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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

My usual question for decentralized storage system is "who is paying".

The DPAGE page says: "your data are by default stored on a free Blockstack’s Gaia storage hub". When I looked at the Blockstack, their page says "Personal data lockers built on Google, AWS, and Azure."

Does this mean that my data is stored (encrypted) on Google/AWS/Azure, and that Blockstack is currently paying for this? So if Blockstack runs out of money, all the pages are gone?

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I wish people would ask this question of IPFS more often. Storage, especially long-term storage, requires incentives! Just look at BitTorrent -- at best, you continue seeding a file after downloading it out of the goodness of your heart, or (more commonly) because you can't be bothered to remove each torrent file after it finishes. In practice, the only way to keep torrent files alive for a long time is out-of-band incentives, primarily in the form of "points" on a private tracker. Even then, seeders have little incentive to seed content that isn't personally valuable to them, since they can get just as many "points" for seeding an equal amount of valuable content. In other words, good luck finding high-quality seeders for your personal photos. Ultimately, if you want someone to store your data, you need to pay them (in traditional currency or otherwise)!

I agree. This is also why Blockstack isn't built on IPFS -- your data is only available as long as someone's pinned it.

Gaia (the Blockstack storage system) will let you use IPFS as your backing store, but at the end of the day it gives users the choice as to where and how their data gets hosted. This way the user can select the best cost/performance trade-offs for hosting and storing their data.

Platforms like Sia, Filecoin, Storj, and Maidsafe do exactly this; they pay their hosters their requisite amount in coins by the hostee.

I guess I should have disclosed that I am the co-founder of Sia. So I may be slightly biased in my opinion of which decentralized storage option is best. :P

> I wish people would ask this question of IPFS more often.

Well, that's what Filecoin is for. Although I'm generally skeptical of cryptocurrency, as well as the scalability of technologies like IPFS. But we'll see.

Don't discount human relationships! For example, I have at least few friends who would be willing a small server in their apartment for me (especially since nowdays, such servers are physically small and draw very little power).

In the theoretical case where the personal photos are hosted on IPFS, they could provide storage for me. And since it is IPFS, it would not require much -- even if they get super popular, the outgoing bandwidth is still relatively small.

Going further, imaging a web build on IPFS, where it is considered acceptable and recommended to pin all the sites you link to. So ipfs hacker news pins all the articles that people are linking to, and my browser bookmarks pin all the bookmarked content (possibly via Firefox sync service), and my personal website pins all the outgoing links so they never go broken.

(Note that this likely would not with the videos very well, but I am fine with that -- most of things I bookmark, and most of HN content for that matter, is video-free)

This is all dreams today of course -- there is a number of technical reasons and missing technologies that make that setup non-feasible now. But wouldn't it be nice to have no broken links?

Blockstack engineer here. The user pays for their storage -- you would supply your own space on a storage provider of your choice (be it a cloud storage provider, your server, a BitTorrent swarm, etc.), and use it as a back-end to your Gaia hub.

The Gaia hub can be run anywhere you want -- on a server, in a service worker in your browser, etc. It's only on the write path, so availability isn't too big of a concern as long as your storage provider handles the read path (which cloud storage does).

The utopian answer would be "everyone else".

My ideal solution would use Layer 3 multicast and Layer 7 anycast heavily where content is initially hosted on your device but scales with popularity by becoming available on the nearest node near the client within the client's multicast group.

I think this problem is difficult because people want decentralization from the start. Why would I pay for hosting or transporting random content I don't care for. I believe IPFS (and bittorrent) have the scale-up decentralization where only one node hosts the content intially with gradual adoption scaling availability. Due to assymetric wan networks and traffic throttling/shaping I think hierarchial grouping of nodes is required,especially when considering low latency applications.

Correct. However, the idea is that you can run your own storage hub on a server of your choice, or, in the future, choose one or more storage providers that you trust and keep your data there (storage providers can't read your encrypted data)

This way you'll be able to pick both: 1) your storage provider 2) the app that works on top of your data

In short, yes. That's exactly what that means. This is a [Block]tech company trying to make a run up.

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