> More efficient that what exactly? It's still far less efficient than not having to hash and run erasure coding...

Large storage systems already do this. RAID is a type of erasure coding. Various enterprise storage systems use hashing for data integrity.

Distributing the data over a larger number of systems can actually be more efficient because the percentage of erasure blocks you need goes down as the number of independent devices increases. For example, if you only have two devices and want redundancy, you need a mirror and lose 50% of your capacity. If you spread the data across 200 devices you might achieve an even higher level of resilience by sacrificing only 25% of capacity so you can lose any 50 devices without data loss. You may get this down even further by periodically checking if a device is still available and replacing it, so the number of devices you can lose can be as low as the maximum number of devices you expect to lose simultaneously.

> That only works if the attacker cannot make big gains from a single cheat after a period of building reputation. There's a reason why this isn't being used in the wild by blockchains...

Blockchains are a different thing.

If you have a GPU and to start out with everything you produce is checked, you get 50% of what the customer pays. If you have a good reputation then only e.g. 1 in 10 of your output is checked, so you get ~90% of what the customer pays, but to do that you have to accept 50% for e.g. 100 transactions.

You can now defect, but you have a 10% chance of being detected each time, so you can expect to only get to do it 10 times. So you get a 90% payment ten times without doing work, then have to go back to getting a 50% payment 100 times. 10 times 90% is way less than 100 times 40%, so if you do this you lose money.

> Yes, it costs too much to operate, and it's too cheap as a product so operators are losing money.

Do you know what the overhead of the network actually is? Trying to put it together from multiple sources seems to imply that miners get paid ~$8/TB/year but storage costs ~$2/TB/year. Which I assume I'm doing wrong somehow, because it would imply negative overhead and therefore a huge arbitrage opportunity.

I'm guessing the real number is less than 50% overhead, because there are obvious ways to do it at least that efficiently, but even that isn't huge when you can avoid expenses for marketing and customer support. Which implies that the problem is this:

> The only reason why there's an offering at all is that some people invested lots of money on hardware in 2021 when the token price was 50 times higher (but then the storage cost was prohibitive).

Which is a self-solving problem. The unprofitable providers go out of business until the price makes it profitable. But that seems like it should happen quicker than this if the profitability isn't there, because storage is fungible. Even if you bought a bunch of drives to do this when the price was higher, you could sell them and go put the money in a traditional investment. Or if you're speculating on the value of Filecoin going up, sell your storage and use the money to buy Filecoin. So the people still doing it are presumably turning a profit even at current prices, whether through economies of scale or because they had "free" storage to use.

> Barely anyone using it despite a price so low that it doesn't even allow operators to break even, how is that supposed to be a success?

It causes very inexpensive storage to be available, which is useful.