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I'm all for Storj (or Sia, or Filecoin) managing to create an alternative to AWS/GCP/Azure, but even if they succeed, they are never going to be able to make th

I'm all for Storj (or Sia, or Filecoin) managing to create an alternative to AWS/GCP/Azure, but even if they succeed, they are never going to be able to make their system operate at a lower cost of the existing commodity. I recently set up a Minio cluster with 80TB (usable, 120TB total) for ~150€/month. Storj is cheap (~3.5€/TB/month), but there is no way that Storj can ever be that cheap. And we are not even talking about egress fees. It's difficult for them to see them truly disrupting the market when their systems have by design so much overhead and middleman wanting a cut. The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices and then any advantage will be gone. The best I see for these decentralized storage systems is to work as a tit-for-tat backup, maybe?

Dylan16807 3y ago
Most people don't want to make their own clusters, or don't have enough data for it to be a good price. There's plenty of room for a service that's twice as expensive as commodity prices. > The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices I doubt it's ever going to be a big threat, since this kind of storage is never going to have great latency. I don't think that's an existential risk. Though even if it is, and happens, there's billions of dollars to make before we reach that point. It's not a reason to avoid the market.
- rglullis 3y ago
  > Most people don't want to make their own clusters, or don't have enough data for it to be a good price. Yeah, these people will pay for iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox... Or maybe if they are a bit more technical they will look into Backblaze B2. > there's billions of dollars to make before we reach that point. It's not a reason to avoid the market. I want to agree with you, but honestly this feels more like a situation where all the players will be investing a bunch of time and money in the hopes of becoming a winner and they will all end up finding an ever shrinking spread. To illustrate the point, all these projects raised already billions of dollars, but there is a very low chance that any of them will ever recoup that money. It's not a problem for them because they are all playing with someone else's money, but globally this has been nothing but a waste of time and resources.

Dylan16807 3y ago

Most people don't want to make their own clusters, or don't have enough data for it to be a good price. There's plenty of room for a service that's twice as expensive as commodity prices. > The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices I doubt it's ever going to be a big threat, since this kind of storage is never going to have great latency. I don't think that's an existential risk. Though even if it is, and happens, there's billions of dollars to make before we reach that point. It's not a reason to avoid the market.

rglullis 3y ago
> Most people don't want to make their own clusters, or don't have enough data for it to be a good price. Yeah, these people will pay for iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox... Or maybe if they are a bit more technical they will look into Backblaze B2. > there's billions of dollars to make before we reach that point. It's not a reason to avoid the market. I want to agree with you, but honestly this feels more like a situation where all the players will be investing a bunch of time and money in the hopes of becoming a winner and they will all end up finding an ever shrinking spread. To illustrate the point, all these projects raised already billions of dollars, but there is a very low chance that any of them will ever recoup that money. It's not a problem for them because they are all playing with someone else's money, but globally this has been nothing but a waste of time and resources.