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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

There are already open file storage protocols, and open source clients that supports many storage providers. I use git-annex, which supports about a dozen commercial services, plus any machine that supports SFTP, SMB, Webdav or rsync, among others. And of course, it encrypts everything locally before uploading.

What's the point of the blockchain?

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Sure, you can sync to your own drives or to several commercial storage providers, but it's not as cheap as it should be. We're talking geographically distributed storage on an open marketplace, cryptographically enforced for extremely cheap prices.

Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services which could even attempt to compete on price with something like Sia today (Filecoin and others in the future potentially), but they're only in single DCs and if they lose your data you have no one to go after. In the cryptocurrency-based systems, this is all automated.

For as many incredibly stupid and useless applications of blockchains as there are, this isn't one of them in my opinion. It may not be unique, but it's actually something that could have a competitive edge over a centralized service.

Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services

You're missing OVH, which has multiple DCs.

Automating the upload to different endpoints is not exactly something exclusive to the blockchain, I already have that with git-annex.

>Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services which could even attempt to compete on price with something like Sia today (Filecoin and others in the future potentially)

It would be nice to see Sia/Filecoin provide some basic DB metrics like availability, durability, latency, bandwidth... things that any prospective client would absolutely need to know.

Not sure how git-annex works, but with blockchain your files are automatically distributed among geographically diverse nodes, and there's an embedded payment method to reward others for hosting your content--all while not having to communicate with a corporation or any other third party and providing pretty good built-in security.

Dropbox got a similar response, no? That it can be replaced by rsync.

New non-blockchain distributed ledgers like Hedera Hashgraph can support 300,000 transactions per second. That's enough to decentralize servers, or host an open-source MMORPG. No more single point of failure.

Sure but I don’t want to own the storage drives myself. Also I want it to be simple as Dropbox. I have other things to do than to dick around with storage and syncing and all that — believe me I did spend a lot of time on it already.

The point of the blockchain is to allow me to rent storage space on other people’s computers.

s3 does this really nicely, for pennies per gig

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