[GTALUG] Blockchain, the solution to nothing

[Alvin Starr]

On 8/27/20 9:44 AM, Mauro Souza via talk wrote:
> If you have a VPS, or a co-located server, or something like that, and 
> unlimited bandwidth, SIA and Storj are good to pass some time. The 
> economics aren't on the side of the storage owners, but on the storage 
> renters. It's so cheap that you can rent a terabyte on both networks, 
> and use it for double backups. I stored maybe 200GB of data for a 
> year, and maybe made 10 cents. Maybe less. And as an earlier adopter, 
> I earned some hundreds of GB for free that I never used.
The problem was not so much that it was using up my 25MB that I am 
running at home but that it was hogging ALL my bandwidth causing 
congestion problems.
I could likely do something with traffic shaping but I was not all that 
invested in the project to try to see how to make it workable.
The long term problem is that if I am subjecting my system to the extra 
traffic and not getting enough to justify the extra wear and tear on my 
disks then why will I put the storage out there.
If the economics don't work in the long run for the storage providers 
then those providers will exit the application.

If I remember correctly a number of years ago HP had a storage service 
that was hosting LOTS of data for people.
They decided the economics were not in their favor and shut it down 
causing huge inconvenience and problems for the customer base.
What do you do when you have a huge data-set with a storage provider 
that will take months to move and get told they are closing down before 
you can extract all your data?

When Storj/sia  take their 30% off the top  and then distribute the rest 
to the 3 to 5 storage hosters your looking at a vanishingly small return 
on your effort.
Combine this with network latency  related penalties and the home user 
with a few TB of space to share will not be interested sharing the space.

It has been a while since I looked but I never found any business cases 
for storage providers.
I don't expect to become the next Jeff Bezos by selling my storage space 
but I do want to know that I will cover my costs and make a bit.

>
> I once was toying with this idea of providing low price backup 
> solution to small businesses, storing data on Storj and SIA at the 
> same time. Both networks aren't still "production ready", so I would 
> store on both at the same time, and keep watching if the files are 
> still available periodically. You only need enough storage to store 
> all the metadata (client id, file name, size, the hash of it on the 
> network, etc) on your database. So you could store a petabyte of data 
> while having a couple GB on your server. The agent would upload 
> directly to the networks and send you only the data you need to 
> restore the file later. It can work, storage is not the difficult 
> part, and the "what changed since last backup?" question is the main 
> issue.
Since the various services are object stores then why not just store 
eachfile as an objects and then keep track of the objects that change.
It would be no better/worse than a regular filesystem backup like dump.

>
> Mauro
> http://mauro.limeiratem.com - registered Linux User: 294521
> Scripture is both history, and a love letter from God.
>
>
> Em qui., 27 de ago. de 2020 às 08:37, Alvin Starr via talk 
> <talk at gtalug.org <mailto:talk at gtalug.org>> escreveu:
>
>     As for Siacoin and Storj I found that they used 100% of my
>     available internet bandwidth without using any storage.
>     Luckily for me I opted for "unlimited bandwidth" but not so lucky
>     for Teksavvy.
>     So doing something like sharing your few free TB could cost you
>     big time if you were a Bell or Rogers customer.
>
>     I have access to large amounts of excess storage but I have yet to
>     be convinced that I could even pay for the power that it takes to
>     spin the drives.
>     The concept is great but the economics does not seem to be there yet.
>
>
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Alvin Starr                   ||   land:  (647)478-6285
Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
alvin at netvel.net              ||

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