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My best guess: Filecoin is hovering at around $65 USD / FIL [0]. The rolling 24-hr reward for storage on the Filecoin network is currently about 0.25 FIL / TB,

My best guess: Filecoin is hovering at around $65 USD / FIL [0]. The rolling 24-hr reward for storage on the Filecoin network is currently about 0.25 FIL / TB, or $16.25 / TB. Backblaze says that they manage around $36 / TB [2], and they have incredible knowledge and scale, so that leads me to believe something is wrong in this calculation I just did. Maybe the reward isn't a good measure of the price of the storage? EDIT: I think the issue is that I didn't take into account storage duration. Not sure how to do that. Storing a blob for two years will be more expensive than for a month, and I know that the Filecoin network accounts for this. After a brief exploration of their site, it seems like you actually make bids to store your data at a certain price. I wish there were an obvious place that showed the most recent offers so people could get a good idea of how much it costs. Also, I had a thought that a smart miner will just create a thin layer between Backblaze B2 and Filecoin to earn some FIL basically for free since no one is going to out-price B2. And then we're just back to storing everything on B2 and S3, except in a less efficient and more opaque way. [0]: https://www.kraken.com/prices/fil-filecoin-price-chart/usd-us-dollar?interval=All https://www.kraken.com/prices/fil-filecoin-price-chart/usd-u... [1]: https://filfox.info/en https://filfox.info/en [2]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...

coolspot 6y ago
Thanks, this is helpful. The $36/TB is how much it costs backblaze to build a storage pod. Actual storage price for end consumer is $60/TB/year ($0.005/GB/month) on B2 [0], with triple redundancy[1]. It’s seems to be really hard to just get a price for the Filecoin storage, but according to some deals I found in Filecoin explorer, it comes out to about $65/TB/year with no redundancy [2]. [0] - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html [1] - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect... [2] - https://filfox.info/en/deal/731671 https://filfox.info/en/deal/731671
- whyrusleeping 6y ago
  Hey! Filecoin Tech Lead here, I really wouldn't take any prices you see for deals as authoritative yet. Things are gonna be pretty crazy up and down until the markets settle. Filecoin miners right now are making about 0.25FIL per day per TB they store. Thats just in block rewards (remember, Filecoin is a proof of SpaceTime network). Any amount the user is paying is on top of that price, so basically, if the user pays enough to cover the transaction fees and bandwidth costs (very small), it makes sense for the miner to accept the deal. This effectively means the block reward is subsidizing the price of storage.
  - _uwu_1 6y ago
    Sounds like an exciting project. What kind of data/information category do you expect people to store in the Filecoin ecosystem in the future? By information category, I mean is it medical data, internal enterprise data, politically sensitive data? Or is all data kind of encrypted so nobody has a clue as to what the data is that is being stored?
  - vlmutolo 6y ago
    I look forward to seeing these markets settle. I really like that Filecoin actually seems to be pegged to a real-world asset, i.e. storage capabilities.
  - a_shevchuk 6y ago
    > 0.25FIL per day per TB [...] in block rewards How would that change say a year from now, assuming some realistic network growth rate? Couldn't find in your blog, docs or whitepaper, how exactly is block reward calculated and changed over time (apart from 30/70% proportion between simple and baseline mint, 200% yoy baseline growth and some other high-level overview stuff), is it documented somewhere or is source code my only friend here?
- vlmutolo 6y ago
  Good point about Backblaze's costs vs. consumer pricing. I was actually citing their cost as a reference for a lower-bound on how much storage can cost nowadays per TB. I wanted to compare that to the Filecoin network. However, your comparison is better anyway. Filecoin is basically operating as a network in the same capacity as B2 (i.e. as a storage service provider) and we should compare prices accordingly. Also, good find on the filecoin deals link. That's exactly what I was looking for but never found.
whyrusleeping 6y ago
> Also, I had a thought that a smart miner will just create a thin layer between Backblaze B2 and Filecoin to earn some FIL basically for free since no one is going to out-price B2. And then we're just back to storing everything on B2 and S3, except in a less efficient and more opaque way. They can totally do this, but they are on the hook for that data. If the backing store for the data that the miner is trusting goes down, the miner loses a pretty significant amount of collateral (currently 0.2 FIL per 32GB sector). In practice, we're seeing most miners set up their own storage clusters. Whether a bunch of small (100TB-1PB) nfs boxes, or much bigger single filesystem CEPH clusters.
- vlmutolo 6y ago
  I'm glad most of the network seems to be rolling their own solutions. Plus, what I said really only applies to lazy miners. It's probably not that hard to set up a thin compatibility layer between B2 and Filecoin, but as another commenter noted, they charge about $60/TB/year. If you wanted to really be competitive on the Filecoin market, you could probably set up a rig just like Backblaze does (they open source their designs) and achieve the approx $30/TB/year mark, which is basically half of the B2 compat layer.

coolspot 6y ago

Thanks, this is helpful. The $36/TB is how much it costs backblaze to build a storage pod. Actual storage price for end consumer is $60/TB/year ($0.005/GB/month) on B2 [0], with triple redundancy[1]. It’s seems to be really hard to just get a price for the Filecoin storage, but according to some deals I found in Filecoin explorer, it comes out to about $65/TB/year with no redundancy [2]. [0] - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html [1] - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect... [2] - https://filfox.info/en/deal/731671 https://filfox.info/en/deal/731671

whyrusleeping 6y ago
Hey! Filecoin Tech Lead here, I really wouldn't take any prices you see for deals as authoritative yet. Things are gonna be pretty crazy up and down until the markets settle. Filecoin miners right now are making about 0.25FIL per day per TB they store. Thats just in block rewards (remember, Filecoin is a proof of SpaceTime network). Any amount the user is paying is on top of that price, so basically, if the user pays enough to cover the transaction fees and bandwidth costs (very small), it makes sense for the miner to accept the deal. This effectively means the block reward is subsidizing the price of storage.
- _uwu_1 6y ago
  Sounds like an exciting project. What kind of data/information category do you expect people to store in the Filecoin ecosystem in the future? By information category, I mean is it medical data, internal enterprise data, politically sensitive data? Or is all data kind of encrypted so nobody has a clue as to what the data is that is being stored?
- vlmutolo 6y ago
  I look forward to seeing these markets settle. I really like that Filecoin actually seems to be pegged to a real-world asset, i.e. storage capabilities.
- a_shevchuk 6y ago
  > 0.25FIL per day per TB [...] in block rewards How would that change say a year from now, assuming some realistic network growth rate? Couldn't find in your blog, docs or whitepaper, how exactly is block reward calculated and changed over time (apart from 30/70% proportion between simple and baseline mint, 200% yoy baseline growth and some other high-level overview stuff), is it documented somewhere or is source code my only friend here?
vlmutolo 6y ago
Good point about Backblaze's costs vs. consumer pricing. I was actually citing their cost as a reference for a lower-bound on how much storage can cost nowadays per TB. I wanted to compare that to the Filecoin network. However, your comparison is better anyway. Filecoin is basically operating as a network in the same capacity as B2 (i.e. as a storage service provider) and we should compare prices accordingly. Also, good find on the filecoin deals link. That's exactly what I was looking for but never found.

whyrusleeping 6y ago

> Also, I had a thought that a smart miner will just create a thin layer between Backblaze B2 and Filecoin to earn some FIL basically for free since no one is going to out-price B2. And then we're just back to storing everything on B2 and S3, except in a less efficient and more opaque way. They can totally do this, but they are on the hook for that data. If the backing store for the data that the miner is trusting goes down, the miner loses a pretty significant amount of collateral (currently 0.2 FIL per 32GB sector). In practice, we're seeing most miners set up their own storage clusters. Whether a bunch of small (100TB-1PB) nfs boxes, or much bigger single filesystem CEPH clusters.

vlmutolo 6y ago
I'm glad most of the network seems to be rolling their own solutions. Plus, what I said really only applies to lazy miners. It's probably not that hard to set up a thin compatibility layer between B2 and Filecoin, but as another commenter noted, they charge about $60/TB/year. If you wanted to really be competitive on the Filecoin market, you could probably set up a rig just like Backblaze does (they open source their designs) and achieve the approx $30/TB/year mark, which is basically half of the B2 compat layer.