This is a good point. An idea that has been discussed is to have subnets where not all nodes participate in consensus and only serve queries. Such subnets would be ideally positioned to serve query heavy workloads.
Yeah, I was thinking of something similar, but even more generally. What if anyone could host a query node?
Kinda like anyone can run an Ethereum node but not necessarily participate in mining / validating new blocks. But it’s even easier in IC because you don’t need to download the entire 400 GB blockchain like you do in ETH; you just need to download a catch-up package from the subnet you’re running the query node for.
There are applications that benefit from large storage but do not necessarily need a lot of query capacity (e.g. backups). However, if the primary usecase is of serving queries, then such subnets may indeed not be ideal.
Exactly. S3 and GCS have different storage classes for different cost + latency requirements.
What prices to charge for something as you can imagine is a very complicated subject indeed. The ideal price should be where the supply and demand curves meet.
This is something I’ve been thinking about. Why is the price for 1 GB / year storage ~$5 on the IC but ~$840,000,000 on Solana? Is it really because the curves for the supply for storage and the demand for storage intersect at a point much lower on the IC than on SOL? The economics are hard to wrap my head around, since there’s not a conventional supply curve here. Node providers supply storage but also supply compute, and are compensated with monthly rewards based on SLA instead of on a per-unit basis. I’d be curious about the decision rationale of the current cycle costs.