
The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different” - signa11
https://blog.dshr.org/2018/06/the-four-most-expensive-words-in.html?
======
TheAceOfHearts
The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it
easier to see it reversed:

The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is
different"

Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more
thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth
pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you
care about. The big incentive is being able to keep your own copy and being
able to do whatever you want with it. How many times have you tried searching
for an old YouTube video, only to find it got taken down?

Another example: package managers! You want to have a machine-local cache, a
remote cache for reproducible builds and deployments, and whatever other
remotes you get the original packages from. Maybe different registries have
varying content policies, and you can pick your favorites. If you have a few
developers in an office it's a lot faster to grab dependencies from the laptop
of the person sitting next to you than a CDN.

~~~
wpietri
Aren't you just replicating the same mistake he's describing as being made
over and over again? Where people express a reasonable desire but don't think
through the issues before deciding it's worth pursuing?

In tech we have this habit of going from, "Wouldn't it be cool if X..." to
"Let's build X right now!" I think that's a fine instinct if it hasn't been
tried and it's something that runs on the author's machines. Something will be
learned.

But when we're talking real money and real work from a lot of people, I think
it's worth stopping and asking some questions. Yes, sure, X would be cool. But
are there perhaps subtle reasons why X has not happened yet? As with jetpacks
and 3D video, sometimes cool things are impractical or don't pay off as much
as you'd first think.

~~~
smolder
Subtle reasons why P2P technologies are squashed likely include the difficulty
of subversion by authorities and the threat that private communications
represent to the copyright lobby.

------
frabcus
I think the main thing that this misses is the potential benefit of an open
protocol.

We still don't have a standard open equivalent of Dropbox.js (deprecated).

That is, a user controlled account which a browser or phone knows about that
can store files, and that _every app that needs to store files can read and
write to_.

Proprietary solutions and B2B solutions will never meet that need - it needs
to be something that _all_ the big tech companies can get behind, and which
consumers have visibility and control of.

I can't see a route to such a protocol right now, in terms of either
technology or finance, other than something open source and based on a
cryptocurrency. As such, I hope one of them succeeds.

Even if all the files end up stored in Amazon, at least the protocol will be
open and everything will be encrypted. And you will be able to trivially as a
consumer store the data on a competitor (Microsoft, Google, Baidu), or on your
own server if you want or need (countries and companies and people at risk of
human rights violations may care).

~~~
frabcus
To show this is possible:

Note how ubiquitous git is now as such a filesystem and protocol for
developers.

Remember how that has come about over the last 10 years.

Imagine the same thing happening with a consumer targetted file storage system
and protocol.

~~~
ksk
git is popular because of many external factors, some of which (github gitlab,
etc) are centralized closed systems. I don't think git by itself would have
become popular. I'd say that in today's world, you need someone somewhere
making mad cash for a protocol to become that popular. Could an open storage
protocol achieve that?

------
bhouston
> But that's not the worst of it. Suppose P2 storage became profitable and
> started to take business from S3. Amazon's slow AI has an obvious response,
> it can run P2 peers for itself on the same infrastructure as it runs S3.
> With its vast economies of scale and extremely low cost of capital, P2-on-S3
> would easily capture the bulk of the P2 market. It isn't just that, if
> successful, the P2 network would become centralized, it is that it would
> become centralized at Amazon!

That is exactly what I said about a year ago, although I predicted
centralization on BackBlaze instead of S3 because they had lower costs:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14988800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14988800)

------
anonytrary
Expensive? On the contrary, Facebook appears to have _made_ money with these
four words -- time and again.

~~~
taneq
Depends on the amount of optimism expressed by the phrase. As the saying goes,
"no-one ever went broke overestimating human stupidity."

------
csomar
No P2P storage networks have succeeded? What about torrents? It is a huge
market.

~~~
jasode
_> No P2P storage networks have succeeded? What about torrents?_

You have to look at the specific context his essay is about.

Torrents are popular for data that _many_ participants desire such as _"
StarWars_1080p.mp4"_ and _" LadyGaga_album.mp3"_.

Torrents do not work for a 500GB encrypted backup of _"
JohnDoe_personal_vacation_photos_20180621.zip"_. There's no financial
incentive for others to download and store it so the number of seeeds/peers
will be 0.

His essay is _not_ about a p2p version of Netflix or Spotify (e.g. bittorrent
or Napster). He's talking about a p2p version of "cloud storage" such as
BackBlaze/AmazonS3/DropBox for storing data that may only be important to that
user. That's why he's dissecting Filecoin and its economics.

------
toxicFork
There are a number of assumptions being made about "P2", for example:

> a peer stores a single copy

Why? You can have multiple peers store your data and I can argue that this
will be even more competitive in price.

> they need to implement their own erasure coding to compensate for the lack
> of redundancy at the service.

But you can have redundancy at the service.

> P2's pricing will be volatile

This is unexplained.

~~~
akanet
These assertions are descriptions of the current set of crypto P2P storage
systems.

Peers only store one copy of your data, _per peer_. Of course, multiple peers
will store copies of your data or the system could never work, but there isn't
too much incentive for any one peer to store two copies of _your_ data.

Price volatility for these systems is already a fact, and it's unlikely that
any crypto could match AWS' historical price predictability of "monotonically
decreasing".

------
Theodores
The points made in this article remind me of how CD-ROM was adopted in the
early nineties.

Once upon a time CD-ROM was new and with Windows for Workgroups you could
share a given CD-ROM across a network. If you needed to install $SOFTWARE on
machine B you could theoretically put the CD-ROM in machine A's drive and
install from there. The person on machine A might even put the right disk in
for you.

Given that CD-ROM drives cost a reasonable amount of money at the time and
probably went at 3x speed, you would have a financial incentive to specify
machine B without the CD-ROM, same with machine C and machine D. In so doing
you could save enough money to buy machine E (or at least the monitor for it).

Nobody went down this route, in offices or in education. In education settings
there were financial incentives to save money plus tech savvy staff on hand to
make it work smoothly. There was no 'status' value in having the CD-ROM
attached.

Everyone was okay about sharing the same printer but not the same CD-ROM
drive.

You would not even need the CD-ROM as often as a printer in those days. The
publishing industry was in its infancy and you only really had install media.
Writeable media was a long way off. Surely it would have made sense to have
your MS-Office install media or 'Encarta' available to all, on the network
which was faster than the CD-ROM drives of the era?

Yet this never happened.

Instead every machine was specified with the CD-ROM. Disks were passed around
much like floppies were. Nobody network-shared their CD-ROM drives. Yet all
that was needed was a 'right click' and 'share'. The financial aspect in doing
so was not a micro-payment in some alt-coin it was proper $$$ saved from not
having to purchase another CD-ROM drive.

In time the $999 CD-ROM drives went to 4x and cost nearer $200, then they
became 52x and cost nearer $100 to eventually become the $20 things bundled
with every machine.

When writeable CD-ROMS and DVDs came along the storage space was vast compared
to HDDs of the time yet still there was no network sharing of the things,
everyone had their own disk in their own machine. Sure there were exceptions -
network machines of the time - but these were the exceptions.

For the same reasons of capitalism and human nature I suspect that file-
sharing-by-altcoin will fail. Moore's Law makes 'common sense' arguments for
file sharing in a P2P way where you rent out your disk not make sense. Layer
on top the fact that every alt-coin is a scam-coin and you know that P2P file-
coins are only for the true believers.

~~~
captain_perl
Good story. True if you had a working network, which was rare outside of
college campuses. Must have startled personal PC users!

Back then you're looking at 1 MBps in the mid 80's and $100 (IPX) - $1000 (IP
or Tokenring) per network card.

------
airbreather
I thought the four most expensive words in the English language were "will you
marry me".

~~~
bartread
Either those, or "Let's have a baby."

~~~
xemasiv
Or "I'm two months delayed"

------
filecoinp2throw
I disagree with his argument that for anyone to use P2P storage, it has to be
less expensive than S3. It's true that this will be hard to do, for all the
reasons he listed. But some amount of people will be willing to pay a premium
for P2P storage, because it can't be censored or ordered to be deleted as
easily as data stored on S3. Pirates, journalists, and activists will
appreciate this use case.

There's also another economic reason for why people would pay extra to use P2P
storage. I'm sure there's some sort of term for this, but many people have
stacks of cryptocurrencies that they can't or don't want to exchange for their
day-to-day currency. Maybe their government restricts exchanges, the funds
came from a questionable source, they have some philosophical issue with
"fiat" currency, or they're just avoiding taxes. If you need to store 50TB of
data, and have $900 in your checking account and 400 ETH in your wallet, you'd
probably choose P2P storage over S3.

~~~
s73v3r_
"It's true that this will be hard to do, for all the reasons he listed. But
some amount of people will be willing to pay a premium for P2P storage,
because it can't be censored or ordered to be deleted as easily as data stored
on S3."

Some will, but most won't.

"Pirates, journalists, and activists will appreciate this use case."

Journalists are probably the only group among those that would have the money
to spend on it.

------
xemasiv
Great post, I dig it.

But I'm fucking wondering why there isn't an option to subscribe to future
posts / your site in general.

~~~
Cthulhu_
What do you mean? There's an RSS available:
[https://blog.dshr.org/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss](https://blog.dshr.org/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss)

