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Comment by tempsolution | Hacker News Reader

This reads like a typical blockchain non-sense hype article. Before you even go down the road of comparing sia to S3, what about some unbiased benchmarks? Show us the 99.999999999% durability, the pretty much unlimited bandwidth, the single digit milli-second latencies, the practically unlimited capacity.

If you want to compare Sia to anything, compare it to Dropbox or OneDrive. S3 was made for an entirely different purpose and Sia can't even remotely compete with it.

As a personal data store? Maybe. But wait until this thing becomes more popular and hackers start making a mess. Will be interesting to see how stable this "fully decentralized" network is, once it gets the full attention from bad actors as all the cloud providers.

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You are being deceived by Amazon's PR machine at its finest. The 11 9s of durability are a "design", not a guarantee. The official PR line at the time was "S3 is designed to provide 11 9s of durability".

There's still no SLA on durability AFAIK.

Actually it is 11 9s of durability, but availability is a different story.

Parent comment mentioned durability, in fact. Not sure where did you read availability?

I agree in that they are probably comparing the wrong aspects of S3.

You're not going to be able to compete on the speed anytime soon probably, and maybe even the capacity if it really takes off. But, anyone here that works on an Amazon-based internet company knows that S3 is the most unreliable (in terms of availability, not storage) universally used product they have, next to EC2.

A good chunk of incidents can be attributed to S3 downtime in some AZ. With a decentralized storage network, the probability of actual downtime in terms of availability go wayyyyy down. If Amazon us-east-1 has a bad deploy or a network event, you lose access to those buckets, full-stop.

With something like this, you'd need a much larger network event, and if the app is fully decentralized itself, blast radius can be contained to individual customer regions instead of where you host your servers.

Probably more useful to compare to GCS Storage honestly, since they have multi-region buckets.

> You're not going to be able to compete on the speed anytime soon probably, and maybe even the capacity if it really takes off

Sia today running in the default configuration gets as much as 300mpbs upload and download, which I believe is comparable to S3. Latencies are several seconds, which is not comparable to S3 however this is a matter of software optimization, not a fundamental limitation of the network architecture.

300mbps is no where close to s3 throughput. Try 300MBps per node and much higher when you access the same bucket in multiple nodes

coming from someone who is not a fan of Siacoin from when I last used it in 2017, I think you miss the point

what I like and want is encrypted distributed data that I can store and retrieve quickly and cheaply

I also like an economic model that aligns the hosts to maintain the data, and how the proliferation of that economic model lets me invest in its growth from merely being a passive non-productive speculator, and finally I would like a clear easy to understand ROI from being a productive host: can I subsidize the cost of my hardware that I'm already interested in having.

any cryptocurrency can do that, but how the software uses the cryptocurrency is a key factor, and unfortunately we can like an idea and team but get forced to accept an economic model that has flaws

so for me, it is easy for me to understand why teams want to promise the sky against S3, and it really isn't that relevant to using this securely. like, you might be able to subsidize all of your hardware and provide a service without worrying about if the SIA comparison is accurate because its really not relevant.

but finally, it turns out that unmonetized and non-cryptocurrency based decentralized cloud storage networks are good enough! so I stick with IPFS.

hope that was useful to someone.

IPFS isn't decentralized cloud storage though. Unless you host your file yourself on your IPFS node, your file is not guaranteed to be available. Hence why Filecoin is a thing they are working on.

yes, pinning IPFS files is good enough FOR ME.

there are also services and nodes which will maintain pins for you, and the capacity for decentralized encrypted shards is fine.

There may be circumstances where I want the piece of mind to pay multiple nodes to store/retrieve encrypted shards of data. SIA nor STORJ seem to be it.

What you're now describing is a centralized system though, albeit an unnecessarily convoluted one.

which exists now and is free and more decentralized and private than fairly cheap alternatives

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