Uploading files to Skynet is free, but without a user account, most portals will store your files for a minimum of 3 months.
Storage expenses are paid by Skynet Portals, which use a cryptocurrency called Siacoin on the Sia network.
Portal operating costs are paid by operators, but we encourage users to support portal operators, developers, and content creators by signing up for a user account.
Like many crypto currencies the current operation is heavily funded by subsidy from minted coins.
As someone who used to run a Skynet portal and no longer does because it was costing me too much money: no, it's not funded by subsidy from minted coins.
Right now portals pay for the hosting of the files as a charitable service to the community. In the future, portals will charge users directly for extra features (with U.S. dollars!)
Some portals may be operating less out of charity, and more out of a desire to build mindshare about their portal in hopes of translating that mindshare into future revenue via subscriptions.
Even the main skynet portal doesn't run off a mint subsidy - it's funded by VC money instead :)
No problem on running a portal! It was fun to be part of it for a while. I may run one again in the future once it's a bit more sustainable.
I'm still interested in the project - I think we still haven't scratched the surface of what something like Skynet is capable of. That said, I'm a little less optimistic than others. I think it's going to be a long road to relevance.
"Skin in the game" is a working solution to combatting abuse/spam in decentralised systems. Due to regulation, it's not possible to build such solutions without crypto.
In the long run, it's always going to be higher than what companies dealing with storage services. First, because of effects of scale, second, because of the overhead of dealing with the crypto layer / extra network costs.
Possible but doubtful. Check market price history - the overheads of dealing with crypto are historically tiny compared to the profits of being forced to hold any.
I don't think you can run a service like Skynet without a crypto backend. It does a _lot_ more than something like IPFS. It can keep files online without needing the original uploader or any user to actively seed them (uses a storage marketplace instead), among other significant features.
SkyTransfer has the benefit of being "infrastruture-less". Rather than needing someone (the developer or someone else) to run a server, it can sit on top of the same Skynet infrasturcture that runs everything else.
SkyTransfer was built in the absence of any devops. No costs to the developer, no servers that need to be run by the developer, and users can perpetuate the service after the developer leaves without having to do any devops themselves.
SkyTransfer also gets to leverage the identity and authentication infrastructure of the Skynet ecosystem. Building an equivalent service off of Skynet would probably take 5-10x as many developer hours.
The gateway operator/uploader still have to pay for the service and data. Node operators take their fee for the devops and maintenance. Even if the cost is spread thin, it's still there.
I'm not sure why you think building it off Skynet would be much harder. It's basically a web form going to an encryption function to upload to link generator (and a download path handler). On the backend you either buy local storage or pay for an external service which supports pre-signed S3-style uploads. Neither sounds like a lot of work.
The key thing here is that the operator/uploader is different from the app developer. As an app developer, you don't need to build or operate any backend at all, and you have no costs.
Buying local storage and paying for an external service both cost money, and the costs scale as your app gets more users. There's also maintenance overhead, you can't just deploy your app and completely forget those things exist. As a Skynet dev, you have no bills, no maintenance overhead, and it's truly a deploy-and-forget sort of thing. As the dev, you don't need any sort of Skynet account or signup.
My question is: Who is paying for it?