Re: Solution to Sia/Storj/etc DDOS issues and Sybil Vulnerability
...but proper erasure encoding can make it many orders of magnitude more resistant.
Even on disk failure, some sectors can often be recovered with forensics. But then you need the storage providers' reputation at risk, so they have the economic incentive to pay for that forensics. Again it seems the Sybil attack is the problem, because they can blame the failure on a disposable Sybil.
If in attacker has to store 10% of the entire network, but only has a 1.67e-11 chance of affecting a file I'd say thatis good enough. Worst case you can start adding economic incentives and disincentives. Look up the attackers funds/earnings on the blockchain for 3 months. "Oops lost your file out of 1 trillion. Here is $10k taken from the attacker."
My original criticism was that what have we accomplished that I couldn't just buy at Google's cloud.
Because a P2P network can outperform Google's cloud at half the cost. If someone offered you a new car that goes 4x faster at half the cost, would you still want to stick with your own car?
How do you calculate that? Google can locate its servers next to hydropower and pay 4 cents per KWH. They have the economy-of-scale to buy hardware cheaper and build the infrastructure for data centers. They can locate on the faster Tier 1 backbone Internet.
How can the average individual provide storage that competes
Seems to me you will just build a system that Google can Sybil attack and provide all the storage for, increasing their profits and economies-of-scale.
The only possible way I can see to prevent this, is to never pay for storage, rather only swap storage for storage. In other words, if I store 500 GB from the network, then I can also store 500 GB on the network. But then the problem is the economics of accessing it the data. Isn't this similar to what MaidSafe is doing? But then how did they corrupt that with a token to raise ICO (no use for a token if P2P trading storage)?
To deal with the economics of access, I think the data one stores for the network would need to have the same access rate pattern as the data one stores on the network. The network needs to institute this policy.