I did the full math today:
Even with very pessimistic assumptions, VPN’s / data centers / proxies are quite innocent actually. These assumptions:
- I assumed an equal online- and loss-chance between VDI-nodes and regular nodes.
- I assumed every VDI node was a singular node in /24-subnet (which isn’t probably not true).
- I assumed loss of pieces and offline state to be independent (which is probably not true, because malfunctioning nodes are both more likely to lose data and to be offline).
- For simplicity, I assumed that if multiple pieces ended up at the same VDI-SNO, only one piece was functional / available.
I had to assume very pessimistic, to even see a significant drop in availability: like <80% online-time, >20% chance of loss of a piece at any time.
Actually quite surprising to see how resilient this protocol actually is. Perhaps even the reason, who Storj actually doesn’t care this problem that much.