Thanks for the overview. Excited to see how this develops.
Two questions:
- It operates with fewer nodes (smaller replication factor) than other subnet types.
With fewer nodes, a subnet may struggle to serve queries with high throughput and low latency. Storage subnets will conceivably store large assets like >1 GB video files. Serving 1 GB may require up to 500 queries (500 queries * 2 MB per query request = 1GB). It’s already at least 3x slower serving images from IC versus conventional CDNs. I worry that reducing the # of nodes may make this worse.
At 5 USD / GiB / year, the Internet Computer today already has very competitive fees for storage. This feature will allow the IC to offer storage to dapps at even lower costs (albeit with potentially different semantics and guarantees).
This is a great opportunity to understand how “prices” in IC are set. This is something that’s been bugging me for a while. Right now, storages costs ~5 USD / GB / year on the IC. How were the cycle costs determined? Couldn’t we all vote to lower that to, say, 2 USD if we wanted? What economic considerations are important when setting “prices”? A higher price means more cycles (and ICP) will be burned. What is the right deflation rate to target for a healthy ecosystem? Is it OK to accept more inflation in the short term (e.g. lower storage costs) in order to attract developers? I have so many questions.
In a cloud like AWS, the price is set based on ordinary business metrics like SKU unit economics, margin, revenue, etc… How should prices be set on the IC?