Decentralized data storage has finally landed | Hacker News Reader

Decentralized data storage has finally landed

storj.io

38 pointsalessandroetc32 comments

Their pricing is only slightly cheaper than backblaze b2. For storage they charge $4/TB/month whereas b2 charges $5/TB/month, and for egress they charge $7/TB whereas b2 charges $10/TB. Personally I don't think the risks (eg. your cost going up because crypto price skyrocket, or you losing your data because of a crypto winter) are worth the savings. Not to mention there are much cheaper solutions than the two I mentioned, like deep glacier that only charges $1/TB for storage, or office365 that provides 6x1TB storage for $100/year.

Costs shouldn't rise or fall based on the price of the coin. You can pay directly in USD for the storage so that you don't have to worry about the pricing shifts.

Sure, you pay in USD, but the network accepts payments in sia/storj coins. What happens if the price of the coin goes to the moon? Is the service provider (storj.io) going to eat the cost?

CTO here! There's no cost to eat. We determine the amount of STORJ to transfer given a storage node operator's USD-valued accruals at the time of transfer. All of the book keeping is USD-denominated.

>We determine the amount of STORJ to transfer given a storage node operator's USD-valued accruals at the time of transfer.

So you have agreements with storage node operators to provide storage space to you at fixed costs (denominated in USD)? Or are you paying whatever the market rate is for storage, and hoping that it won't go above $4/TB?

Whoops, sorry for the late reply, but it's the former.

I don't know the details myself, but one aspect may be how many places your files are stored.

With B2 or similar S3 based storage, it's generally in one datacenter. But at least from what I've heard, stuff like Storj or Sia has an advantage from your files being stored over a large geographic area in multiple places.

>With B2 or similar S3 based storage, it's generally in one datacenter

that's true for B2, but not for s3. From AWS:

>your objects are automatically stored across multiple devices spanning a minimum of three Availability Zones, each separated by miles across an AWS Region

That makes sense with AWS S3 pricing, I had always wondered if it was more distributed compared to the cheaper B2, Wasabi, etc.

I ran some storj nodes a few years ago but gave up because the ratio of what I needed to share to the amount I could store was too poor.

I see their pricing [0] has improved but does anyone have a good comparison of the true costs of various storage systems? I feel like I’m dealing with comparing Roblox to hearthstone gems when trying to figure out the cost of S3 vs Storj vs Filecoin vs whatever.

It seems like there should be some p2p system where I can share 100GB on my storage array in return for 10GB that’s reliable enough that it will always be there if my house burns down.

Currently I use S3 Glacier because S3 is too expensive.

[0] https://www.storj.io/pricing

If you want something that you can just plug into and leave alone, I'd just use Storj. It's priced the cheapest and their tech is the best thus far. I will say that it's built for developers so expect needing to spend some time to set everything up.

Thanks, that’s helpful. I’m looking for something that does this analysis that I can follow. When I did the math a few years ago Storj wasn’t the cheapest, so I want a good way to confirm that if storj is best now, what’s best in a year, etc.

OP is affiliated, though.

We built a service that tells you the exact cost/performance differences between different object storage systems [backblaze, storj, wasabi, s3, etc].

All you need is an AWS cost and usage report and we can tell you the tradeoffs including egress fees and everything.

Would be more than happy to help you out with this.

https://taloflow.ai

"Once your Node is verified after a vetting period, you’ll start being compensated for the storage and bandwidth you provide. Every month you meet the requirements, you’ll be paid in STORJ Token."

I'd rather be paid in money

What is money?

It's like bitcoin that doesn't go up.

Money definitely goes up, it also goes down. What's important is what you compare it to. The USD has been going down for a long time, compared to EUR for example.

Bad memory? The first ever EURUSD exchange rate was 1.2034 in December of 2003. Today's rate is 1.2042.

It has most certainly not been going down for a long time.

Now do BTCEUR and BTCUSD.

They're not paying in BTC. Here is all-time STORJUSD: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/storj/

Looks like no pattern at all except occasional extreme spikes followed by crashes back to where it was before.

No, but I think I forgot to qualify what time range means "a long time" for me, something like the last 5 years. Anyway, it's besides the point, the point is that "money" besides cryptocurrencies also changes value over time.

The last five years is regression to the mean after the EURO tanked in 2015 due to Greece defaulting on its sovereign debt.

Does anyone know the difference between this and TahoLAFS? Almost sounds the same.

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs

Storj is going to be a lot more tried and battle tested than TahoLAFS. If you need to reliable store files under a strong encryption, I'd use storj.

CTO here! We took a lot of inspiration on our latest design from Tahoe LAFS. Big fans. Main difference as I see it is Tahoe isn't as focused on producing a full storage ecosystem (storage node operators, etc), but we do share lots of similar points technically! Encryption, Reed Solomon, etc. Zooko's zfec Reed Solomon library influenced our usage of Reed Solomon for sure.

Can someone eli5 the difference between storj and filecoin? And explain why filecoin has a market cap multiple times that of storj?

From what I’ve read, it’s really a matter of branding and marketing that’s resulted in filecoin having a larger market cap.

so I'm guessing that syncthing (with you running your own repeater/server node), doesn't meet your requirement. why not?

(for me it's the lack of one way sync, ignoring deletes, and no partial directory sync)

Finally! Just few years after Wuala closed down. /s

What's the difference between that and Diode?

https://diode.io/

Considering that their pricing page doesn't mention any storage prices, I'm guessing it's some sort of self-hosted cloud solution, rather than storj which is closer to something like s3.

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