Guns are now the leading cause of death for people under the age of 24 in the US (and have been for several years). Yes, they exceed motor vehicle deaths.
I do think Filecoin is closer to cloud storage than 'free hard drive space'. The hardware requirements for miners (storage providers) are pretty significant and pretty much guarantee that miners are running dedicated hardware. While I'm sure some storage providers operate out of data centers, I don't think a server needs to be located in a data center to be called cloud storage.
This. The comparisons to S3 are specious. Filecoin is doing some interesting things such as their proof of storage and collateralized contracts, but there are significant differences between S3 and Filecoin:
- Filecoin is 'cold storage' similar to AWS Glacier. Retrieval times can be really long and certainly aren't web time.
- Redundancy is left up to the user (or the user's client). Sure, you can store your files with multiple providers, but good luck determining the reliability of your hand-rolled storage logic.
- Retrieval prices are known up front with S3 and other cloud providers. Given that retrieval prices aren't part of storage contracts, costs of retrieval can vary widely (and change). A user's only defense against usurious retrieval pricing is to store with multiple providers.
- Bandwidth available to users is largely unknown and likely pretty variable
- Miners serve a 'dumb box interface' that will serve anyone any data that they are holding.
In the end, users are still writing contracts with individual storage providers, each of which has their own degree of experience, expertise and proven service history.
Obviously, the Filecoin community is working on improving many of these, but costs will certainly change as Filecoin evolves closer in functionality to s3 and other cloud providers.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/05/25/guns-are...