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Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 22:00:24 -0800 From: Bill Stewart Subject: Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium (fwd)

Assume the existence of a for-profit service provider. The service provider needs to cover the costs of the service,

Which in general are a flat rate. I'll try to fill in the various issues you raise with as real-world numbers as I can get.

plus enough profit to make the effort interesting. The prices charged need to reflect the costs (or be higher) or the service provider can't make money and goes out of business. So what are the costs, and who can be talked into paying for them?

Everyone who uses the system. The question is who do we want to define as 'using'. I believe the provider of information is not 'using' the system in the strictest sense but rather making an investment of their time and effort in somebodies elses business model and hoping that work will bring them profit.

1) Storage of information - Storage currently costs < $1/MB for raw disk, and getting cheaper by the minute,

Assuming your 5 year plan, a 1G drive costs $100 or less. That's roughly $20/G-yr.

but sysadmins, lawyers, etc. cost money and they're not getting cheaper as fast.

Granted, but except for the sys-admin you don't need them often. In all the years I have been in business I've needed a lawyer only a couple of times. Say $1k/lawyer-year.

The costs of the equipment for permanent storage are probably about 10-50% more than the costs for storing for 5 years;

A Cyrix P200 runs about $600 for a working box (I bought one just a few weeks ago). So that gives us about $120/cpu-year.

the costs of administration (assuming inflation is limited to some small number) can be covered by an annuity.

For reliable system administartion you're looking at 5 people (3 8-hr. shifts plus weekend coverage of 2 12 hour shifts). A sys admin with the skills and maturity to work in this environment is going to run you in the neighborhood of $40-60k/yr. So this means we're looking at, on the outside, $300k/sysadmin-yr. This is the real cost of doing business.

Every technology upgrade or two you need to copy the archives to new storage media, and data that doesn't get accessed often may get migrated out to slower or perhaps even offline media; storage contracts need to reflect that retrieving data that hasn't been accessed in a while may involve some delay.

Not shure what the normal ratio for online versus offline storage actualy is currently, say 10:1.

2) Transmission of information - Roughly proportional to MB/time -

This seems overly simplistic to me. The actual cost of the bandwidth is reasonably fixed for a given site. Also if we throw in the other servers this model becomes a bit more flexible. Remember, under the Eternity model we don't know *which* server is being hit for the request. This means we have to consider the actual end user costs in a much more complicated fashion. It's one of the issue I'm working on myself. It does not seem clear cut nor well researched at all.

unlike storage, this one's not predictable, unless the provider and author agree in advance (e.g. N free accesses per year, per password.) So the provider could charge the reader for access,

I fail to see the profit in giving away plans for man portable nukes or to turn commen cooking yeast into a THC producing horde when the various groups around the world would pay so many millions (or would that be billions) for some to get it and some to keep others from getting it. The potential for a access auction hasn't been explored as far as I am aware.

or use advertising banners to fund retrieval costs (if that remains a valid model for financing the web over the next N years, especially if the readers retrieve data through anonymizers.)

I believe advertising would be a necessity. The question is how. Would the payoff for doing a print ad in a magazine be worth it? Should it only be advertised on the net?

3) Legal defense - This one's harder to predict :-)

If the Eternity model works the question becomes which one and where are they located? Whose legal defense? Which jurisdiction? Put up an offer for 1 weeks notice of any pending legal actions against the network and make it worth the while. Say $500M. It would of course be fully anonymous and the information would have to be testable prior to payout. Leaves two option. First, the data is verified and the source is paid. Second, the server goes down and the source isn't paid - thus ruining the reputation of a server. It isn't clear to me what the total impact would be on the network as a whole. One way to mediate this impact on a given server would be to share the cost of the payout between the various servers. It is after all in all the servers best interest to keep as many going unharrassed and as well prepared and for-warned as possible.

The current US climate is that service providers are relatively immune as long as they cooperate with subpoenas and court orders,

True, but the current model doesn't allow anonymous providers as the norm either. The users may be anonymous but the ISP isn't.

If they want their names known, they can include them in the contents of the data that readers retrieve, independent of what the server does.

Then there is no reason to use an anonymous network, simply put the data on their own webpage and sell it direct, cut out the middle-man a tried and true business tactic.

and accumulate reputation capital under those nyms.

One of the assumptions is that the source, individual server, and sink are all anonymous to each other as well as Mallet. Now we're changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game. Apples and oranges. If I were actualy going to impliment something like this I wouldn't even consider it unless I had at least $500k worth of funding for each of the first 5 years. That start up cost, $2.5M, is what is going to kill it. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage@ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|