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Comment by calafrax | Hacker News Reader

There is another macro-economic issue here:

With a decentralized trustless system you have to assume a higher failure rate for nodes than with a central trust based system.

If you assume a higher failure rate you have to replicate data more extensively to achieve reliability.

If you have to replicate data more extensively then decentralized will always be more expensive than centralized.

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Not necessarily if the inputs are free (e.g. unused disk space). However Spotify, Skype, and Joost all found that CDNs are cheaper than borrowing free bandwidth from people so the same may apply to storage.

Did they find that out? I thought they realised it's unprofessional and unacceptable to turn your users into hosting nodes.

Also, if decentralized storage systems become very popular, then people will buy lesser storage space with their computers, because they expect storage space to be cheaply available online. In that case, the number of individual hosters would reduce and big companies/pools would step, making it less decentralized.

You achieve reliability with erasure codes, not with more replication. And failure rates are likely to be identical if not better, since incentives are the same as with hosting companies, but since it is decentralized there are a lot more availability zones.

> You achieve reliability with erasure codes, not with more replication

If nodes are not trusted then replication has to play a major roll.

It doesn't matter how you mix up the data. You still have to store it somewhere and if that somewhere is a random untrusted stranger you will need to copy your data to a lot of random untrusted strangers in order to have kind of reliability.

you could achieve some trust through a reputation system. the longer you've been reliable the more reliable you are.

It does play a major role, in fact I think not everyone figured this thing out yet, some not even taking into account countries as risky availability zones. But the storage space overhead for redundancy is at worst 2x, which could eventually be reduced by a lot.

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