Storj, Maidsafe, Sia, and Permacoin
(and any other decentralized file system that pays to store a file instead of only paying to serve the file) are all
provably scams.
He seems to be saying (among many other criticisms) that the economics of decentralised cloud storage systems can't work, and storage providers will end up using dedicated servers and smaller opertions will get shut down by their ISP's. He's a wacky guy, but not a light weight thinker. Does he have a point?
No, he doesn't have a point, because he made no point.
I am not a Sia dev but it is hard to take his comments seriously. He makes some hand-waving claims that Sia is prone to Sybil attacks, without proper analysis of how. He then
concludes that Sia is therefore a
provable scam, which demonstrates that he is incapable of logical deduction. For me, taking anything else in his post serious is therefore an impossibility.
In order to make these claims, you need some demonstrable proof of your assertions. I am not saying a Sybil attack can't be done, but I disagree with simply taking it for granted.
He moves on to some legal justifications for why Sia will be limited to ISP user clients which are simply not true. There is no reason why a commercial entity could not provide storage on the Sia network, even if they host illegal content, as long as they take steps to remove illegal content and block nefarious users. Dropbox does it. Google does it. Why can't Sia storage providers? Just because there is no central authority, that does not mean there can't be policing and enforcement of the rule of law.
TPTB is a known conspiracy theorist, but I'm still not convinced he isn't raising an important issue here, not just for Sia, but for all P2P decentralised economic activity that *might* take place over the internet in the new knowledge age economy. His points about the differentiated treatment of upload vs download capacity, and net neutrality, and how they both effect the economics of ISP's, and therefore the governments ability to 'tax' the middle man in the knowledge economy sort of makes sense to me, but I can't grasp the full picture in my mind yet.
I like Sia coz it offers the chance to run a small independent business without any intermediaries in between, but if a large chunk of the knowledge economy follows this pattern, then people can avoid taxes easily, and ISP's will want a cut of the profits (similar to how some ISP's argue for a cut of Netflix $$), so wont there be a 'reaction' from both (ISP's & gov)? I can see they would both want to differentiate between commercial & non-commercial internet traffic eventually.