4 ms·

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.
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    2x3Tb disk at hetzner, line rental, electricity included is 30€pcm.
    - buildzr 7y ago
      Depends largely on your bandwidth usage if that's beneficial, for me personally I'm talking home/small business backups where the additional reliability of B2 is great and the price actually works out better than putting that system in RAID1.
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        (EDIT: PSA) Remember, redundancy (RAID) is not a replacement for backups.
        buildzr 7y ago
        Of course, I'm talking about using the system to host personal and small business backups like I do with B2. I backup all the important content off my home RAID nightly. Definitely a good warning to put out there though.
    - panarky 7y ago
      At that price per GB, could you make money by setting up some Sia nodes?
- wmf 7y ago
  You're not necessarily wrong but it's not so one-sided. In Sia you are definitely paying, the storage is automatically verified, and the storage providers don't get paid if they go down.
- AcerbicZero 7y ago
  I think its great that most of the questions here are getting answered, but I'm still a little confused as to who this is for, and why adding bitcoins great great grand child to the project helps. It doesn't look like its built for large data sets, since the capacity of the network is fairly low, and the providers fairly small. So if I want to store ~5TB of data, this isn't much of a fit and if I want to store ~5GB of data well there are tons of options and if I want it replicated, I'll replicate it. Seriously though, I don't want to play game theory games with a list of storage providers, especially for tiny sums of data, I just want it to be there.

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.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  2x3Tb disk at hetzner, line rental, electricity included is 30€pcm.
  - buildzr 7y ago
    Depends largely on your bandwidth usage if that's beneficial, for me personally I'm talking home/small business backups where the additional reliability of B2 is great and the price actually works out better than putting that system in RAID1.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      (EDIT: PSA) Remember, redundancy (RAID) is not a replacement for backups.
      - buildzr 7y ago
        Of course, I'm talking about using the system to host personal and small business backups like I do with B2. I backup all the important content off my home RAID nightly. Definitely a good warning to put out there though.
  - panarky 7y ago
    At that price per GB, could you make money by setting up some Sia nodes?
wmf 7y ago
You're not necessarily wrong but it's not so one-sided. In Sia you are definitely paying, the storage is automatically verified, and the storage providers don't get paid if they go down.
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I think its great that most of the questions here are getting answered, but I'm still a little confused as to who this is for, and why adding bitcoins great great grand child to the project helps. It doesn't look like its built for large data sets, since the capacity of the network is fairly low, and the providers fairly small. So if I want to store ~5TB of data, this isn't much of a fit and if I want to store ~5GB of data well there are tons of options and if I want it replicated, I'll replicate it. Seriously though, I don't want to play game theory games with a list of storage providers, especially for tiny sums of data, I just want it to be there.