> Apparently that does not include data redundancy
Indeed. So if you compare it to S3, the calculation seems to be "Filecoin cost / Amazon cost = 0.0010% the cost of Amazon S3", so if you're willing to pay the same amount as for S3, you can store your data with 100,000 different providers around the world.
I'm not sure how many locations S3 data get stored at, but I'm fairly certain it's not 100,000 different machines, so even with that, it seems like a pretty good deal for vital data.
If you want it cheaper than S3, you can store it with just 10,000 different providers (10% of the price of S3), and I'd still consider it a good deal.
The problem here is end-hosting transparency. How Amazon and S3 and the other providers structure themselves to ensure redundancy is fairly well known.
How those 10,000 providers do is quite different - namely, a 6000 of them are all behind the same segment of the internet that can go down? Then if you were distributing data aggressively, you probably lost access to something temporarily - or permanently.
This isn't an idle risk: if it's cheap and easy to start making some amount of money off of Filecoin hosting, then you have the fly-by-night problem: suppose some Chinese firms with cheap warehousing cobble together a whole lot of storage, and then, to optimize against people doing exactly this (and thus increase revenue) they advertise themselves out onto the network as dozens, or hundreds of logically separate entities?
What looks like cheap storage which you've made redundant, suddenly actually isn't - it all has the same base fault possible.
A few things work in the network's favor in this situation (disclosure: I work at the Filecoin Foundation: I guess David and I are tag-teaming this). Firstly, the proofs that storage providers have to provide to the network are designed to work per replication. So you can't store just one copy, and claim you're multiple providers storing multiple copies.
Secondly: storage providers aren't anonymous, and in fact compete on additional features on top of the commodity storage offer. At the most basic level, you have orgs competing on geographical diversity -- so you have PikNik https://www.piknik.com/ or https://www.sealstorage.io/ in the US, dcent in the EU https://dcent.nl/ . And then there are other contractual requirements that let storage providers offer distinctive services, like the use of renewable energy.
Thirdly: the economic requirements of the Filecoin proofs at this point (constant availability, a reasonable amount of CPU/GPU power, an initial FIL stake that can be removed in the event that you fail to prove in a timely fashion you're storing the data), mean that the optimum storage provider setup is pretty professional -- you really need a presence and fast connection in an extremely reliable hosting center, a 100TB or more, and so on.
So, I'd say that there's a (potentially contingent -- i can imagine see the entry price for filecoin storage provision going down) entry barrier, and a lot of meta-data that can, and is, being used to make decision about which SP's to make deals with. So, for instance, Estuary and I believe the other front-ends use historical and business data to determine who they're making deals with.
What is the value FileCoin is providing in this scenario though? I feel like there's a bait and switch here: proposition 1 is: FileCoin lubricates storage provider transactions by providing proof of storage, such that you can easily transact with a gigantic marketplace of vendors.
But then that's affected heavily by: to ensure storage is secure and redundant, you'll need to research extensively which providers you contract with based on reputation.
Which pretty much completely undermines proposition 1: I could just transact with providers who act as registered business entities in countries who's legal systems I trust, using regular currency directly. Because that stance in the marketplace is a shortcut for "is a geographically distributed operation that can be held legally accountable for their behavior", and have a history of success backed in the regular market place.
Interestingly, this is PRECISELY what FVM will help enable.
By using an FVM contract, you can specify exactly what you'd like - how distributed, how automatic the replication, etc etc. This, of course, is a bit manual for now, expect lots more simplicity in the space - or just use https://web3.storage which does this all for you!
Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.
Indeed. So if you compare it to S3, the calculation seems to be "Filecoin cost / Amazon cost = 0.0010% the cost of Amazon S3", so if you're willing to pay the same amount as for S3, you can store your data with 100,000 different providers around the world.
I'm not sure how many locations S3 data get stored at, but I'm fairly certain it's not 100,000 different machines, so even with that, it seems like a pretty good deal for vital data.
If you want it cheaper than S3, you can store it with just 10,000 different providers (10% of the price of S3), and I'd still consider it a good deal.