<story><title>Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month</title><url>https://blog.sia.tech/cloud-storage-for-2-tb-mo-8a34043e93bb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway9878</author><text>Everybody with more money than you can always undercut you in anything you ever do so why bother ever trying to do anything</text></item><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the issue. We know that due to economy of scale and domain experience, AWS will always have the lowest cost (to Amazon) for storage -- whether that&amp;#x27;s totally-reliable storage, or sorta-reliable. If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they&amp;#x27;d build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Then, blockchain adds inefficiency. Therefore, it&amp;#x27;s basically impossible for any blockchain solution to have a lower total cost to provide storage.</text></item><item><author>Taek</author><text>Author here. A lot of these numbers are drawn from experience in the mining world, where people realized that when cost is the ultimate bottom line, a lot of corners can be cut.&lt;p&gt;Sia systems don&amp;#x27;t need a ton of networking. I ran the networking buildout costs by some networking people, and again it comes down to cutting corners. If you only need 10 gbps per rack, if you don&amp;#x27;t mind having extra milliseconds added, etc, you can get away with very scrappy setups. The whole point is that it&amp;#x27;s not a highly reliable facility.</text></item><item><author>kmod</author><text>I worked on the design of Dropbox&amp;#x27;s exabyte-scale storage system, and from that experience I can say that these numbers are all extremely optimistic, even with their &amp;quot;you can do it cheaper if you only target 95% uptime&amp;quot; caveat.  Networking is much more expensive, labor is much more expensive, space is much more expensive, depreciation is faster than they say, etc etc. I don&amp;#x27;t think the authors have ever done any actual hardware provisioning before.&lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#x27;t read all their math but I expect their final result to be off by a factor of 2-5x.  Hard drives are a surprisingly low percentage of the cost of a storage system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enaaem</author><text>Very good point! Let&amp;#x27;s say you move into a new market, trying to undercut the status quo. The status quo, with their power of scale and experience can just undercut you back. Who is benefitting from this? The customers! So if the customers want more competition they have to pay you to play. Which means they have to co-invest with you and promise to buy your service later.&lt;p&gt;A good is example are the Apple iPhone screens. If Apple wants a new competing supplier, they have to invest in new competitors.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month</title><url>https://blog.sia.tech/cloud-storage-for-2-tb-mo-8a34043e93bb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway9878</author><text>Everybody with more money than you can always undercut you in anything you ever do so why bother ever trying to do anything</text></item><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the issue. We know that due to economy of scale and domain experience, AWS will always have the lowest cost (to Amazon) for storage -- whether that&amp;#x27;s totally-reliable storage, or sorta-reliable. If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they&amp;#x27;d build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Then, blockchain adds inefficiency. Therefore, it&amp;#x27;s basically impossible for any blockchain solution to have a lower total cost to provide storage.</text></item><item><author>Taek</author><text>Author here. A lot of these numbers are drawn from experience in the mining world, where people realized that when cost is the ultimate bottom line, a lot of corners can be cut.&lt;p&gt;Sia systems don&amp;#x27;t need a ton of networking. I ran the networking buildout costs by some networking people, and again it comes down to cutting corners. If you only need 10 gbps per rack, if you don&amp;#x27;t mind having extra milliseconds added, etc, you can get away with very scrappy setups. The whole point is that it&amp;#x27;s not a highly reliable facility.</text></item><item><author>kmod</author><text>I worked on the design of Dropbox&amp;#x27;s exabyte-scale storage system, and from that experience I can say that these numbers are all extremely optimistic, even with their &amp;quot;you can do it cheaper if you only target 95% uptime&amp;quot; caveat.  Networking is much more expensive, labor is much more expensive, space is much more expensive, depreciation is faster than they say, etc etc. I don&amp;#x27;t think the authors have ever done any actual hardware provisioning before.&lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#x27;t read all their math but I expect their final result to be off by a factor of 2-5x.  Hard drives are a surprisingly low percentage of the cost of a storage system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemonemo</author><text>I think the point is that the cost should not be the main motivator. I would agree that there needs to be other differentiators in addition to cost, which could provide sufficient moat against other competitors, big or small.</text></comment>