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Yes you're right. In fact the fact that they are asking for you money is what ticks me off the most. Let me put it this way instead. They are essentially sayin

Yes you're right. In fact the fact that they are asking for you money is what ticks me off the most. Let me put it this way instead. They are essentially saying they will pay for the hosting and data access usage and networking costs forever, and you can enjoy all these things for free forever, if you "only" pay an upfront cost. And that's a lie. There's no such thing as forever, especially if it's run by beings that won't be around forever. The scammy people behind this initiative will all die in hundred years. Without an economically viable model, it will all go. In my eyes, what they are doing is essentially trying to make it big with a one time splash, and don't care what happens next. No different from all the scammy blockchain ICOs that promise "forever immutable storage".

JCharante 6y ago
So it's a ponzi scheme for cloud storage dependent on people continuing to pay to store new items in order for them to pay for their current costs. Although the idea is to create a fund and operate off the interest. Let's look at their prices. $1000 for 100 Gigabytes or $100 for 10 Gigabytes. Basically it's $10/GB. With like a very safe dividend allocation they can probably get a 2% annual return on their investments, which means they need to only spend $0.20/year on my 1GB of data. They say their plan is perfect for phone or hard drive backups, and they offer continuous file migration. Let's say I completely replace the contents of my GB every 3 months. We can't use AWS S3 One-zone because they advertise "Redudant backup". S3 Standard Infrequent access is $0.0125 per GB per month, so that's $0.15/year/GB. Maybe they can use AWS S3 Glacier although I'm not exactly sure how it'd work with the continuous migrations. That would be $0.048/year/GB which is a lot more feasible. Data ingress into AWS is free, but egress isn't. If we download our GB 4 times per year that's $0.04 in egress. There's also some costs for PUT, COPY, POST, LIST, GET, SELECT requests, so let's say that for our 1 GB it'll amount to $0.01 per year. That means it'll cost us $0.098/year/GB for our storage service that we can only download from 4 times/year and does not give us millisecond-access to our data. I'm sure they can find a storage solution that's cheaper than using AWS S3 Standard Infrequent Access so they still have a good response time for data, but overall it seems feasible.
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  if these people actually cared about people owning their own data, they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described. Instead of asking for money.
  - mmastrac 6y ago
    This is a somewhat ridiculous position. If I hope to preserve data for my children, I'm not going to hand them a box with jerry-rigged software and hardware that they then have to maintain. I want someone to maintain that for them. If I'm looking for my blog, or my tweets, or a set of family photos and videos to live on forever, I absolutely want them under control of a foundation that outlives me and my relatives interest in maintaining that data.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    So you just made the claim this is essentially a scam and the people don't know what they are doing (considering the people on the board that's quite a rich claim). JCharante just showed with a back of the envelope calculation that it seems feasible. Why don't you refute the argument and tell us why it isn't? You made some pretty bold claims, so I would be nice if you can back them up.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    >>> There's no such thing as forever, especially if it's run by beings that won't be around forever. The scammy people behind this initiative will all die in hundred years. > if these people actually cared about people owning their own data, they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described. Instead of asking for money. The only way human beings can successfully store data (especially symbolic/digital data) for long terms is by creating institutions to maintain it. Even granite tablet buried in a cave for 10,000 years will require a continuous series of institutions maintain the knowledge to successfully interpret it, otherwise you'll just end up with something like Linear A.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described Where is this individual going to store their data? On the unreliable hard drive on their personal computer, which they never back up? A toolkit or an application isn't hardware. Solving the problem of reliable long-term data storage requires hardware. Hardware costs money. Basically this service is competing with my ISP, my hosting company, etc. to be a long-term data storage provider.
luckylion 6y ago
I don't know whether they will be around forever, but if we assume they're not trying to scam people, the math can be done. How much does storage amount X cost per year (=$Y), how much money would you need to continuously generate $Y per year? The one-time fee you'd need is $Y. Whether their math is sound, I have no idea. Whether it's a good idea I don't know either. I don't need "permanent" storage as in "for ever and ever and ever". But that's not necessarily a scam.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I think people all seek a permanent legacy of some sort. I don't think our digital junk really fits. There are IRL costs to hoarding junk; I'm really not sure any benefits - of keeping _all_ someone's digital miscellany - justify those costs?
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I think people all seek a permanent legacy of some sort. I don't think our digital junk really fits. There are IRL costs to hoarding junk; I'm really not sure any benefits - of keeping _all_ someone's digital miscellany - justify those costs? I think with a lot of things there's a J shaped value curve. Over long periods of time, things of small value (including literal garbage) become historical and archeological treasure. Also this doesn't seems like it's really mean to be storage for random "junk": > Permanent.org isn't just another digital box or drive. It's a digital archive. > Upload your most important digital materials to your archive and customize the archive profile to represent you. Create multiple archives for other people and organizations. Then establish relationships to share materials between them and create everlasting connections. Collaborate with your community by adding members to any archive to curate a shared history. That implies there's a certain level of curation that's supposed to go into the archive, so more diaries and important records than your "Downloads" folder.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > I think with a lot of things there's a J shaped value curve. Over long periods of time, things of small value (including literal garbage) become historical and archeological treasure. Isn't that mostly because of it becoming a rare insight into a time that is long gone? With perfect preservation, would literal scraps of garbage from 10k years ago be individually interesting?

JCharante 6y ago

So it's a ponzi scheme for cloud storage dependent on people continuing to pay to store new items in order for them to pay for their current costs. Although the idea is to create a fund and operate off the interest. Let's look at their prices. $1000 for 100 Gigabytes or $100 for 10 Gigabytes. Basically it's $10/GB. With like a very safe dividend allocation they can probably get a 2% annual return on their investments, which means they need to only spend $0.20/year on my 1GB of data. They say their plan is perfect for phone or hard drive backups, and they offer continuous file migration. Let's say I completely replace the contents of my GB every 3 months. We can't use AWS S3 One-zone because they advertise "Redudant backup". S3 Standard Infrequent access is $0.0125 per GB per month, so that's $0.15/year/GB. Maybe they can use AWS S3 Glacier although I'm not exactly sure how it'd work with the continuous migrations. That would be $0.048/year/GB which is a lot more feasible. Data ingress into AWS is free, but egress isn't. If we download our GB 4 times per year that's $0.04 in egress. There's also some costs for PUT, COPY, POST, LIST, GET, SELECT requests, so let's say that for our 1 GB it'll amount to $0.01 per year. That means it'll cost us $0.098/year/GB for our storage service that we can only download from 4 times/year and does not give us millisecond-access to our data. I'm sure they can find a storage solution that's cheaper than using AWS S3 Standard Infrequent Access so they still have a good response time for data, but overall it seems feasible.

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
if these people actually cared about people owning their own data, they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described. Instead of asking for money.
- mmastrac 6y ago
  This is a somewhat ridiculous position. If I hope to preserve data for my children, I'm not going to hand them a box with jerry-rigged software and hardware that they then have to maintain. I want someone to maintain that for them. If I'm looking for my blog, or my tweets, or a set of family photos and videos to live on forever, I absolutely want them under control of a foundation that outlives me and my relatives interest in maintaining that data.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  So you just made the claim this is essentially a scam and the people don't know what they are doing (considering the people on the board that's quite a rich claim). JCharante just showed with a back of the envelope calculation that it seems feasible. Why don't you refute the argument and tell us why it isn't? You made some pretty bold claims, so I would be nice if you can back them up.
- ardy42 6y ago
  >>> There's no such thing as forever, especially if it's run by beings that won't be around forever. The scammy people behind this initiative will all die in hundred years. > if these people actually cared about people owning their own data, they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described. Instead of asking for money. The only way human beings can successfully store data (especially symbolic/digital data) for long terms is by creating institutions to maintain it. Even granite tablet buried in a cave for 10,000 years will require a continuous series of institutions maintain the knowledge to successfully interpret it, otherwise you'll just end up with something like Linear A.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described Where is this individual going to store their data? On the unreliable hard drive on their personal computer, which they never back up? A toolkit or an application isn't hardware. Solving the problem of reliable long-term data storage requires hardware. Hardware costs money. Basically this service is competing with my ISP, my hosting company, etc. to be a long-term data storage provider.

luckylion 6y ago

I don't know whether they will be around forever, but if we assume they're not trying to scam people, the math can be done. How much does storage amount X cost per year (=$Y), how much money would you need to continuously generate $Y per year? The one-time fee you'd need is $Y. Whether their math is sound, I have no idea. Whether it's a good idea I don't know either. I don't need "permanent" storage as in "for ever and ever and ever". But that's not necessarily a scam.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I think people all seek a permanent legacy of some sort. I don't think our digital junk really fits. There are IRL costs to hoarding junk; I'm really not sure any benefits - of keeping _all_ someone's digital miscellany - justify those costs?
- ardy42 6y ago
  > I think people all seek a permanent legacy of some sort. I don't think our digital junk really fits. There are IRL costs to hoarding junk; I'm really not sure any benefits - of keeping _all_ someone's digital miscellany - justify those costs? I think with a lot of things there's a J shaped value curve. Over long periods of time, things of small value (including literal garbage) become historical and archeological treasure. Also this doesn't seems like it's really mean to be storage for random "junk": > Permanent.org isn't just another digital box or drive. It's a digital archive. > Upload your most important digital materials to your archive and customize the archive profile to represent you. Create multiple archives for other people and organizations. Then establish relationships to share materials between them and create everlasting connections. Collaborate with your community by adding members to any archive to curate a shared history. That implies there's a certain level of curation that's supposed to go into the archive, so more diaries and important records than your "Downloads" folder.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > I think with a lot of things there's a J shaped value curve. Over long periods of time, things of small value (including literal garbage) become historical and archeological treasure. Isn't that mostly because of it becoming a rare insight into a time that is long gone? With perfect preservation, would literal scraps of garbage from 10k years ago be individually interesting?