On a different note, there's an interesting
discussion over on Maidsafe.org about the economics of a coin that's linked to the value of storage. In a (badly butchered I'm sure) nutshell, the cost of storage has decreased by about 30% a year -- how does that effect the value of the coin? (Now that I tracked down the link, the OP has added an edit stating he thinks the value will rise, but it's an interesting discussion in any case.)
Here is an interest, if slightly old (2012) article which may allay an fears over this issue:
http://blog.dshr.org/2012/10/storage-will-be-lot-less-free-than-it.htmlSome of the main takeaway points:
"
- According to IDC, the demand for storage each year grows about 60%.
- According to IHS iSuppli, the bit density on the platters of disk drives will grow no more than 20%/year for the next 5 years.
- According to computereconomics.com, IT budgets in recent years have grown between 0%/year and 2%/year.
"
So basically, whilst the cost of a given unit of storage is going down, the total cost of storage is going up. Therefore:
"10 years from now, storing all the accumulated data would cost over 20 times as much as it does this year. If storage is 5% of your IT budget this year, in 10 years it will be more than 100% of your budget. "