Is the number of hosts increasing or decreasing? I would expect a specialization progress like the bitcoin mining that small hosts can't compete against growing hosts who specialist in hosting for sia. Of course, in the case of bitcoin the gaining need of performance to mine the coins is an important factor. But also bigger hosting provider can work more efficient and provide better conditions than smaller one (and profit more).
I would expect that on the long turn only a few hosts will continue which is obviously against the sia philosophy. How is this handled or am I wrong?
The number of hosts is actually increasing dramatically. 3 months ago we were 150, and today we are 650 in the network. While one could imagine only the top50 or top100 would survive, there are reasons that will avoid centralization:
- When the overall used space grows, top hosts will run out of space or collateral (probably sooner out of collateral), giving room for other hosts
- Certain renters will prefer only hosts in their specific country or region (a US hospital that wants to be HIPPA compliant, a EU company forced to store their client's data in EU servers)
- On future updates, manual culling and pickup of hosts will be improved, so renters will choose according to their needs: some hosts with a limited bandwidth specialize with a very cheap storage price and high bandwidth costs, so they'll pick up data from renters that want cold storage solutions
So there is a mechanic that I automatically prefer the faster hosts?
In general, as each piece data is 3x reduntant, the bottleneck is actually the faster of those 3 hosts ;-). But also, in a future update they'll implement latency as a factor for choosing the host when forming a contract, so by default you'll pick up the fastest and closest hosts
