OK what you will read below might sound insane but I am obliged to ask. There are 275 petabytes of NIH data at risk of being deleted. Cancer research, medical data, HIPAA type stuff. Currently unclear where it's located, how it's managed, who has access to what, but lets ignore that for now. It's presumably splattered across data centers, cloud, AWS, supercomputing labs, who knows. Everywhere. I'm talking to a biomed person in Australias that uses NCBI data daily, she's in talks w/ Australian govt to copy and preserve the datasets they use. Some multi-petabytes of stuff. I don't know. While bouncing around tech ideas, IPFS and Ceph came up. My experience with IPFS is that it's not a serious contender for anything. My experience with Ceph is that it's more-or-less A-list. OK. So here's the question: is it possible to (has anyone tried) set up an internet-wide Ceph cluster? Ticking off the typical checkboxes for "decentralized storage"? Stuff, like: internet connections need to be encrypted. Connections go down, come back up. Slow. Sure, national labs may have multi-terabit fiber, but little itty-bitty participants trying to contribute a small collection of disks to a large pool might only have a gigabit connection, of which maybe 10% is "usable". Barely. So, a hostile networking environment. Is this like, totally insane, run away now, can't do that, it won't work idea, or is there some glimmer of hope? Am I misunderstanding something about IPFS that merits taking a second look at it? Is there any other way of getting scalable reliable "decentralized" internet-wide storage? I mean, yes, of course, the conventional answer is that it could be copied to AWS or some national lab or two somewhere in the EU or Aus or UK or where-ever, That's the "obvious" answer. I'm looking for a non-obvious answer, an IPFS-like thing, but one that actually works. Could it work? -- Linas -- Patrick: Are they laughing at us? Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.