[mkup]

There's Siacoin, a cryptocurrency/blockchain built around the idea of decentralized encrypted p2p storage.

They're dirt cheap to store as of now: median contract price is $12/TB·mo, but network storage utilization is currenly only 2%, so actual deals settle on about $2/TB·mo. Downside is that exchange rate of their coin is highly volatile, at least was during last month.

https://sia.tech/

http://siahub.info/

http://siapulse.com/page/network (Prices tab)

[lewisl9029]

Do these decentralized storage networks provide any guarantees in terms of durability, redundancy and availability? I've been looking into Siacoin, Filecoin, Storj and the like, but lack of clarity around some important concerns have so far prevented me from taking them seriously as a backup solution:

1. Performing a restore in a timely fashion on a large dataset seems like a tall order if these networks don't impose any minimums for the upstream bandwidth of the hosts.

2. Files can completely disappear from the network if the machines that are hosting them happen to go dark for whatever reason, which seems to be a much more likely occurrence for some random schnub hosting files for beer money than it would be for traditional storage providers that have SLAs and reputations to uphold.

Maybe these concerns are unfounded, and some or all of these networks already have measures in place to address them? I'd appreciate it if someone more familiar with these networks could enlighten me if that's the case.

[Geee]

In addition to redundancy, Sia has the concept of collateral, which is basically money locked in a smart contract that says "I'm willing to bet this money that I'm not going to lose your files". I.e. Hosts lose the money if they fail to store your files.

Different hosts have different amount of collateral, and it's both an important security measure as well as market mechanism.

Also, Sia is completely decentralized (unlike StorJ for example), so it can't be intervened with by anyone which might result in lost files.

[Taek]

Speaking as a Sia developer, I can address your concerns.

> these networks don't impose any minimums for the upstream bandwidth of the hosts.

Sia today primarily handles that through gross redundancy. If you are using the default installation, you're going to be putting your files on 50 hosts. A typical host selection is going to include at least a few sitting on large pipes. Downloads on Sia today typically run at about 80mbps. (the graph is really spiky though, it'll spike between about 40mbps and 300mbps).

We have updates in the pipeline that will allow you to speedtest hosts before signing up with them, and will allow you to continually monitor their performance over time. If they cease to be fast enough for your specific needs, you'll drop them in favor of a new host. ETA on that is probably ~August.

> Files can completely disappear from the network if the machines that are hosting them happen to go dark for whatever reason

We take host quality very seriously, and it's one of the reasons that our network has 300 hosts while our competitors are reporting something like 20,000 hosts. To be a host on Sia, you have to put up your own money as collateral. You have to go through this long setup process, and there are several features that renters will check for to make sure that you are maintaining your host well and being serious about hosting. Someone who just sets Sia up out of their house and then doesn't maintain it is going to have a very poor score and isn't going to be selected as a host for the most part.

Every time someone puts data on your machine, you have to put up some of your own money as collateral. If you go dark, that money is forfeit. This scares away a lot of hosts, but that's absolutely fine with us. If you aren't that serious about hosting we don't want you on our network.

> but lack of clarity around some important concerns have so far prevented me from taking them seriously

We are in the middle of a re-branding that we hope introduces more clarity around this type of stuff as it relates to our network.

[ericflo]

This is the one I've got my eye on - once the marketplace boots up on both sides, it's going to be hard to compete against it. I suspect some day even the big providers like Amazon and Google will sell into these kinds of marketplaces.

[klodolph]

I'm calling it, it's not gonna happen.

For data storage, you need error encoding. Sia does that, but you pay for it. So for 1TB of data, you upload 2TB to the network (that's how Sia is configured) and at the current $2.02/TB per month, that's $4.04/TB, which is more expensive than Glacier. Glacier charges funny for downloads but Sia charges for downloads too.

I assume that if you wanted to store ~2.5TB like we're talking about, you'd be paying more than $4/TB, because 2.5TB is 10% of the total of all data currently stored in Sia, currently 24.5 TB. (By comparison the major cloud providers are undoubtedly in the exabyte range of actual data stored. Or for another comparison, you could comfortably hold 24.5 TB of storage media in one hand.)

Sia promises to be cheap because you're using unused bytes in hard drives that people already bought, but that's exactly what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are already doing, except their data centers are built in places where the electricity costs less than what you're paying. Plus they don't charge you extra for data redundancy.

[ericflo]

In that case, Sia provides an avenue for an new company with access to cheap electricity to compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft without investing a cent in marketing or product. They will just plug in and start receiving payments, and strengthen the network and lower the price in the process.

Another cool thing is Sia lets hosters set their storage and bandwidth prices, so specialized hosts will likely pop up. For example one host might use tape drives, set cheap storage cost and expensive bandwidth cost. Clients can prioritize as desired. SSD servers with good peering can do the opposite.

The real interesting part will be when you can create one-time-use URLs to pass out, which connect directly to the network - effectively turning it into a distributed CDN.

[Taek]

The $2 / TB / Mo we've traditionally advertised as our price included 3x redundancy. The math we've done on reliability suggests that really you only need about 1.5x redundancy once you are using 96 hosts for storage.

The network prices today are less friendly, though that's primarily due to market confusion. The siacoin price has doubled 6 times in 6 months, and there's no mechanic to automatically re-adjust host prices and the coin price moves around. So hosts are all currently advertising storage at these hugely inflated rates, and newcomers to Sia don't realize that these aren't really competitive prices.

Though, I will assert that even at our current prices it's not price that's the primary barrier to adoption. It's some combination of usability, and uncertainty. Sia is pretty hard to set up (it's around 8 steps, with two of those steps taking over an hour to complete), and a lot of people are not certain that Sia is truly stable enough to hold their data.

We're focused on addressing these issues.

[Geee]

You can't compare to Glacier. S3 is a more comparable product. And obviously redundancy is already in the price, or did you think there's no redundancy?

[klodolph]

From what I understand, your client does the error encoding and pays for raw data storage on the network, rather than trusting the network to do error encoding. You can configure the encoding to whatever you want, you just end up paying more for more redundant encodings.

[jshmrsn]

Isn't this exactly what Pied Piper gets used for in later seasons?