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This looks interesting. Why is the payment method based on a crypto coin? How does using a blockchain help make Skynet and Sia work? I am wary of crypto coins

• hinkley 6y ago
  A common theme in distributed filesystem conversations is the idea of "socializing" the costs of intermittent loads. If I 'pay in' a little more than my mean traffic capacity, then my surplus during low traffic cancels out some of my peak traffic. Peak shaving and trough filling. If you are doing business in India, you get payed in rupees. If the workers are in India, you just pay them in rupees. If you have to exchange currencies you end up with several types of friction that just create headaches and potential losses. If you periodically cash out or inject cash it's easier to deal with than on every transaction. Denominating file replication services in a "coin of the realm" just seems like the same sort of rationale. One of the problems with capacity planning is that you get punished for being wrong in either direction. You bought too much hardware or not enough, too soon or too late. With an IPFS or a Skynet, putting your hardware online two months before you need the capacity at least affords you some opportunity to make use of the hardware while your Development or PR team figures out how to cross the finish line.
• kordlessagain 6y ago
  > Why is the payment method based on a crypto coin? A blockchain gives a way to make a payment and provide identity/ecrypt functions to keep the resource private while it is active. Yes, one could create a system that attaches other authentication (user/pass or oauth), but then one has to create/connect a payment system which then uses that login information in conjunction with credit card information. To sell a product online taking credit cards requires an excess of 10 pieces of information that must be provided by the user. In the case of compute resources, I may want to deal with 100s of providers to host my resources (blog, images, video, code) and I'd need to use an intermediary if I wanted to be efficient about it. With something like Lightning payments, a system like this can provide resources without the need for a "signup" process or intermediary. > can I be sure that if I upload something today worth $2/month, in 2 years I will still be paying this much or less? What does the future value of a fiat currency have to do with the current rate of storage on something like AWS? Would those prices not go up if the currency was undergoing deflation? Would you not have paid less integer values before the deflation? Would you not pay more integer values after? Where does something like AWS provide cost protection, other than spot instances? If you create a crypto contract and put the funds in escrow, then there is ZERO ways for the cost to go up over the life of the contract. Other than a bad actor scenario, which is why having multiple providers is the way to go.
  • viraptor 6y ago
    > I may want to deal with 100s of providers to host my resources (blog, images, video, code) and I'd need to use an intermediary if I wanted to be efficient about it Why multiple providers? With no-features data storage, S3 can easily provide that without an intermediary and in a pretty well automated way. > Would those prices not go up if the currency was undergoing deflation? Unless you're in a country with very unstable currency, the exchange rate change will be very slight. Sia changed ~60x over the last 2 years, which is significant. The price of course won't change during the contract, but what happens after is not trivial to plan for.
• Taek 6y ago
  Sia is a decentralization first protocol. We believe strongly that the biggest advantage is an immunity to de-platforming and a commitment to uncompromisingly open protocol. Crypto is the only means of payment I am aware of that does not have a centralized middleman with the power to deny a transaction. Decentralization aside, there are efficiency gains as well. Every transaction on the Sia network is point-to-point, and in some cases we've had nodes that average more than 1 million discreet transactions per day for over a month. The total cost of doing that was something like $100 (including the cost of all the resources bought with those millions of transactions), I struggle to imagine a traditional payment system providing that kind of value. There's also a lot more flexibility to innovate. For example, every single one of our payments is accompanied by a cryptographic proof that the accompanying storage or computation (not many people know, but the Sia network does support a limited form of computation) action was completed correctly. The payment and computation are fundamentally/cryptographically tied together in way that we could not reasonably achieve on a traditional payment system.