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Comment by zherbert | Hacker News Reader

Hi all, author here, just wanted to say I am thrilled to see the HN community discuss decentralized cloud storage in more detail. There are many drawbacks today and narrow use-cases, but our goal is to continue to improve Sia – and over the coming years we will prove that decentralized storage can compete directly with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We feel confident that the marketplace dynamics, in particular, will foster competition between hosts on the network and maintain prices that are an order of magnitude cheaper for storage and two orders of magnitude cheaper for bandwidth.

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Pretty arrogant to say you're going to make cloud storage providers obsolete when you haven't even built a competing solution. You can't even share data yet...

And what about all the other features that cloud providers offer? You say "[the] Sia software is exponentially improving, and performance and featureset is quickly approaching Amazon S3", but I see absolutely no evidence of even the most basic features of cloud storage providers.

Authorization? Regulatory compliance? High-performance bandwidth? High-reliability public API/URLs? Customer support? Private cloud peering? Zero effort integration with many (most?) major data-related open source projects? Versioning? One-click, no-knowledge reliability?

How much do you need to grow to hit cloud scale? 1,000,000x? More? And you're already claiming that you're going to make S3 obsolete?

Your blog would hold more weight if you weren't so over-the-top, bullshit-level optimistic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I often enjoy the cynicism of HN as a counterpoint to the typical breathless media coverage of new technology. However that now famous comment on dropbox is a good demonstration that cynicism isn't a short cut to truth.

I'm not saying it won't work (I have no idea - there's no reason someone can't replicate all of s3's features eventually). I'm just saying that this "we're going to replace run s3 out of business" optimism is pretty unfounded right now. And on a factual level, "featureset is quickly approaching Amazon S3" is pure bullshit.

I went and tested this after reading the article

https://filebase.com/

Only took me a couple of minutes to get a file uploaded using the aws-cli. It’s the only decentralized object storage solution I’ve ever seen that seems to actually work.

Thanks for trying out our service! We're glad to hear that it was an easy experience for you.

Filebase is not decentralized.

Filebase uses a decentralized service on the backend, but the service itself is centralized. If Filebase shuts off their servers, you lose all your data.

As an analogy, email is decentralized but Gmail is not.

Interfacing with these decentralized storage networks requires cumbersome client side software, that handles things like the smart contracts and utility coin transactions.

All of the projects I’ve seen appear to be quite far away from being easily accessible by ordinary users.

Based on where the technology is currently at, if you want to compete with traditional could services, you need a service provider like this to build a platform on top of the underlying network.

My point is that this service seems to have achieved that. People talk about storj a lot in this space, but go and try upload a file to storj right now. You can’t because they don’t actually have a product in the market. This is the first time I’ve seen a press release like this, gone to a web page, signed up for a service, and uploaded a file immediately. Which is a refreshing change from an industry that tends to talk big about the impact they’re going to have for months or years on end, without ever releasing a functional product to the market.

Fair enough. I agree about there being huge value in services providing abstracting away the complexities of Sia and making it accessible to more casual users. I'm just bothered by the fact that Filebase seems to be deliberately implying that they're a decentralized service, when they're, in fact, just as centralized as Google or Amazon.

The player that I prefer in this space is Goobox.[1] I think their goal is to build a Sia-based service similar to Mega, but they have an S3 API as well. They've been around longer than Filebase, and their marketing comes across to me as more honest.

[1] https://goobox.io/

Gotta say, the fact that the installation instructions consist primarily of getting around the "unknown / unidentified developer" restriction doesn't inspire confidence.

I would also add – give Sia a try, especially if you have tried it before our v1.4.0/v1.4.1 releases! https://sia.tech/get-started

Hi,

Any chances that Sia will eventually support directly restic/Borg?

I did not know about filebase (and looks interesting), but honestly it is barely competitive with backblaze/wasabi for backups.

Thanks for checking out our service! Filebase[1] offers an S3-compatible API and we are happy to confirm that we have tested basic use cases with restic.

Using Sia on our backend enables us to offer cloud storage at very competitive rates. Currently, Backblaze charges egress fees (we don't) and Wasabi has a 90-day minimum charge for all objects. (we have no minimums)

[1] https://filebase.com

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