The key thing in our blockchain is the storage contract, which is something like a blockchain-SLA. The host has an obligation to store some data, and the host also puts up money out of pocket as a promise that the data will be stored faithfully. The blockchain will occasionally challenge the host, and if the host cannot create a proof that the data is still being stored, the host's collateral is forfeit.
The renter also puts money into the file contract, this money is used to pay the host if the host is honest/keeps the data, and the money is destroyed if the host is dishonest or loses the data. The money gets destroyed so that the renter has no reason to interfere with the host, nothing to gain from seeing the host fail or working to make the host fail.
Thanks to the blockchain, the host has a guaranteed payment if they store the data, regardless of whether the renter sticks around for the duration of the contract or not. And also thanks to the blockchain, the renter knows that the host will not get paid until the end of the contract, and that they will actually lose some of their own money if they lose the data.
There's another great benefit though to cryptocurrency, which is that payments are super low friction. Every time you upload data to the Sia network or download data from the Sia network, you make hundreds to thousands of tiny payments to the various parties over state channels. This wouldn't be feasible using more traditional payment systems, we'd have to track everything in a centralized database, and that actually doesn't scale very well.
Sia is both low cost and high speed, but these are side benefits over the primary goal of uncompromising decentralization. Storage just happens to be an application where the decentralized version is actually highly competitive to the centralized versions.
I'm glossing over a fair amount here, if there's anything that doesn't make sense or seems off feel free to ask, I'm happy to clarify.
I run a video rendering service that currently uploads previews (call it 5-10mb) to S3 for ~3 days and then deletes them. Finished renders (~50-200mb) are stored for 2 weeks. I upload 500-1000 new files a day.
Amazon just bills me for this once a month. Would I need to load up a wallet and prepay each of these contracts individually? How would I send out a download link or play a video in a browser?
Anything that you paid for but didn't use will be refunded in full at the end of the 3 months.
Right now Sia does not support filesharing of any kind, however that's in the mid-term (6-12 months) roadmap.
with VC money? with a fickle settlement system that requires 5 layers of financial institutions before you get a REST API? where you probably still need 50+ money services licenses and compliance department anyway? where any of those financial institutions can still cut you off for any reason? to maintain operations in a single country?
why do all that when you can just print money, or more accurately create a scarce digital asset of value to the market you create, available internationally on day one
you don't have to agree with it, but the pendulum has swung waaay in this other direction and thats the answer for "why" before you even get into the implementation that the founder wrote.
If I want to decentralize my storage, I would replicate data between multiple cloud object stores (Backblaze, S3, Wasabi, etc, a library to abstract PUTs and GETs) and pay them for their service. I trust them, but can verify each is holding up their end of their commercial agreement (similar to RAID block scans, but with object hash verifications). They aren't randomly going to yank their storage node of the network like a home NAS device or other consumer level storage device, because it's their business to be available.
A superior solution has yet to present itself.
Sidenote: The blog post is holding cloud provider data egress fees up as an example of exorbitant bandwidth pricing; this is true, but only from cloud providers. You can get bandwidth extremely cheap from non-cloud providers or through other means[1].
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ (random example picked from Google search)
They're definitely less costly. I could host over 10x the amount on Sia for what I pay for B2 at the moment, B2 is already one of the cheapest providers, plus that's just in storage, ignoring all bandwidth costs. I'm really curious what the numbers will look like in terms of reliability here. Theoretically you can figure out how often storage contracts try to retrieve and fail and the host has to pay a fee by looking at the block chain, anyone done the analysis on this yet?
I'm paying for trust, and it is a hard sell that a distributed storage system spanning worldwide jurisdictions is inherently more trustworthy (although it is possible that it can be as durable and reliable as traditional storage systems, but the proof is in the data).
I would like to be proven wrong.
No, I trust the cryptography to, I sure as hell wouldn't trust Backblaze, let alone Amazon not to do that either. I use Restic when using such services to encrypt before sending anything to them.
> durability and availability
This is IMO the only real question. I want to see some numbers and I think their blockchain should actually be able to provide values for this theoretically.
Overall, given this, while I'm not 100% confident in their software and cryptocurrency yet, given time I think this could prove to offer an even higher guarantee of reliability than traditional cloud storage services at much lower prices.
It doesn't look like its built for large data sets, since the capacity of the network is fairly low, and the providers fairly small. So if I want to store ~5TB of data, this isn't much of a fit and if I want to store ~5GB of data well there are tons of options and if I want it replicated, I'll replicate it.
Seriously though, I don't want to play game theory games with a list of storage providers, especially for tiny sums of data, I just want it to be there.