i dont understand how the redundancy works. ok so say I upload 1TB worth of stuff. and i wanted it stored for 1+year... how much would that cost? and lets say I wanted to store it indefinitely and just pay a one time fee, wouldn't that just really bloat the blockchain and if i dont constantly pay it would get deleted. i dont see how these systems work if you stop paying all of a sudden or stop hosting other people's data.
either you keep paying or keep hosting on the network, or else you get your stuff deleted. i dont see how that is decentralized. as your data is still at the whims of your contribution to the system, making it centralized. the only thing is that your really just paying for redundancy.
what is a platform or system that stores data indefinitely? once you upload it, it can NEVER be deleted.
Bitcoin is a platform that stores data indefinitely. But it's a very expensive platform. And even then, there's not a strong guarnatee that some form of pruning won't be implemented in the future.
On Sia, once you stop paying for data, it gets deleted. That doesn't make it a centralized platform though, I don't think you have a good understanding of what it means to be decentralized.
Decentralization means reducing the amount of control that any single individual or set of parties have over something. Decentralization is a gradient. For example, democracy is more decentralized than dictatorship, though I don't think anyone would really consider the US to be a decentralized government. The power is still all centralized at the top, it's just spread over a few hundred elite individuals instead of resting completely with one individual.
Sia decentralizes cloud storage by increasing the number of hosting providers in use at any time, and by facilitating algorithmic contracts that will be enforced by a decentralized ledger instead of audited and confirmed/denied by a party like Paypal. When you make a contract with a host and put it on the blockchain, that host is on the hook for the data that you've given them according to the contract that got created. No other party can manipulate the contract. This is in stark contrast to traditional cloud storage infrastructure, where there multiple points at which a single centralized party can interrupt the transaction. Further, by splitting your data into dozens/hundreds of pieces and giving each piece to a separate host, you ensure that you are very far from a single point of failure. Decentralization is increased even further by the fact that you get to pick which hosts you are contracting with, and you can avoid any bad/centralized/etc. hosts. There is no question that Sia is
substantially more decentralized than any working platform available today.