brutaltruth

Clearly the Bitcoin skeptics had the better of the debate ;)

You must also think "scale" and "market pressures" keep down the price of Windows.

Hint: AWS has wonderful margins because everything is tied together, and bandwidth charges to get data out are huge. S3 is a great solution for data used on AWS, but costs more than 30x Storj on bandwidth alone ($90/TB for outside access, plus the cost of doing cross-region replication).

If you're going to work from "first principles" it always helps to have the first hint about how markets actually work--and that different products make different trade-offs (local transfer speed and latency vs. cheap global redundancy)

Not very interesting. There are ways to solve all of these concerns--no fees are paid during the first X months, nodes periodically tested for bandwidth, etc. etc. Just because the author didn't bother to think it through doesn't mean it's not straightforward.

The whole idea of a blockchain is reputation CAN be built up over time, because every transaction is recorded and there might even be incentives to associate nodes to show X nines of pool reliability.

Is it a bad idea to use this as your only source of storage? Of course. Is it less useful than AWS if you do large local burst queries? Of course.

But none of the concerns mentioned in the post are relevant. This can be cheaper than AWS because they charge an enormous markup, and this automatically provides worldwide replication and accessibility.

Amazon already erases books from Kindles, Google scans your Docs for blasphemy against Fauci, and both have been known to throw businesses off their services. In a few years it will seem crazy not to have an extra copy of your data on here.

Congratulations to the author on missing that it's possible to swap tokens with DeFI, that bitcoin is one of the most liquid instruments in the world, and that Bitcoin isn't competing with cash: it's competing with a ledger entry at a bank that can go bust denominated in a currency that can be printed at will.

(Leaving aside 3-10% fx conversion fees, ACH delays, wire deadlines, and more that prevent "dollars" from being a useful international or digitally transferable form of "money")

But otherwise good take circa 2010 ;)