[IDEA] Dirt cheap online storage
punningclan:
I'd gladly free up and manage some gigs to be paid some Bitcoin. I'd probably also back up the the data, if the pay were enough I'd invest in a RAID.
markm:
There is already at least one commercial pass-through app, or something very similar to it:
http://smestorage.com/?p=static&page=about#about-clouds
Google Drive does not mention mounting it as a drive in unix/linux using webdav protocol, but the chap who gave me the above link seemed to be saying that using that service he could use webdav to mount his google drive space.
Unthinkingbit too is concerned that developers of free open source stuff often are not paid well; that is why DeVCoins exist. Maybe DeVCoins would be more suitable than BiTCoins for developing this concept since implicit in DeVCoins is developers get coins. So far in your concept this is the first I have heard of any hint of a whisper of a suggestion that developers should get paid, it was all about users (of the software and the network of users it marshals) getting paid.
I wonder whether we even need random home-users though, maybe we should be looking at operators of virtual machines as our target nodes for acting as host nodes. Home users can be target consumers of storage, no need to use any of their own on site storage at all, what we would want them to contribute is coinage, not storage. Even if they do have lots of storage available, so what, that just means they are not likely to be a paying customer. No need to concern ourselves with them until they do not have enough storage and thus go shopping around for more.
In fact if we could estimate very firmly how many terrabytes of storage a large ISP's home-users would offer to sell and how much bandwidth that would cost the ISP maybe we could even go directly to the ISPs suggesting they sell us the storage cheaper than their users could due to not having the bandwidth cost of sending our data all the way to their users and back...
-MarkM-
SgtSpike:
Devcoins are virtually worthless - I don't know why a developer would work to gain them. And why not use Bitcoins? How is Devcoin ANY better suited to pay developers than Bitcoin, aside from name? I didn't mention developers getting paid because it absolutely depends on who is willing to develop something like this, and whether they would like to be paid or not. If there is a central entity involved, then it is fairly likely that they would take a cut of the hosting fees gathered, and would be willing to front the costs of having a platform like this developed. If it is a truly decentralized project with no central entity involved, then either some developer needs to believe in it enough to put it together without pay, or some bounty needs to be posted by users interested in seeing it happen.
I made it all about the users because, ultimately, a platform developed without the users in mind is worthless. So, first figure out what the users want, then decide on how it will be developed and managed. Right now, we're still in the "figure out what the users want" bit, which means how the platform is developed and whether developers are paid or not is largely irrelevant. All I was saying in my previous comment is, I'd like to see a platform that allows developers to be paid, either via a central entity taking a cut of the fees, or via a bounty. That's not a necessity, and obviously, it depends on what users want and need.
I don't know why home users should be ignored, either. If they can provide storage at a lower cost than VPS providers (which are typically very expensive), then why not include them? Reselling professional hosting is not the goal here.
enmaku:
I'm intrigued... Sign me up for both sides of the fence if you ever get it up and running.
Also, make damn sure every file uploaded is on more than one or two drives and encrypted with keys that the storage providers don't have ;)
markm:
For sure the storage providers should not to be able to read the files without the permission of the owners of the files.
There is plenty of free open source code that does that, in fact I have had the impression that part of what drove open source developers was often precisely the tendency of commercial service providers to set services up in such a way as to allow the providers access to as much of the customers' data as possible.
Just recently I was told that one share of devcoin generation is worth about 15 bitcoins. To me fifteen bitcoins is a nice amount to have flowing in regularly just as a side of effect of the fact I develop free open source stuff, and even a majority of the bitcoins I have made directly as bitcoins I received as bounty for working on devcoin and devcoin-related stuff.
It is true that each individual devcoin is worth far less than each bitcoin, but that was a deliberate design decision; bitcoins were skyrocketing back then, there was talk of having to move the decimal-point because users would find numbers with too many decimals awkward, so devcoin deliberately set out to be worth a thousandth or less of a bitcoin. 50,000 are minted per block accordingly.
The people who want to make coin by renting out space might be potential customers for the developers, but they are not potential customers for the users who supply the coins in the normal mainstream manner of thinking. Yes, bitcoin owners sometimes want to sell bitcoins, so any merchant willing to accept bitcoins is a customer of the person who sells them bitcoins in return for other goods or services, but if we take your view of wanting this project to be a consumer of bitcoins rather than a producer of bitcoins we want to be buying bitcoins not buying storage, right?
The people who have bitcoins do sometimes look for customers to sell them to, so maybe this is about how many of their offered bitcoins we can afford to buy given the amount of development ability and storage we can offer in return for their bitcoins.
Maybe we have to look at this in two layers: one, the person who actually wants storage. Two, the person who wants to sell them some. Three, the facilitator(s), which presumably amount to being markets, offering to bring buyers and sellers together.
To operate such a market, maybe a whole new asset-type, OSA (Online Storage Asset) would be useful. Persons wanting to sell storage could look at a prospective customer's OSA balance to decide whether that customer even has enough OSA to buy the storage the storage-vendor wants to sell, and the people wanting to buy storage could look at vendors BTC (BiTCoin) balance to see if the vendor has enough BTC balance to recompense any loss of data purportedly being stored. The market could act as escrow both for both the data stored and the coins paid. And yes I am thinking I mean here escrow of the actual data, not the abstract OSA asset. If the storage provider fails to provide the storage, the data stored on it can be recovered from the escrow aka the operator of the market? Hmm. Shoot that down for me, I am surely not seeing the problems with it clearly.
EDIT: I see one problem already: I seem to have shifted somewhere in that paragraph from OSA as a thing one buys storage with from storage vendors to OSA as actually stored data. I think that the confusion is that the OSA would amount to being coin/value that is commited to buying storage. Looking at someone's OSA balance is different from looking at their bitcoin balance because with bitcoins they might buy anything, so could spend it on something else. Their OSA balance though is purpose-specific. They already spent bitcoins or dollars or icecreamcones or sticks of gum or whatever to buy OSA units, now they are looking at vendors to decide which vendors to give them to. Something like that. I am getting confused.
...Maybe because of the layers. Coin vendors gave coins to the market/escrow, then the market/escrow is looking at storage vendors to choose which ones to obtain storage from...
-MarkM-
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