For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
You forget that the blockchain is all about not trusting some middle-man/site, so you need to stock that blockchain yourself, everyone needs to stock that blockchain.
So multiply not only the cost, but also the ecological impact just buying all those drives.
And that’s only for *US" housing (I didn’t get the timeframe you used to calculate it, is it for like year 2050? Old data stays forever.).
BTW found the guy buying 0.5TB Hard drives ;-)
Yes, everyone would need a copy of the 10s-of-GB blockchain. That’s a fraction of the amount of space a single computer game would use, does that seem unreasonable/impractical to you?
And I buy used enterprise 2-3TB drives on eBay :) . I was going to use a 32GB flash drive for my example, but a 500GB HDD is the same price
Fair enough about the size.
Checked out eBay, there are some cheap 2-3Tb drives there! How does it pan out quality wise? I guess they sell them off like after 5 years of usage right?
Yeah, that’s my understanding. Tbh I don’t have a lot of experience with them yet, but I’m building an 8 disk RAID6 array and I decided to go with those used drives. 10 matching disks will be around $120, and I’ll have 2 extra drives so I can rebuild the array asap if a drive fails.
Edit: I also backup all of my important files, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the entire array fails. And a little downtime isn’t that big of a deal for my home server, unlike a commercial data center.