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Comment by zherbert | Hacker News Reader

Appreciate your response. My comparison to the cost of a hard drive today is not meant to be a direct comparison, but instead to demonstrate that traditional cloud storage is actually quite expensive. Sia is able to bring down storage costs by an order of magnitude and bandwidth costs by two orders of magnitude. While most HN readers understand the nuances of cloud storage costs, most non-technical readers are unfamiliar with the high costs of S3 storage and egress.

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The issue I take is that the comparison is truly not meaningful. Yes, storage is cheap, but you are comparing the cost of a refurbished disk to a managed service.

This may lead people to think cloud storage is a waste of money, which I personally think is untrue (though Sia certainly may be able to do it for cheaper than cloud storage, too. Both things can be true.) While the cost to us is certainly more than the cost to the provider, the cost for us to replicate what a cloud provider offers is certainly greater at small scales where we benefit less from amortization and volume pricing.

A good point may be that we don’t actually need to replicate what a cloud provider does to offer a compelling alternative for various use cases. This I would probably agree with. It is certainly cheaper for me to have my own NAS and offsite backups than it would be to pay for cloud storage, though it is still surprisingly expensive (at least to the uninitialized. Check out what a fully loaded Synology 8 bay would cost! Multiply by number of backup sites. A lot of storage, but definitely not cheap.)

The comparison wasn't complete, but I think it was still meaningful. It's like comparing the cost of sand to glass; it should be obvious that sand is not glass, but it begs the question: how much proprietary value is there in glassmaking?

> This may lead people to think cloud storage is a waste of money, [...]

But that is exactly the argument being made -- that a trustless distributed system can substitute and obsolete cloud storage.

> But that is exactly the argument being made

Then I respectfully disagree. I don't think cloud storage is always the best use case, but I do believe it is a good value for what it actually offers you. Backblaze B2 is my ideal marker for what a 'good value' in cloud storage should look like. At $5/mo per TB[1] it easily crushes the metric of monthly cost being less than equivalent non-redundant refurbished storage media.

> that a trustless distributed system can substitute and obsolete cloud storage.

OK, I have literally no qualifications to say that this isn't true. After all, what I am NOT claiming is that it can't be done for cheaper. What I AM claiming, is that without a service like Sia, it is certainly not going to be cheaper for common use cases of end users. I'm talking about comparing harddrives to services.

> Buyers are essentially paying Amazon each month the entire cost of the hard drives used to store their data

I still think though, that a compelling case could be made without bad comparisons or hyperbole. Which makes this more frustrating than it needs to be imo.

[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html - Assuming I am not deeply mistaken.

Well, the actual comparison is between the cost (for ownership) of a 1 TB (refurbished) drive vs. 1 month of 1 TB of cloud storage.

The Author could have done it as the cost (for ownership) of a brand new NAS with 2x2 TB disk (which can be - just checked on tiger direct) around 350+65+65=480 US$ vs 6 months of 4 TB cloud storage 6x4x20=480, but the overall message would have been the same.

Imagine that you rent a car for 6 months and during the 6 months you pay rates equating the price of the car brand new.

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