaper, the protocol forces the data to be replicated by scrambling it with the miner's public key. It's not possible to have two identities using the same backing storage. However, two identities could use the same account or even the same disk, in which case the data would be replicated on that disk, which is useless. At the same time, there is no benefit to the miner to doing things that way. As far as "running away", the miner is paid by the network for proving they are storing some data at a certain time. It's not like a storage contract for someone's individual data paid up front.

xorcist 9y ago
If it's scrambled by the miner's public key, why can't the miner un-scramble it?
- kalmi10 9y ago
  The miner has to serve the "scrambled" data (or derived proof). The "scrambling" is slow enough that the miner cannot do it in realtime. It's in the whitepaper.
- TrickyRick 9y ago
  It's probably encrypted with the owner's public key, just an educated guess though.
- mappum 9y ago
  They can, the idea is that they can mine more efficiently by storing the scrambled version rather than storing it unscrambled and re-scrambling when they need to generate a mining proof.

Veratyr 9y ago

> Aside from the oodles of money that the early adopters will make, what am I missing? You're assuming that all the people selling storage will be buying hardware for that sole purpose. In reality, many regular people have some free space on their computer that costs them "nothing" and they can sell very cheaply.

tommoor 9y ago
There isn't really any incentive for these folks though, It's not worth the hassle, bandwidth, and electricity to give up remaining disk space for a couple of cents / month.
- goldfeld 9y ago
  Except if a service facilitates it and aggregates folks' resources to get something nice collectively, like crowdfunding.
  - tommoor 9y ago
    That's exactly what Filecoin / Sia etc are doing, no? It doesn't make it any more worthwhile for the individual participants providing the storage though
deegles 9y ago
True, but my point is that it might not be worth your time to. I can earn money by recycling aluminum cans but it's not worth the effort to me. Is it possible right now to get some hard numbers on what a person would earn if they had say 1TB disk space and 25mbps available?
- tim333 9y ago
  I doubt hard numbers but Backblaze B2 is $0.005/mo so if it was that much that would be $5/mo for the storage 22c/hr for up/downloads. I guess filecoin would be much less as B2 had 24/7 availability etc. So 2-3 $/mo ?
- deleted 9y ago

Geee 9y ago

It's not just storage, but content distribution too. So, locality matters a lot, and it will be favorable to have storage close to users. Also, even if it was 'centralized' only to few players, the economics would be similar to the current situation; it's more profitable to keep the operation running than to close it. I'm not even sure what you mean by 'run off with the coins', as the hosts don't really have any coin to run with. They should only earn when they fulfill the contracts. I'm not sure about Filecoin, but in Sia hosts are required to put up a 'collateral' which they lose if they don't fulfill the contract. Edit: Running multiple accounts from a single datacenter will increase the hosts risk to lose the files and money.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

traverseda 9y ago

From their proof of replication whitepaper [^1] >We introduce Proof-of-Replication(PoRep), a new kind of Proof-of-Storage, that can be used to prove that some data has been replicated to its own uniquely dedicated physical storage. I'd be partial to a "proof of location" system myself. You know that two computers are physically far apart if they respond to pings in the right way, as limited by the speed of light. [^1]: https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf

jacobush 9y ago
Hm, you could always delay a ping. But maybe some sort of GPS-like system could be made to work.
- traverseda 9y ago
  You can delay a ping, but you can't ping faster. If you build a geometrically constrained network of servers pinging as low-latency as you can, then delaying a ping will change your position on the (x,y) plane, but you'll get pushed "up". https://imgur.com/yK4RkHg https://imgur.com/yK4RkHg Due to the reality of internet-routing, everything is going to be a little bit "up", since we can't actually measure the distance between two points via speed of light. Probably also useful for routing things.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Are you saying, that unless everyone cheats, one could tell which ones are artificially delaying their pings?
    - traverseda 9y ago
      Sort off. There are a lot of different ways people could cheat, but they all look "weird" one way or another. Weird in a way that a computer should be able to identify.
sah2ed 9y ago

urbit 9y ago

The first question (economics) is one we've thought a bit about. Not affiliated with Filecoin/IPFS/Protocol Labs, so these answers may be wrong: Filecoin creates a market for storage. The price of B2 is an important variable in this market, because it creates an arbitrage opportunity where you can use B2 to mine Filecoin. But why not just use B2 directly? Three reasons. One, B2's replication isn't perfect (at least, not as perfect as S3), and both B2 and S3 have nonzero political risk (a sovereign could order them to destroy your data). B2 plus a layer of blockchainy replication could be quite attractive to some low-price-sensitivity customers. Two, to work with B2, you need a business relationship with B2. This is obviously no big deal in the normal world of multiuser, single-server apps that we live in today. However, if we can somehow migrate to a world in which users have their own servers, it's much easier for those personal servers to have simple, maintenance-free automated relationships with decentralized token-based services. Think about how many centralized service providers a typical startup has relationships with (and how much they cost). This design can't really be scaled down from industrial computing to personal computing. Three, Filecoin has an interesting consensus design in which the word "miner" is used in two senses: "miners" participate in storage transactions, and also receive block rewards based on proof of stake, where stake is defined as the storage of the whole system. The effect of this on the economics of Filecoin is extremely hard to predict, but it can only be positive. The one point that seems unresolved about the economics of Filecoin is this interesting interaction between FC as a cryptocurrency and FC as a payment mechanism in a storage market. It does seem that you could take FC's storage market and port it to an existing blockchain. But there may be more subtle technical requirements from a blockchain -- a storage market is certainly a demanding application.

luke0016 9y ago

> Backblaze B2 costs $0.005/GB/Mo (vs. $0.021/GB/Mo for S3). No reasonable person will have hardware at home that can compete with those prices. I don't get this. Suppose I have 1TB of data that I want to back up. That's $5/mo with Backblaze. I can get an external 1TB drive for ~$60. Some even have 3-5 year warranties. $60 buys me one year with Backblaze. There's a good chance the hard drive will last much longer. An external drive also gives me the benefit of higher data transfer rates. I could even splurge and for another $50-60 buy a small fireproof safe to store it in. Then I'm pushing two years with Backblaze. The external drive approach also has the side benefit of not having to trust a third party (yeah, I know, encryption). It seems like a much better deal to me. Does this mean that I am an unreasonable person?

acid__ 9y ago
Your external drive may fail or be destroyed in a number of ways -- protection against this is a portion of what you're paying for.
- luke0016 9y ago
  Well, I did suggest a safe. But sure, there are other ways it could be destroyed. As for failure, presumably it's already a back up, so assuming the source didn't simultaneously fail, I can just replace the external drive. If this makes you queasy, you could always buy a second drive. Two 1TB drives and a fireproof safe, that's equivalent to three years with Backblaze. Still seems pretty reasonable to me.
  - keithwhor 9y ago
    Or spend five minutes uploading to the cloud and be done with it. This is such a ridiculous premise that wastes tens of hours (at least) just to save $10 that I'm pretty convinced you're trolling.
    - luke0016 9y ago
      I'm not sure how you come up with $10. Drives regularly last 5+ years. A single 1TB drive at $60 saves me $240 over Backblaze if it lasts 5 years. Throw in the safe, and I still save $180. Two drives and a safe? Still saving $120. I have drives that have gone well beyond 5 years too - so the longer they last, the more you save. And, what kind of connection do you have that allows you to upload 1TB in 5 minutes? That's spectacular. An ideal gigabit connection is going to take you a good two hours. Even that would be pretty amazing.