[jude-]

What stops a filecoin miner from storing all replicas to S3? If nothing, then why use filecoin at all? Economies of scale would dictate that the most successful filecoin miners would simply be cloud storage providers by another name (but paid in tokens instead).

[aschmahmann]

it's possible that some miners choose to store their data on S3 or some other large/well known cloud provider. However, miners have other options as well. For instance, they could store their data in their own data centers or with more start-up storage providers without needing all the marketing resources that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. have.

One of the use cases I'm looking forward to seeing from Filecoin though is for regular folks with desktops that have extra storage capacity to just rent that capacity out. Right now the extra 500GB of storage space I have is just an unutilized resource waiting to be made use of. Additionally, it allows people to basically swap data capacity so I'll store 500GB of data for other people, and in return I'll use that Filecoin to pay other people to store my data. This is could be very useful for personal data backup where my primary requirement is that my data live somewhere else that is not on my computer.

[JetSpiegel]

> What stops a filecoin miner from storing all replicas to S3?

Being undercut by Amazon running Filecoin on their own?

[jude-]

So filecoin would just be a slower, less scalable, and more costly way to pay for S3?