| > Your arguments do not follow: > > which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. > No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded) You cut off the first half of my sentence. The full sentence was: > In perfect competition, which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. Oil is not in perfect competition because of OPEC, a gigantic state-sanctioned cartel. Since there's imperfect competition, there can be economic profit. > who would be interested in taking the supply side of the filecoin network, when there is no profit to be made? If we assume the filecoin network is technically able to do what it's supposed to, there will likely be profit to be made. Just not economic profit. Economic profit is different from accounting profit because economic profit takes into account opportunity cost. In the real world many people, such as grain farmers, do seem to be interested in taking the supply side of a transaction even when their economic profit is 0 (or negative). I don't see why filecoin would be any different. |
Also, with farming at least there is the notion of resource constraints. To be a farmer one needs to have access to land and dedicate some time to actually work on it.
With storage, unless the hard disk manufacturers start holding their production and use it to offer storage directly, what is the resource that other people can't have?
What would stop anyone to see that Filecoin network bids of (say) $1/TB-month and think "oh, I can buy some disks and offer $0.95/TB-month, and I will get my money back in 3 months", only to be outbid by someone who thinks they can offer $0.90/TB-month and recoup costs in six-months", until we get to the point where the time to break-even gets longer than the lifetime of the disks...