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Comment by drcode | Hacker News Reader

This system is going after the dream where everyone can earn extra money by letting other people use spare space on their hard drives. In theory, I think it could offer "cloud storage" at orders of magnitude lower cost than other offerings- This would certainly be desirable.

The problem is, people have been trying to build this sort of system for many years, so any proposed system is likely to fail when put into operation & therefore has an enormous burden to prove they've overcome the many fatal flaws that existed in previous systems.

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It doesn't have to be making money, it can just be saving it. The idea behind many of these protocols is that people with bursty traffic should be able to exchange bandwidth over time for peak heavy traffic during exceptional events.

Be that running an obscure website that gets flash traffic, or pushing out backups you hope you never need, until you need them all at once.

So the question is does your cloud provider end up charging you for your average traffic per year or your peak traffic, and that depends on base rates and overage rates. Even if protocols like this just exert downward pressure on those rate tables, we all win.

The problem is likely an insurmountable one - If you can offer storage to someone on your spare capacity in such a way that you make any money at all from it, it's likely that the cloud vendors with their economy of scale and cheap electricity can undercut you and capture the market.

Unfortunately for the dream, centralisation offers efficiencies and reliability that are hard or impossible to match.

It may help drive their prices down though.

Sia has been around for years doing this for backups

Sia is one of the few ICO projects that seems to actually work, but it gets zero attention.

Yep, we fell for the "good products sell themselves" meme. :/ As engineers, we felt uncomfortable promising the moon like so many other ICOs did (and still do). Blockchain-wise, the system we built was actually very conservative: aside from the file contract payment channels, our consensus design doesn't stray far from Bitcoin. As it turns out, the blockchain is the easy part! The hard part is, once you've got your network of hosts, how do you turn that into a truly great product? Sia is crazy cheap, it streams video at 1Gbps, it's got plenty of 9s, but those metrics don't mean anything in a vacuum. We've finally hit upon a more user-friendly product in Skynet, and we're doing a lot more PR this time, but we've still got a long way to go.

I really wish you well. Makes me consider actually trying Sia for our backups, which would make this the first time I or anyone else I know has actually used a block chain product in production... or for much of anything for that matter.

The block chain world is absolutely overrun with over-funded over-specced over-engineered boil the ocean projects that will never ship anything usable, solutions in search of problems, stuff that just plain doesn't work for fundamental math/algorithmic reasons, and of course a ton of outright scams. All of these are loud and lean heavy on the hype because they have nothing else. Just keep working and you will emerge once the dust settles. Not saying forget about marketing, but focus more on product.

Do you have any budget left for a sales team? I can speak from experience they are essential for most startups

I don't really want to hijack this discussion by discussing merits (or lack thereof) of other cryptocurrencies. Maybe post a link on HN for the cryptoeconomics of this other project and then we can discuss it there?

It's meant for private encrypted backups instead of public distributed files, so it is less complicated. The users just pay the people who store it through a contract.

That is also not true. On Sia you can have:

* private encrypted backups

* public distributed files

* public encrypted distributed files

You opened the door to this avenue of discussion by implying or suggesting by omission or dismissal that no successful implementation currently exists. The existence and purported demonstration of work of Sia is not yet proven. I’ve never heard of Sia before now, and I will research it now that I know that it’s a thing to study. But I digress.

It’s contrary to parliamentary procedure and rules of debate to make a statement in order to back up your own point and not admit counterexamples and discussion of said statement and it’s implications as well as it’s intent and factual basis in the current reality we all share, regardless of which parts of it are presently up for debate.

You would have us not be informed about relevant contextual information regarding a point you yourself brought up, just so we don’t derail a discussion you yourself are replying to? We’re all valid commenters with valid comments provided we have something relevant to say.

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