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Comment by guy_c | Hacker News Reader

I had been recently looking at Siacoin, but still a lot of work is needed before it can displace something like AWS. Took nearly a day with lots of stalls just to sync the blockchain. Also I am not sure about how price competitive it will ultimately be. Amazon has huge buying power which I am sure means they pay less per TB then consumers. Also other economies of scale. I bet the cost of labour to bring online each 1TB on S3 is very low.

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Siacoins calculator at http://sia.tech/ is claiming a price of $2/TB/month vs $23/TB/month for Amazon S3.

However it neglects to include Backblaze's B2 storage which is only $5/TB/month - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

That is maybe a not a big enough price saving to convince conservative corporations to switch. Imagine going to your accounts department to request they purchase a cryptocurrency so you can use it to pay for data storage.

Does backblaze have a single enterprise client that anyone knows of? That's Sia's target market. They are targeting companies that use S3, not a company that's pretty clearly targeting personal and SMB's.

I don't know how using Sia works in practice, but comparing it with regular S3, which is connected to the entire AWS ecosystem (including EC2), is absurd.

Amazon S3 also offers "glacier" for longterm storage with few accesses, which is $4 per TB.

But that's the problem. S3 is cheap if you use it with other AWS services and it's designed to be only cheap that way. Bandwidth is expensive to avoid that people pick services from a combination of Azure/AWS/Google.

If you're just looking for storage, S3 is certainly not the cheapest provider. Glacier is a bit different but clearly just for archives.

I'm comparing just storage prices, because I have no idea how Sia works in terms of latency/bandwidth/access. Being distributed, I suppose it will fare worse in most (if not all) these respects compared to Azure/AWS/Google and maybe even glacier.

As for bandwidth cost: I don't believe Sia can be successful and stay that cheap. Why would providers of bandwidth for Sia be able to offer it magnitudes cheaper than the biggest tech companies in the world? Answer: It's offered by a bunch of individuals with no caps on their data plans. If Sia takes off and lots of people start using terabytes of bandwidth, the ISPs will put an end to it.

Costs for retrieval from Glacier are insanely complex and can be shockingly high.

It's best not to use Glacier as a price comparison because it's really misleading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412886

Continuing on my thoughts on costs, with some very quick napkin maths (apologies if errors)

* From https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ 1TB of storage cost around $25. * I'll assume 3 year life-span for a drive. * Add 50% costs for the infrastructure and electricity to support the storage. * Add another 17.6% due to redundancy (17 data shards + 3 parity) - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...

Gives a minimum cost (before employee costs, marketing etc) of $1.22/TB/month.

If we do the same with Siacoin (which I believe stores 3 copies of your data) we get $3.12/TB/month.

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