4 ms·

Non-reliant on central services or entities.

snarf21 7y ago
This also cuts both ways. Your business needs a file but your customer can't connect to that node because of some political blocking of internet connections. Who can you rely on? What central service can you call to get this fixed asap?
- buildzr 7y ago
  The idea with Sia is you upload to not one, but several people, you pick the level of redundancy you want and if you can't get the file you want from any given one of them, they pay the price and you get it from someone else.
- ukd1 7y ago
  It's kinda designed to expect that; you end up paying for more redundancy over more hosts, which is a win. Yes some will / may be down, but a) they're penalized financially, b) you can (by default do) have redundancy
idlewords 7y ago
Except for the software developers.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  So exhausting watching people argue that trust is no longer necessary when they're simply pushing the trust around. You have to trust someone at the end of the day, and it's more practical to use the law to trust them (and enforce that trust) than cryptography. If I want to decentralize my storage, I would replicate data between multiple cloud object stores (Backblaze, S3, Wasabi, etc, a library to abstract PUTs and GETs) and pay them for their service. I trust them, but can verify each is holding up their end of their commercial agreement (similar to RAID block scans, but with object hash verifications). They aren't randomly going to yank their storage node of the network like a home NAS device or other consumer level storage device, because it's their business to be available. A superior solution has yet to present itself. Sidenote: The blog post is holding cloud provider data egress fees up as an example of exorbitant bandwidth pricing; this is true, but only from cloud providers. You can get bandwidth extremely cheap from non-cloud providers or through other means[1]. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ (random example picked from Google search)
  - buildzr 7y ago
    > or less costly They're definitely less costly. I could host over 10x the amount on Sia for what I pay for B2 at the moment, B2 is already one of the cheapest providers, plus that's just in storage, ignoring all bandwidth costs. I'm really curious what the numbers will look like in terms of reliability here. Theoretically you can figure out how often storage contracts try to retrieve and fail and the host has to pay a fee by looking at the block chain, anyone done the analysis on this yet?
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      But do you have the same level of durability and availability of your data? Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data? Can you pay with dollars instead of bitcoin? I'm paying for trust, and it is a hard sell that a distributed storage system spanning worldwide jurisdictions is inherently more trustworthy (although it is possible that it can be as durable and reliable as traditional storage systems, but the proof is in the data). I would like to be proven wrong.
      - buildzr 7y ago
        > Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data? No, I trust the cryptography to, I sure as hell wouldn't trust Backblaze, let alone Amazon not to do that either. I use Restic when using such services to encrypt before sending anything to them. > durability and availability This is IMO the only real question. I want to see some numbers and I think their blockchain should actually be able to provide values for this theoretically.
      - buildzr 7y ago
        Okay, so after some reading: Sia uses Reed-Solomon coding in a 10 of 30 configuration. This means that as long as any 10 out of the 30 hosts you upload to are available you can download your files. There's a quite high failure rate for contracts at the moment as it's not very profitable, around 9%. In order for this to be a problem, over 20 contracts would need to fail. If my math is correct we're talking about that should achieve approximately "20 9s" of reliability. Now there's one major catch with that, which is that your hosts must be chosen in a properly random way, but there's some cool tooling for Sia to help with that available like Decentralizer. Overall, given this, while I'm not 100% confident in their software and cryptocurrency yet, given time I think this could prove to offer an even higher guarantee of reliability than traditional cloud storage services at much lower prices.

This also cuts both ways. Your business needs a file but your customer can't connect to that node because of some political blocking of internet connections. Who can you rely on? What central service can you call to get this fixed asap?

buildzr 7y ago
The idea with Sia is you upload to not one, but several people, you pick the level of redundancy you want and if you can't get the file you want from any given one of them, they pay the price and you get it from someone else.
ukd1 7y ago
It's kinda designed to expect that; you end up paying for more redundancy over more hosts, which is a win. Yes some will / may be down, but a) they're penalized financially, b) you can (by default do) have redundancy

idlewords 7y ago

Except for the software developers.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
So exhausting watching people argue that trust is no longer necessary when they're simply pushing the trust around. You have to trust someone at the end of the day, and it's more practical to use the law to trust them (and enforce that trust) than cryptography. If I want to decentralize my storage, I would replicate data between multiple cloud object stores (Backblaze, S3, Wasabi, etc, a library to abstract PUTs and GETs) and pay them for their service. I trust them, but can verify each is holding up their end of their commercial agreement (similar to RAID block scans, but with object hash verifications). They aren't randomly going to yank their storage node of the network like a home NAS device or other consumer level storage device, because it's their business to be available. A superior solution has yet to present itself. Sidenote: The blog post is holding cloud provider data egress fees up as an example of exorbitant bandwidth pricing; this is true, but only from cloud providers. You can get bandwidth extremely cheap from non-cloud providers or through other means[1]. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ (random example picked from Google search)
- buildzr 7y ago
  > or less costly They're definitely less costly. I could host over 10x the amount on Sia for what I pay for B2 at the moment, B2 is already one of the cheapest providers, plus that's just in storage, ignoring all bandwidth costs. I'm really curious what the numbers will look like in terms of reliability here. Theoretically you can figure out how often storage contracts try to retrieve and fail and the host has to pay a fee by looking at the block chain, anyone done the analysis on this yet?
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    But do you have the same level of durability and availability of your data? Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data? Can you pay with dollars instead of bitcoin? I'm paying for trust, and it is a hard sell that a distributed storage system spanning worldwide jurisdictions is inherently more trustworthy (although it is possible that it can be as durable and reliable as traditional storage systems, but the proof is in the data). I would like to be proven wrong.
    - buildzr 7y ago
      > Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data? No, I trust the cryptography to, I sure as hell wouldn't trust Backblaze, let alone Amazon not to do that either. I use Restic when using such services to encrypt before sending anything to them. > durability and availability This is IMO the only real question. I want to see some numbers and I think their blockchain should actually be able to provide values for this theoretically.
    - buildzr 7y ago
      Okay, so after some reading: Sia uses Reed-Solomon coding in a 10 of 30 configuration. This means that as long as any 10 out of the 30 hosts you upload to are available you can download your files. There's a quite high failure rate for contracts at the moment as it's not very profitable, around 9%. In order for this to be a problem, over 20 contracts would need to fail. If my math is correct we're talking about that should achieve approximately "20 9s" of reliability. Now there's one major catch with that, which is that your hosts must be chosen in a properly random way, but there's some cool tooling for Sia to help with that available like Decentralizer. Overall, given this, while I'm not 100% confident in their software and cryptocurrency yet, given time I think this could prove to offer an even higher guarantee of reliability than traditional cloud storage services at much lower prices.