Market Research on market size and growth

If we take that Arweave’s pricing has fluctuated between $60/GB (How much does arweave cost? / Tom MacWright / Observable) and $5/GB (The Decentralized Storage War: Filecoin vs. Arweave | Alexandria) to store “forever”.

And considering all of the other benefits that Safe N would offer over Arweave (e.g., convenience, communications, speed, etc.) I would guess that storage on Safe would end up costing somewhere in that range. Let’s say that there’s no additional increase in WTP from those additional benefits and go with the low end of $5/GB.

There’s argument to support the pricing being less than $5/GB since the convenient farming would allow a much larger number of farmers and idle resources being put to use.

But there’s also argument to support that the pricing would be greater than $5/GB as bandwidth becomes the limiting resource. Note that after their initial entry into the market and using VC money to subsidize the cost of their products, AirBnB and Uber, despite freeing up idle resources, end up costing about the same as hotels and cabs respectively. So Safe N storage might be cheap initially but end up costing more as subsidies run out and its popularity rises.

Another way I like to think about the eventual price of storage on Safe N is 10 to 30 times the cost of S3 per month, i.e., $3 to $8 per GB, which also around the $5/GB thesis above.

1 Like

This is news to me. What price are they going to set it to?

Do you think we will have a lower upload rate than Filecoin?

The price remaining ‘so low’ would suggest lots of people would want to upload data, right?

Either. Both.

Asking ‘will safe node operators run a loss / profit / breakeven’ is a different question than ‘what will be the cost ratio with S3’.

I wonder if when Safe will become another multicloud option? That could be an easy way to get people to get started with very low risk because they have redundancy from the other clouds.

I guess the other way for filecoin providers to break even is if the filecoin price has been speculated very high, so it’s not related to their vs amazon costs, it’s related to their vs amazon income. I feel like eventually filecoin costs:income will converge towards amazon levels, but for now I’d guess viability is probably not a costs thing, probably more of an income thing. @Dimitar seems to agree: “the rest of the pay will come from inflation”.

Yeah, this would probably indicate filecoin storage costs are currently low because of too much income rather than very low operating costs. Oversupply would only happen if suppliers were being paid too much income.

Certainly initially. Filecoin had a lot of publicity, while very few people know about Safe. But if there are enough brave people in the community to place ads on social networks and if we organize free distribution of storage, we can change that. :dragon:

Cheap price for storing means that the token will be expensive. People keep expensive money (gold, bitcoin) and spend cheap ones (fiat). I continue to speculate that in the first stage of life span the Safe Network will be used mainly as money because:

  • people have free storage at the moment (unfortunately it is free because people are the product that is sold to advertisers);
  • there is not enough good money in the world (Fiat does not work to storing value, gold is better than Fiat, but it is only for the rich, bitcoin is better than gold, but again it is only for the rich - safecoin will be the first currency to be for the poor)
2 Likes

Maybe not a great metric but it was the best I could find:

Filecoin forum 816 users
Safecoin forum 6500 users

Maybe this stat:

Filecoin total addresses: ? (maybe use total deals?: 1,264,121)
Maidsafecoin total addresses: 17,190

I agree that filecoin has a lot of publicity but would be interested in how to quantify the difference. None of the numbers I have found seem to show very few people knowing about Safe relative to filecoin. But I agree with you intuitively, so I’m not sure where the revealing data would be.

4 Likes

By my (very very very) rough estimates the value of the resource circa 2020 is :

$80 per Mbps-year for bandwidth.
$100 per Terabyte-year for storage (for a 10x min chunk redundancy)

Presuming the store-forever storage cost is (again very) roughly 4x present storage cost gives you a value of $0.0005 per 1MB chunk delivered by a GET. That is what farmers need to earn to break even. So I guess you could call that $0.50 per GB stored (forever).

Clearly the logic is off somewhere considering how low the filecoin price is by comparison. :thinking:

4 Likes

Pretty incredible stats on cloud storage historical pricing

2006: ~$0.15
2016: ~$0.015

10x cheaper over 10 years.

4 Likes

Factor general inflation into the picture and the real cost is even less.

2 Likes

10x cheaper over 10 years is an annual reduction of about 20%
(1-0.2)10 = 0.107

Or in monthly terms is about a monthly reduction of 1.85%
(1-0.0185)12*10 = 0.106

Accumulating the costs over time (including reductions) eventually approaches 5x the original annual cost, so about 60x the original monthly cost.

9 Likes

Maybe the logic above is fine. I forgot that the filecoin erasure code is 5x more space efficient than 10x replication.

Factor in loss of purchasing power due to inflation and the real cost (roughly) approaches 4x. :yum: Joking aside, Good to see additional confirmation that forever storage cost is no more than 5x year one cost.

4 Likes

Add to this:

Filecoin has 39.9K Twitter followers
MaidSafe (which barely posts) has 51.6K

More people know about MaidSafe than one would think. At this time, the issue is less about awareness and more about belief in MaidSafe’s ability to deliver a working product.

On principle, I agree with you, but corporate inertia is a terribly difficult thing to overcome, even when there’s an obviously sound strategic choice.

9 Likes

Interesting and obvious when you say it like that… the long term saving, tempts those interested in long term data storage… more than where data turns over quickly. Static data applications then likely more inclined but offset perhaps with a need to be confident in stability. All bodes well for a balanced takeoff over time… but unclear how the number of coin play into that.

1 Like

I don’t know how Filecoin works. if price based on supply and demand? Right now they have an enormous capacity with peta bytes on peta bytes of supply and probably low demand on storage. It would make sense if the price is well below brake even. but do not know if mining rewards offset the low store price but that would mean an unsustainable long term model unless endless printing of coins or future demand improves.

When did some research on IPFS a few years ago the conclusion from listening to others where that it was bad code, speed to finish over quality. Basically that the code was trash, full of security vaulnerabilities and need full re-write. A teacher told me once that shit input equal shit output, because of that I have not bothered about Filecoin or IPFS.

And when you reported of what hardware was necessary to run a node it just confirmed for me previous conclusions, shit code, shit input equal shit output / results, speed to finish over quality.

Disclaimer my knowledge about code and technology is limited but probably above average.

2 Likes

Thanks for making the depreciation explicit. I was implying that with Arweave’s pricing on the assumption that, knowing the group that funded them, they likely took into account the cost of storage over the useful life and reverse amortized it in setting their price range.

There’s a mistake in my $3 - $8 estimate above. Reading this post too quickly, I took 0.276/GB to be per month. But it is per year.

Let’s go to the source:
S3 standard at 50TB costs $0.023/GB/month
S3 Glacier cost $0.004/GB/month
Assuming that storage on Safe would be a mixture of these types of storage, let’s average these them, which yields $0.0135/GB/month or $0.162/GB/year (a more thorough approach might average all the s3 pricing tiers).

Hence:
Lifetime cost = 10x - 30x monthly cost => $0.135 - $0.405/GB. A far cry from $3 - $8 borne of the $0.276/GB/month error.

Lifetime cost = 60x monthly cost per your depreciation calculation => $0.81/GB.

6 Likes

I suspect they need that hardware to manage the erasure coding and get the high space efficiency.

2 Likes

It might be so but if they are not, full path real time raytracing the Transformers movie, it is too much. :slightly_smiling_face: :wink:

Did you find how to use it, upload files and such? Was thinking about trying out IPFS and compare it with Microsoft, Amazon cloud or similar. Thinking about backup a few gigs of important data and comparing the services and just for privacy throw them in an encrypted folder, because they are backups so don’t need them unless a solar flare or similar happens. :slightly_smiling_face:

Went visiting the IPFS page, it was easy to find how to download software to become a miner but it was not obvious how to download and such if you wanted to use the service.

1 Like

This might be helpful to you:

https://twitter.com/bchaininstitute/status/1325814916062846977?s=21

3 Likes

PS: we’re forgetting about Egress charges, which would add to the estimated costs.

2 Likes

Filecoin outline why this hardware is needed in Specific Operation Requirements

Each of CPU / GPU / RAM / Storage plays a part at various stages of mining but never all parts needed at once.

It’s not about erasure coding.

No, but only for lack of motivation. If other people have to pay to download what I’ve uploaded then I’m not interested since I can’t easily share my content with people.

6 Likes

I normally check https://filstats.com/ a couple of times a day to see how they’re tracking. Usually filecoin storage is between 5-20x cheaper than S3 and about 1000-5000 GB uploaded in the last 2.5K deals.

Just now I’ve seen that filecoin is more expensive than S3 for the first time - 1.79x costlier. This is also clearly reflected in only 17.501 GB uploaded in the last 2.5K deals. That’s a massive drop in uploading.

The strange part is FIL is currently valued at about $28, not much different to the last few weeks. So why is storage suddenly so expensive?

As an aside, network storage is currently at 994 PB, pretty huge.

12 Likes