[Nursie]

> If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks at home to offer enough disk capacity for everyone, then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts.

Only if these enthusiasts are willing to take a loss on power.

> If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts

Or the cloud hosts themselves will enter the market. The upper bound on the market will be their costs, which will always be lower than the costs of enthusiasts using spare disks at home.

[ric2b]

> Only if these enthusiasts are willing to take a loss on power.

An 8TB HDD doesn't use more power than a 100GB one.

[Nursie]

> An 8TB HDD doesn't use more power than a 100GB one.

But access to it by third parties does, it changes the usage model and increases your electricity costs. This may not be a lot but it doesn't have to be a lot to make your costs more than those of a datacentre operator, not to mention you also need to be online all the time.

The dream of edge-node storage utilisation has never survived in the face of economic analysis.

[rglullis]

It is not a matter of size. It is a matter of availability.

If I only have my data on a disk, I can turn it off anytime. If I am hosting someone else's data and I want to get paid for it, I need to keep the computer running 24/7/365. That costs quite a bit.