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Comment by GoldenMonkey | Hacker News Reader

Sure it can provide an SLA. The code is the SLA. And is available for all to examine. Via opensource. And governance allows the community to change terms/accept code... moving forward.

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That's pretty hand-wavy. Anyone can read the published code, but you can't read the code being run by each individual entity in the network. Any individual might change their server to not make the stored data available to those paying for the storage.

It's not _likely_, as that would negate the usefulness of the whole system if it became an issue, and therefore negate the cash flow into the system.

Ultimately what's keeping the storage providers honest, whether they're centralized or decentralized, is that their future profit stream is based on their current behavior, and they presumably care about future profits. Code and SLAs ain't nothing but words.

In fairness, real-company SLAs also tend to be hand-wavy. People like to pretend it's "they'll never be down more than X" or "if they're ever down more than X they'll give us a refund", but it's usually more like "the service provider said that it didn't count because only one part of their service was 'degraded', and after we threatened to take them to court they threw us a $13 discount'".

What if the system had 2 kinds of nodes, storage nodes, and then verification nodes. The storage nodes, store the data. The verification nodes, hit the storage nodes and verify the data is there and available. If the storage node fails a verification attempt, the storage node pays a fee. After a certain amount of failures, it is banned from the network.

Disclaimer: I have no idea how these systems currently work.

This is basically how decentralized storage works except you can't really ban anyone so a storage provider will lose their deposit if they fail verification. As the article says, this forces storage providers to lock up capital and even that is no guarantee since there may be situations where losing the deposit is actually cheaper than staying in business.

I can run the code behind a network that prevents outbound file transfers for large data.

So the code shows file, all my proof of storage is correct and users are hosed. There’s no “proof of bandwidth” (yet)

And again, even if we restrict ourselves to honest parties, hardware failures happen. Auditing the code tells you nothing about their infrastructure.

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