Cryptocoin miners' profit is largely based on "access to cheap power and network connectivity", and many of them run fairly large-scale operations but nowhere near the same scale as Amazon. No reason why a "file coin" should be any different.
But they do centralise. And they do quickly go out of profitability for those with some spare compute power at home, into the hands of those with cheap power and specialised equipment who can undercut and outcompete them.
You are right - there is no reason this would be different. That specialised equipment is storage space here.
That is missing the point. No one doubts that it is possible to bring down the costs of storage and its infrastructure. The point is that no matter how low these costs are all nodes are driven to undercut each other until their profitability is zero.
There's a lot of spare capacity in personal devices, getting _anything_ out of that capacity is nice and means you'll have people gladly undercutting Amazon and friends. Maybe limited and not at the same level of availability but still competition.
Ok, now go tell that to the ones that put 257 million USD on the Filecoin ICO and are expecting profits on a growing network!
> undercutting Amazon and friends.
That is so short-sighted. Amazon storage is not priced only due to the cost of storage. If it were, Wasabi would be stealing all of their customers given they charge "only" $6/TB-month, and I could go steal all of their customers because I have a cluster of Minio Servers that cost me $3.50/TB-month.
People are paying Amazon and the other major players a premium is not due to lack of competition or collusion between them or because they are price-sensitive. If they are (like I am), they would figure out how to setup Minio/Ceph and run their own servers.
