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> I'm not entirely clear what would be analogous to revenue for Filecoin, but they "mine" ~330K coins per day, which at current prices is about $21 million

This is actually analogous to an expense. That $21 million per day is not revenue that is flowing to the shareholders (or in this case, the Filecoin holders), but rather new shares that are being printed and distributed to the people offering storage to the network. Filecoin's annual expenses to maintain that 13 EiB are roughly $7.5 billion per year, and those expenses manifest as inflation of the total coin supply.

> Now here's where it gets crazy... based on the current average reward if Backblaze dedicated all of their storage to Filecoin mining they could (theoretically) generate about $2.5 million a day (or $900 million/year, about 13x what they bring in now).

They can't because Filecoin mining requires pairing storage with massive GPUs and servers that have 128 GB of RAM. To move all of their storage over to Filecoin mining, Backblaze would have to make a massive infrastructure investment that is otherwise completely out of the scope of what their business does (as none of their existing products leverage such hefty compute).

Note: the 13 EiB pledged are real storage capacity: miners must provide a cryptographic proof every day, that they are storing this much space; or it doesn't count. I still think crypto valuations are excessively, tulip-y high, but valuation/byte is pretty similar.

The cryptographic system that enables people to prove storage is called 'Proof of spacetime'; which sounds cringey, but it's pretty clever (begins at page 10): https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf

Note that if you went to Backblaze and wanted to store 2 EB, it's unlikely they'll be able to serve you immediately (they probably can't get enough HDDs from their channels that quickly). However, you CAN store 2 EB on Filecoin the same way you can auto-scale on AWS.

People have said "tulips and crypto" when bitcoin was at $800, $5000, $20000, and now at $50000.

I wonder when (if) it will stop?

I also wonder if crypto valuations are a reflection of truly "free market" economics. Where there is little-to-no barrier to entry as a creator or an investor, and there is complete impossibility of counterfeiting assets.

Side-thought: User A "invested" $100 dollars into Bitcoin, thereby raising its price a little. Then, they accidentally lost the key (broken hard-drive, stolen laptop, forgot password etc). But Bitcoin price is still raised a little.

If someone thought bitcoins were overpriced tulips at $500, why would they change their mind when they reach $50,000?

No, it's not. Have you tried crypto projects? Scams and rug pulls are rampart. It's a wild west, and really not a good way if you are trying to invest in anything that's not Bitcoin or Ethereum.

I wonder, how should content risk (for lack of a better term) be factored in?

As a storage service you don't know what you're storing, generally. Maybe you're storing proof of extrajudicial assassinations, or hilarious Winnie the Pooh memes, just to name two things that can get a person locked up forever.

At this point it's all equal, neither Backblaze nor Filecoin has any idea about it.

But if The Government discovers you're storing this stuff, suddenly you have a big problem. They will "stop at nothing" to make you give them all the metadata and delete the goods.

If you're Backblaze and you're on NASDAQ and you have a relationship with regulators, etc. etc., you can throw up your hands and do whatever they tell you. You'll be fine.

If you're a decentralized crypto-storage conglomerate, you probably can't actually do anything. At which point, The Government's best hand may be to declare everything you do illegal and everybody doing it a terrorist. And then all your miners/storers/whatever flee (or are captured) and the system shuts down, at least anywhere The Government can reach.

Thus it seems like Filecoin has a built-in risk to its longevity that is completely separate from its financials, whereas Backblaze really just has to make more than it spends.

Filecoin doesn't make sense to me:

https://file.app/ says it's 0.0000394/GiB/year

So for 4TiB HDD used for 4 years: 0.0000394 * 4000 * 4 = USD 0.6. Wut? I guess I'm missing something. :)

The storage on the network is being subsidized to the tune of $20 million per month, which means there's a massive oversupply of storage and nobody buying it, hence very cheap prices.

Who is doing the subsidizing?

The people buying and holding the tokens

As it turns out, unreliable storage is not as valuable as reliable storage.

This is a brilliant comment, and despite it doesn't answer or address every question or concerns, it points our brain to an interesting direction of thought.

I think the key question here is: are the two companies really in the same space?

If I’m a blackblaze customer, how likely am I to switch to filecoin. Is that even an option?

Yeah well, the market is well known to do irrational things, people are speculating highly on all things crypto.

Happy Backblaze customer here (for a Windows Laptop I admin, for the rest I happily use rsync.net).

I couldn't care less about any company doing ICOs or anything else crypto related when it comes to backup services.

I want a backup company doing one thing: backups, safe, reliable, paid by me.

Pyramid schemes shouldn't be compared to real companies.