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Not very interesting. There are ways to solve all of these concerns--no fees are paid during the first X months, nodes periodically tested for bandwidth, etc. e

Not very interesting. There are ways to solve all of these concerns--no fees are paid during the first X months, nodes periodically tested for bandwidth, etc. etc. Just because the author didn't bother to think it through doesn't mean it's not straightforward. The whole idea of a blockchain is reputation CAN be built up over time, because every transaction is recorded and there might even be incentives to associate nodes to show X nines of pool reliability. Is it a bad idea to use this as your only source of storage? Of course. Is it less useful than AWS if you do large local burst queries? Of course. But none of the concerns mentioned in the post are relevant. This can be cheaper than AWS because they charge an enormous markup, and this automatically provides worldwide replication and accessibility. Amazon already erases books from Kindles, Google scans your Docs for blasphemy against Fauci, and both have been known to throw businesses off their services. In a few years it will seem crazy not to have an extra copy of your data on here.

300bps 5y ago
What do you base AWS storage having "an enormous markup" on? AWS has a type of storage to meet any access need / budget. S3 Glacier Deep Dive for example is perfect for storing archival items and costs $0.00099 per GB-month. So you can store a TB for about $1 per month. There are even options like S3 Intelligent Tiering that enable you to store objects on S3 Standard and it will intelligently move them to lower-cost options based on the usage patterns of the data. There are six different pricing options of S3 storage. There are EBS volumes, EFS volumes, FSx for Lustre and many other options for storage. I used to mine BTC, currently mine Ethereum and looked into mining Filecoin and was left wondering if the people buying into it have any idea what cloud storage options are actually out there. There is so much competition and the prices are sooooo low that I don't see any viable use case for Filecoin outside of the one you mentioned about being concerned about being shut down by a single vendor.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- admax88q 5y ago
  > What do you base AWS storage having "an enormous markup" on? Probably on the basis that backblaze costs an order of magnitude less for the same product.
  - gruez 5y ago
    AFAIK s3 is multi datacenter whereas B2 is only one.
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      And you pay S3's markup for every datacenter you want your data to be stored in, plus AWS's network markup for the transfer between those datacenters, do you not?
      - 300bps 5y ago
        S3 has lots of options. If you don't want multiple availability zones (which is having multiple copies in multiple datacenters) you can use S3 One Zone-IA. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
        jfrunyon 5y ago
        I was replying to a comment which used AWS having multiple datacenters as a benefit over Backblaze which only has one. If your data is only in one datacenter either way, then does it really matter if a particular provider only has one datacenter?
- edem 5y ago
  You forgot to mention transfer costs. It is only free within Amazon's VPC. You even pay for transfer between AWS regions (and transfer to CloudFront).
- krrrh 5y ago
  It’s like the people who seriously touted Bitcoin as a cheaper payment mechanism in than credit cards 2013. Few of them explored how ~3% fees are a balance between customer rewards, regulatory priorities, and merchant convenience. In places like Australia regulators made other choices, largely eliminating rewards programs and capping interchange fees at around a tenth of what they are in the US. There are good arguments for decentralization and censorship resistance, but from a first principles perspective scale and market pressures are good bets for delivering cost efficiencies.
  - brutaltruth 5y ago
    Clearly the Bitcoin skeptics had the better of the debate ;) You must also think "scale" and "market pressures" keep down the price of Windows. Hint: AWS has wonderful margins because everything is tied together, and bandwidth charges to get data out are huge. S3 is a great solution for data used on AWS, but costs more than 30x Storj on bandwidth alone ($90/TB for outside access, plus the cost of doing cross-region replication). If you're going to work from "first principles" it always helps to have the first hint about how markets actually work--and that different products make different trade-offs (local transfer speed and latency vs. cheap global redundancy)
    - shuckles 5y ago
      I’m not sure I follow. By what metrics were the skeptics wrong about Bitcoin as a viable and cheap transaction platform?
    - Proven 5y ago
      > but costs more than 30x Storj on bandwidth alone ($90/TB for outside access, plus the cost of doing cross-region replication). Yeah but if use AWS S3 for off site backups, those huge charges cost me exactly $0/TB. I agree with others - Filecoin and Storj have no meaningful commercial use cases. Who wants to understand how those things work, let alone use it for anything that involves commercial use cases? AWS S3: put, get, delete, pay. Done.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Aws bandwidth costs are ridiculous and personally makes public clouds entirely unusable. Ps everything on aws is marked up by like 300%, it's easy to beat them on cost.
deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gruez 5y ago
>Amazon already erases books from Kindles, Google scans your Docs for blasphemy against Fauci, and both have been known to throw businesses off their services. In a few years it will seem crazy not to have an extra copy of your data on here. Isn't this a non-issue because you can encrypt your data prior to uploading?
- jlizzle30 5y ago
  It's an issue if the data's public.
ethn 5y ago
Not true, they suffer to the Sybil attack. I could create several digital identities to create a fake reputation.
- jlizzle30 5y ago
  Not with proof of work.
  - ethn 5y ago
    Proof of Work is an alternative to reputation networks, so it won’t succumb to a Sybil attack since it doesn’t rely on reputation.
Dig1t 5y ago
> Google scans your Docs for blasphemy against Fauci What is this referencing? I'm just curious, this is something I haven't heard about.
- wmf 5y ago
  https://reclaimthenet.org/google-drive-takes-down-user-file-plandemic/ https://reclaimthenet.org/google-drive-takes-down-user-file-... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23275308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23275308 As usual, it may not be what you think.
boogoob 5y ago
I agree that all the concerns can be mitigated. But they're not just theoretical, they're also issues with the current implementations—some of which remain a year and a half after this was written.
qyi 5y ago
For backup scenarios, you can encrypt your data before sending it to Google/Amazon. Filecoin even accommodates (or at least plans to, from what I've read) for nodes that want to store only certain types of content based on legality or whatever.

300bps 5y ago

What do you base AWS storage having "an enormous markup" on? AWS has a type of storage to meet any access need / budget. S3 Glacier Deep Dive for example is perfect for storing archival items and costs $0.00099 per GB-month. So you can store a TB for about $1 per month. There are even options like S3 Intelligent Tiering that enable you to store objects on S3 Standard and it will intelligently move them to lower-cost options based on the usage patterns of the data. There are six different pricing options of S3 storage. There are EBS volumes, EFS volumes, FSx for Lustre and many other options for storage. I used to mine BTC, currently mine Ethereum and looked into mining Filecoin and was left wondering if the people buying into it have any idea what cloud storage options are actually out there. There is so much competition and the prices are sooooo low that I don't see any viable use case for Filecoin outside of the one you mentioned about being concerned about being shut down by a single vendor.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
admax88q 5y ago
> What do you base AWS storage having "an enormous markup" on? Probably on the basis that backblaze costs an order of magnitude less for the same product.
- gruez 5y ago
  AFAIK s3 is multi datacenter whereas B2 is only one.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    And you pay S3's markup for every datacenter you want your data to be stored in, plus AWS's network markup for the transfer between those datacenters, do you not?
    - 300bps 5y ago
      S3 has lots of options. If you don't want multiple availability zones (which is having multiple copies in multiple datacenters) you can use S3 One Zone-IA. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
      - jfrunyon 5y ago
        I was replying to a comment which used AWS having multiple datacenters as a benefit over Backblaze which only has one. If your data is only in one datacenter either way, then does it really matter if a particular provider only has one datacenter?
edem 5y ago
You forgot to mention transfer costs. It is only free within Amazon's VPC. You even pay for transfer between AWS regions (and transfer to CloudFront).
krrrh 5y ago
It’s like the people who seriously touted Bitcoin as a cheaper payment mechanism in than credit cards 2013. Few of them explored how ~3% fees are a balance between customer rewards, regulatory priorities, and merchant convenience. In places like Australia regulators made other choices, largely eliminating rewards programs and capping interchange fees at around a tenth of what they are in the US. There are good arguments for decentralization and censorship resistance, but from a first principles perspective scale and market pressures are good bets for delivering cost efficiencies.
- brutaltruth 5y ago
  Clearly the Bitcoin skeptics had the better of the debate ;) You must also think "scale" and "market pressures" keep down the price of Windows. Hint: AWS has wonderful margins because everything is tied together, and bandwidth charges to get data out are huge. S3 is a great solution for data used on AWS, but costs more than 30x Storj on bandwidth alone ($90/TB for outside access, plus the cost of doing cross-region replication). If you're going to work from "first principles" it always helps to have the first hint about how markets actually work--and that different products make different trade-offs (local transfer speed and latency vs. cheap global redundancy)
  - shuckles 5y ago
    I’m not sure I follow. By what metrics were the skeptics wrong about Bitcoin as a viable and cheap transaction platform?
  - Proven 5y ago
    > but costs more than 30x Storj on bandwidth alone ($90/TB for outside access, plus the cost of doing cross-region replication). Yeah but if use AWS S3 for off site backups, those huge charges cost me exactly $0/TB. I agree with others - Filecoin and Storj have no meaningful commercial use cases. Who wants to understand how those things work, let alone use it for anything that involves commercial use cases? AWS S3: put, get, delete, pay. Done.
dannyw 5y ago
Aws bandwidth costs are ridiculous and personally makes public clouds entirely unusable. Ps everything on aws is marked up by like 300%, it's easy to beat them on cost.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

gruez 5y ago

>Amazon already erases books from Kindles, Google scans your Docs for blasphemy against Fauci, and both have been known to throw businesses off their services. In a few years it will seem crazy not to have an extra copy of your data on here. Isn't this a non-issue because you can encrypt your data prior to uploading?

jlizzle30 5y ago
It's an issue if the data's public.

ethn 5y ago

Not true, they suffer to the Sybil attack. I could create several digital identities to create a fake reputation.

jlizzle30 5y ago
Not with proof of work.
- ethn 5y ago
  Proof of Work is an alternative to reputation networks, so it won’t succumb to a Sybil attack since it doesn’t rely on reputation.

Dig1t 5y ago

> Google scans your Docs for blasphemy against Fauci What is this referencing? I'm just curious, this is something I haven't heard about.

wmf 5y ago
https://reclaimthenet.org/google-drive-takes-down-user-file-plandemic/ https://reclaimthenet.org/google-drive-takes-down-user-file-... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23275308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23275308 As usual, it may not be what you think.

boogoob 5y ago

I agree that all the concerns can be mitigated. But they're not just theoretical, they're also issues with the current implementations—some of which remain a year and a half after this was written.

qyi 5y ago

For backup scenarios, you can encrypt your data before sending it to Google/Amazon. Filecoin even accommodates (or at least plans to, from what I've read) for nodes that want to store only certain types of content based on legality or whatever.