Are Web3 social networks even plausible?
Alright, put in your retainer, whip out your TI-81 - it's time to get nerdy and run some numbers.
The co-founder of Animoca Brands (creators of Sandbox), Yat Sui, has called for more developers to enter Web3, saying:
“The fact that I don’t have an alternative to Facebook is the reason why Facebook is a monopoly.
But if it was on a blockchain, I could transmit data freely, there could become [different] Facebooks."
A decentralized social network? Sign us up!
...but Zuck's social networks are free platforms that collect and store 4 petabytes of user data per day (that's 4 million GB!).
That seems like a pretty big bottleneck.
...if it were up to us as users to store our data:
How much would it cost per year?
Where would we even store it?
How secure would it be?
Righto, let's ready the backs of our napkins and run the math on costs.
Meta (formerly Facebook) has 3.65B total users, creating 4 petabytes per day, which means the average user is generating about .001GB of data per day, or ~0.4GB per year.
0.4GB of data stored per year? That ain't bad.
Hell, both iCloud & Amazon AWS gives you 5GB of storage for free - that's 12.5 years of storage right there.
But they're centralized, so no dice...moving on.
When we Googled 'cheapest decentralized Web3 file storage,' the first result was Web3.storage, who charge - wait for it - zero dollars for up to 1TB.
Ok...wow. That's awesome. So, price problem solved?
What about security?
Web.storage runs using Filecoin, which doesn't encrypt data by default, instead it fragments your data. Think of it like this:
If you upload a photo to Filecoin, it'll break the file up into a bunch of different pieces and upload them all separately to a range of different independently owned computers around the world.
(And only you have the 'virtual treasure map' that acts as key to finding and reforming the file).
Which means, if one of the host computers gets sly and tries to read your data - it won't work.
So, decentralized data storage is available, affordable and secure?
Wait...is a decentralized social network genuinely plausible??
Holy hell!
Where the devs at?
