If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks at home to offer enough disk capacity for everyone, then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts. If all that capacity gets used up, then supply and demand will cause the price to go up until more people add capacity. If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts, so the price of cloud hosting will be the upper bound on Filecoin hosting prices. Then anyone that can undercut the cloud hosts will be free to run their own Filecoin nodes, and the price will be pushed down as people do this.
That means average home user bandwidth costs will go up? The unlimited download, flat-rate, fair use plan your home lan connects to the internet can be provided because your connection is lingering 90% of its time practically unused (besides all sorts of home appliance phoning home).
If you are using this seemingly free connection capacity, internet access rates should go up, because there is no such thing as a free lunch?
> If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks at home to offer enough disk capacity for everyone, then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts.
Only if these enthusiasts are willing to take a loss on power.
> If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts
Or the cloud hosts themselves will enter the market. The upper bound on the market will be their costs, which will always be lower than the costs of enthusiasts using spare disks at home.
> An 8TB HDD doesn't use more power than a 100GB one.
But access to it by third parties does, it changes the usage model and increases your electricity costs. This may not be a lot but it doesn't have to be a lot to make your costs more than those of a datacentre operator, not to mention you also need to be online all the time.
The dream of edge-node storage utilisation has never survived in the face of economic analysis.
It is not a matter of size. It is a matter of availability.
If I only have my data on a disk, I can turn it off anytime. If I am hosting someone else's data and I want to get paid for it, I need to keep the computer running 24/7/365. That costs quite a bit.
> If there's enough enthusiasts using spare disks (...) then that means Filecoin hosting will be available cheaper than cloud hosts
Ok. Agreed.
> If all that capacity gets used up, then supply and demand will cause the price to go up until more people add capacity.
Agreed.
> If the price hits the price of cloud hosts, then people will just run tons of Filecoin nodes on cloud hosts.
Not necessarily. I can just buy more disks and run locally, whether for hosting my data or to sell the space on the network, which brings the price back to people-selling-spare-disk-space-for-cheap level.
> Then anyone that can undercut the cloud hosts will be free to run their own Filecoin nodes, and the price will be pushed down as people do this.
Yeah, but that is kind of my point. Everyone will undercut each other until the price hits the bottom. The equilibrium will be at most the commodity price.
