I thought that it is already drastically cheaper than centralized solutions right now.
From the Sia website:
Far More Affordable
On average, Sia's decentralized cloud storage costs 90% less than
incumbent cloud storage providers. Storing 1TB of files on Sia costs about $2 per month,
compared with $23 on Amazon S3.
Yes, I have investigated a bit some months ago, and it was really very cheap. However, this was also partly due to low usage (only about 1% or less of the capacity were used). We know that with high supply and poor demand prices stay low. But also if that changes and demand picks up, Sia should stay much cheaper - because it's using unused space and everybody that's online 24/7 can participate.
Coming up with useful
applications for smart contracts is incredibly hard in any case (even though all
the companies in the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance seem to disagree with me for now).
Exactly. Maybe we can find some more use cases here, I think that's what Gyrsur wanted. Until now we have seen (apart from financial
dapps):
- Storage management
- Proof of computation
- maybe Proof of connection
I remember when Ethereum folks were all talking about a "decentralized Uber" with autonomous cars. That has exactly the same problems like the decentralized AirBNB I mentioned - nobody could know if a car is real or simply a number some hacker copied there, and otherwise we need oracles and a centralized surveillance system.