I'm assuming the catch with this is that you are letting your data be stored on some randomer's set of disks. which means availability is directly tied to the interest of nerds who are loaning out their hdd space for a pittance.
How is it different than any other market? To bitcoin nodes? To Torrents, Tor network? Wikipedia depends on donations of random nerds.
Like this is such a self-depreciating perspective, that nothing can be done or relied upon unless its done by a megacorp.
To just fill you in, Coffee growers grow coffee because the cost of growing coffee is less than the local wholesale price (most of the time.) It is possible to subsist on the profits of growing coffee(depending on where you are).
The price per TB being charged to the consumer is $48 a year. which is significantly less than the initial setup cost to become a data host. (pi + sd card + hdd) That's before we get to the opex of paying for an ISP, (and any bandwidth overages) plus power and general maintenance.
Thats assuming that the company is selling at the price it pays the "hosts". I'm assuming they have some ambition for profitability.
which leads me back to the original statement: you're reliant on a bunch of randomers Who didn't really think about the economics subsidising this company.
The money is made on egress, that's the case with Storj and most others. For domestic setup, the data connection is a fixed cost you would have anyway.
Stop assuming everyone is an idiot, people do the math for profitability of these platforms, and switch between them.
> coffee farming is less profitable than data hosting.
yes, the money is in roasting. you're missing the essential point, there is a reason why coffee growers don't roast their own raw material, because they cannot get access to capital to get the equipment, let along access to the customers.
but coffee isn't the point.
Unless there is a sustained incentive to store the data, there will not be anyone willing to host it. the amount they charge is not enough to make it sustainable for people to invest in equipment to host the data, so you'll be reliant on best effort, or worse still, short term incentives that are unsustainable, leading to wide spread evaporation of storage.
You pay for gaurenteed storage, which is why its expensive, its a slice of the capex for the equipment, opex for the running and maintenance, plus profit. At this current price, it doesn't cover any of them.
If anyone on this site has built a business that relies on wikipedia having accurate information at all times I'd call them crazy too.
In the same way I wouldn't call this "enterprise" as they have plastered all over the site. Using spare capacity on a bunch of random usb drives that users happen to have online gives me no guarantee of uptime. With a 20+20 they're betting that 21 users won't experience an outage at the same time, and that if a large portion experiences outages that they can rebuild faster than users fail.
Without knowing anything about where the users are coming from, or what kind of contract they've agreed to, you're just giving a company your data that has told you: it'll be secure, TRUST ME!
There are thousands (millions?) of coffee farmers, so they have no problem.