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So how much does it cost to store 1gb of data for one month on/with filecoin? I looked all over the site and there was a lot of talk about it being cheap but no

by vosper 4y ago

So how much does it cost to store 1gb of data for one month on/with filecoin? I looked all over the site and there was a lot of talk about it being cheap but no prices. Is there some way to compare cost and reliability to S3? On account of the word “coin” being in the name, I have a feeling the answer isn’t simple.

squishy47 4y ago
currently seems to be $0.0000001 USD for 1GB for 30 days https://file.app/ https://file.app/
- compsciphd 4y ago
  so it costs 10c a month to store 1PB?
  - dannyobrien 4y ago
    My back-of-the-envelope calculations put it closer to $2-$10 per petabyte. The network is most attractive right now for clients who have large amounts (>1Pib) of archival data, although it's also good for acting as a cache-of-last-resort for IPFS. Think Amazon Glacier. One of the reasons it's so cheap is that this is a quote for literally just raw storage; the other value-added services that you'd expect to accompany that are just beginning to appear now, including the FVM for more complex deals and processing over stored data. The other big one is an automated retrieval market -- storage providers right now either negotiate separately for uploading and downloading of that amount of data (you mostly have to do that anyway when you're trying to work out how to transfer PiB of data!), or just include it in the price. But that's coming. https://retrieval.market/ https://retrieval.market/ All of these will add to the cost, but in optional ways, and not the orders of magnitude that differentiate Filecoin from, e.g., S3.
    - vesinisa 4y ago
      How do you plan to independently verify storage retrieval? A neutral party? How many?
      - dannyobrien 4y ago
        With the proviso that I am woefully behind on reading up on the retrieval market developments, I understand that there's a few projects being built in parallel with different emphasis. One model is essentially a P2P CDN, where the verification would be distributed across, essentially, IPFS nodes: https://pl-strflt.notion.site/Filecoin-Saturn-efc122f123f344ff8ff0de6071954dba https://pl-strflt.notion.site/Filecoin-Saturn-efc122f123f344... Another, which I will try and dig up a link to (if I haven't imagined it entirely) is more of a sentinel system, whereby clients and storage providers have a protocol to pick a neutral third party that escrows and streams FIL payments from clients to SPs, conditional on retrievability. But as I say, I'm not an expert here.
- vesinisa 4y ago
  Apparently that does not include data redundancy. You must take care of that yourself by buying the same storage from multiple vendors: https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/faq/#after-i-made-a-deal-with-a-storage-provider-and-sent-my-data-to-them-how-exactly-is-the-data-supposed-to-be-recoverable-and-healable-if-that-storage-provider-goes-down https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/faq/#after-i-made-a-... Also, the next FAQ question answers an interesting problem where the cost of data retrieval is not agreed before hand, and allows the storage providers to extort you for actually ever retrieving your data. Solution is again storing your bytes with multiple providers and hoping they are not all extortionists.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > Apparently that does not include data redundancy Indeed. So if you compare it to S3, the calculation seems to be "Filecoin cost / Amazon cost = 0.0010% the cost of Amazon S3", so if you're willing to pay the same amount as for S3, you can store your data with 100,000 different providers around the world. I'm not sure how many locations S3 data get stored at, but I'm fairly certain it's not 100,000 different machines, so even with that, it seems like a pretty good deal for vital data. If you want it cheaper than S3, you can store it with just 10,000 different providers (10% of the price of S3), and I'd still consider it a good deal.
    - XorNot 4y ago
      The problem here is end-hosting transparency. How Amazon and S3 and the other providers structure themselves to ensure redundancy is fairly well known. How those 10,000 providers do is quite different - namely, a 6000 of them are all behind the same segment of the internet that can go down? Then if you were distributing data aggressively, you probably lost access to something temporarily - or permanently. This isn't an idle risk: if it's cheap and easy to start making some amount of money off of Filecoin hosting, then you have the fly-by-night problem: suppose some Chinese firms with cheap warehousing cobble together a whole lot of storage, and then, to optimize against people doing exactly this (and thus increase revenue) they advertise themselves out onto the network as dozens, or hundreds of logically separate entities? What looks like cheap storage which you've made redundant, suddenly actually isn't - it all has the same base fault possible.
- TheIronYuppie 4y ago
  This is broadly correct! It's remarkably cheap. As other commenters have noted, you'll want to handle reproduction/etc, which is a bit more work, but still many orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else out there. HOWEVER, most folks don't want to do this - we recommend solutions like https://web3.storage https://web3.storage (which gives you 1 TB with three replicas for free forever), and https://estuary.tech https://estuary.tech. Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
  - dpe82 4y ago
    > many orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else out there How does this work? Are other providers earning many orders of magnitude in profit, or are filecoin's storage costs being subsidized somehow?
    - apatil 4y ago
      It seems to me that, at some level, they must be subsidized by new buyers of filecoin. It's hard to imagine anyone providing storage so cheaply even if they didn't make any profit at all. Miner revenues have to come from somewhere. What I want to know is whether a good equilibrium is available. Say some decentralized apps with significant storage requirements win big over the next five years, and the filecoin network starts seeing a more moderate level of usage. Assume also that sentiment normalizes so that the filecoin market starts viewing filecoin as a service token for storage and retrieval, not as a speculative investment. Is the network still competitive with centralized storage providers, and how does the filecoin supply inflate over time as the network operates?
      - dannyobrien 4y ago
        So the initial capital investment is supported by the value of the coin, and that's what gets the network to its current capacity of c.17 EiB (https://dashboard.starboard.ventures/dashboard https://dashboard.starboard.ventures/dashboard ) . Committing storage to the network gets increases the probability of gaining new filecoin, so there's always an incentive there to grow the network's size, and once you have that storage available, there's an additional incentive to seek out deals to use the space. I'm not an economist, so I can't speak to the details of the balancing act, but the incentive system is engineered to create a balanced equilibrium -- so more demand increases the incentives to provide storage, etc. It's a challenge to follow all the thinking, but this video from ZX Zhang is a good guide to the current state (I fast-forwarded it to the relevant bits: https://youtu.be/gbJgsav2lP0?t=554 https://youtu.be/gbJgsav2lP0?t=554 ). There's also one of the regular cryptoecon days coming up in Paris, and the videos of those are kept online. https://www.cryptoeconday.io/event-schedule/cryptoeconday-ethcc-paris https://www.cryptoeconday.io/event-schedule/cryptoeconday-et... https://www.cryptoeconday.io/videos https://www.cryptoeconday.io/videos
madsbuch 4y ago
https://file.app/ https://file.app/ Pricing for web3 projects is a bit more complicated than getting a product from AWS. As you participate in a specialized economy it is like asking what a Danish stock costs from the US standpoint. First you need to buy DKK, and thereafter the stock might be volatile and have another price. (Spoiler alert, Danish stocks are cheap now :) )
davidatbu 4y ago
I think it's currenlty free? https://web3.storage/ https://web3.storage/
nonameiguess 4y ago
There is virtually no way to really answer that. People quoting the nominal dollar cost are misleading you. Nobody can buy hard drives and keep them running and connected to the Internet for $0.10 per PB per month. The fact that they're willing to offer you that price anyway presumably means they're actually getting paid in some shitcoin they hope will go to the moon. If it doesn't, then you'll find out what it was really costing. The other possibility is the global demand is so low that hard drive owners who already found some other way to fund their capex are just charging peanuts for the slack in otherwise idle disk space, but that is inherently a pricing model that can't scale, like airlines giving away seats on a plane that is not going to meet capacity but needed to fly anyway to keep a route alive.
ilaksh 4y ago
Take a look at web3.storage and Filebase for IPFS pinning. Pinata if you know it will be a small amount of if you are rich.
tmcw 4y ago
The answer is: nobody knows, because nobody pays for anything with FileCoin. The services that get pointed to, like estuary, have the price of "free," and most of the incentives in the system are pumped in automatically to "reward suppliers" rather than there being any value transferred between people paying for storage and those providing storage. Happy to adjust this conclusion - I've spent some hours trying to figure out how to pay for anything with FileCoin and come up empty-handed. Does anyone want to do a walkthrough of buying the coins, installing the software, storing data in exchange for FileCoin, and retrieving it? In the meantime, you have to wonder: is this a sort of "you get what you pay for" scenario, and you pay nothing, so you get… no reliability?

by vosper 4y ago

squishy47 4y ago

currently seems to be $0.0000001 USD for 1GB for 30 days https://file.app/ https://file.app/

compsciphd 4y ago
so it costs 10c a month to store 1PB?
- dannyobrien 4y ago
  My back-of-the-envelope calculations put it closer to $2-$10 per petabyte. The network is most attractive right now for clients who have large amounts (>1Pib) of archival data, although it's also good for acting as a cache-of-last-resort for IPFS. Think Amazon Glacier. One of the reasons it's so cheap is that this is a quote for literally just raw storage; the other value-added services that you'd expect to accompany that are just beginning to appear now, including the FVM for more complex deals and processing over stored data. The other big one is an automated retrieval market -- storage providers right now either negotiate separately for uploading and downloading of that amount of data (you mostly have to do that anyway when you're trying to work out how to transfer PiB of data!), or just include it in the price. But that's coming. https://retrieval.market/ https://retrieval.market/ All of these will add to the cost, but in optional ways, and not the orders of magnitude that differentiate Filecoin from, e.g., S3.
  - vesinisa 4y ago
    How do you plan to independently verify storage retrieval? A neutral party? How many?
    - dannyobrien 4y ago
      With the proviso that I am woefully behind on reading up on the retrieval market developments, I understand that there's a few projects being built in parallel with different emphasis. One model is essentially a P2P CDN, where the verification would be distributed across, essentially, IPFS nodes: https://pl-strflt.notion.site/Filecoin-Saturn-efc122f123f344ff8ff0de6071954dba https://pl-strflt.notion.site/Filecoin-Saturn-efc122f123f344... Another, which I will try and dig up a link to (if I haven't imagined it entirely) is more of a sentinel system, whereby clients and storage providers have a protocol to pick a neutral third party that escrows and streams FIL payments from clients to SPs, conditional on retrievability. But as I say, I'm not an expert here.
vesinisa 4y ago
Apparently that does not include data redundancy. You must take care of that yourself by buying the same storage from multiple vendors: https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/faq/#after-i-made-a-deal-with-a-storage-provider-and-sent-my-data-to-them-how-exactly-is-the-data-supposed-to-be-recoverable-and-healable-if-that-storage-provider-goes-down https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/faq/#after-i-made-a-... Also, the next FAQ question answers an interesting problem where the cost of data retrieval is not agreed before hand, and allows the storage providers to extort you for actually ever retrieving your data. Solution is again storing your bytes with multiple providers and hoping they are not all extortionists.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Apparently that does not include data redundancy Indeed. So if you compare it to S3, the calculation seems to be "Filecoin cost / Amazon cost = 0.0010% the cost of Amazon S3", so if you're willing to pay the same amount as for S3, you can store your data with 100,000 different providers around the world. I'm not sure how many locations S3 data get stored at, but I'm fairly certain it's not 100,000 different machines, so even with that, it seems like a pretty good deal for vital data. If you want it cheaper than S3, you can store it with just 10,000 different providers (10% of the price of S3), and I'd still consider it a good deal.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    The problem here is end-hosting transparency. How Amazon and S3 and the other providers structure themselves to ensure redundancy is fairly well known. How those 10,000 providers do is quite different - namely, a 6000 of them are all behind the same segment of the internet that can go down? Then if you were distributing data aggressively, you probably lost access to something temporarily - or permanently. This isn't an idle risk: if it's cheap and easy to start making some amount of money off of Filecoin hosting, then you have the fly-by-night problem: suppose some Chinese firms with cheap warehousing cobble together a whole lot of storage, and then, to optimize against people doing exactly this (and thus increase revenue) they advertise themselves out onto the network as dozens, or hundreds of logically separate entities? What looks like cheap storage which you've made redundant, suddenly actually isn't - it all has the same base fault possible.
TheIronYuppie 4y ago
This is broadly correct! It's remarkably cheap. As other commenters have noted, you'll want to handle reproduction/etc, which is a bit more work, but still many orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else out there. HOWEVER, most folks don't want to do this - we recommend solutions like https://web3.storage https://web3.storage (which gives you 1 TB with three replicas for free forever), and https://estuary.tech https://estuary.tech. Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
- dpe82 4y ago
  > many orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else out there How does this work? Are other providers earning many orders of magnitude in profit, or are filecoin's storage costs being subsidized somehow?
  - apatil 4y ago
    It seems to me that, at some level, they must be subsidized by new buyers of filecoin. It's hard to imagine anyone providing storage so cheaply even if they didn't make any profit at all. Miner revenues have to come from somewhere. What I want to know is whether a good equilibrium is available. Say some decentralized apps with significant storage requirements win big over the next five years, and the filecoin network starts seeing a more moderate level of usage. Assume also that sentiment normalizes so that the filecoin market starts viewing filecoin as a service token for storage and retrieval, not as a speculative investment. Is the network still competitive with centralized storage providers, and how does the filecoin supply inflate over time as the network operates?
    - dannyobrien 4y ago
      So the initial capital investment is supported by the value of the coin, and that's what gets the network to its current capacity of c.17 EiB (https://dashboard.starboard.ventures/dashboard https://dashboard.starboard.ventures/dashboard ) . Committing storage to the network gets increases the probability of gaining new filecoin, so there's always an incentive there to grow the network's size, and once you have that storage available, there's an additional incentive to seek out deals to use the space. I'm not an economist, so I can't speak to the details of the balancing act, but the incentive system is engineered to create a balanced equilibrium -- so more demand increases the incentives to provide storage, etc. It's a challenge to follow all the thinking, but this video from ZX Zhang is a good guide to the current state (I fast-forwarded it to the relevant bits: https://youtu.be/gbJgsav2lP0?t=554 https://youtu.be/gbJgsav2lP0?t=554 ). There's also one of the regular cryptoecon days coming up in Paris, and the videos of those are kept online. https://www.cryptoeconday.io/event-schedule/cryptoeconday-ethcc-paris https://www.cryptoeconday.io/event-schedule/cryptoeconday-et... https://www.cryptoeconday.io/videos https://www.cryptoeconday.io/videos

madsbuch 4y ago

https://file.app/ https://file.app/ Pricing for web3 projects is a bit more complicated than getting a product from AWS. As you participate in a specialized economy it is like asking what a Danish stock costs from the US standpoint. First you need to buy DKK, and thereafter the stock might be volatile and have another price. (Spoiler alert, Danish stocks are cheap now :) )

davidatbu 4y ago

I think it's currenlty free? https://web3.storage/ https://web3.storage/

nonameiguess 4y ago

There is virtually no way to really answer that. People quoting the nominal dollar cost are misleading you. Nobody can buy hard drives and keep them running and connected to the Internet for $0.10 per PB per month. The fact that they're willing to offer you that price anyway presumably means they're actually getting paid in some shitcoin they hope will go to the moon. If it doesn't, then you'll find out what it was really costing. The other possibility is the global demand is so low that hard drive owners who already found some other way to fund their capex are just charging peanuts for the slack in otherwise idle disk space, but that is inherently a pricing model that can't scale, like airlines giving away seats on a plane that is not going to meet capacity but needed to fly anyway to keep a route alive.

ilaksh 4y ago

Take a look at web3.storage and Filebase for IPFS pinning. Pinata if you know it will be a small amount of if you are rich.

tmcw 4y ago

The answer is: nobody knows, because nobody pays for anything with FileCoin. The services that get pointed to, like estuary, have the price of "free," and most of the incentives in the system are pumped in automatically to "reward suppliers" rather than there being any value transferred between people paying for storage and those providing storage. Happy to adjust this conclusion - I've spent some hours trying to figure out how to pay for anything with FileCoin and come up empty-handed. Does anyone want to do a walkthrough of buying the coins, installing the software, storing data in exchange for FileCoin, and retrieving it? In the meantime, you have to wonder: is this a sort of "you get what you pay for" scenario, and you pay nothing, so you get… no reliability?