The network uses Reed Solomon erasure coding to prevent against failures. You can pick your own redundancy scheme, but the default is 10-of-30 today. (3x overhead).
> Does the system allow those specific encrypted blocks to be removed
Hosts have the ability to remove specific blocks if law enforcement informs them that they are storing illegal material. The host must make the choice to remove it though, you can't just choose to take down data.
> How do you protect against correlated failures - i.e. does separate hosts rule out the same person operating multiple servers? Any geographic requirements so the same power outage, hurricane, etc. doesn't take out multiple copies?
A combination of proof of burn and ip address lookups help us guarantee diversity.
Oh wow, I misunderstood that completely. Very cool. Will this be a user configurable setting when uploading in the future?
Would it also be possible to calculate a sort of "odds of safety" using historical transactions of the whole network? If so, please consider implementing some sort of slider in the GUI between "cheap", offering whatever the failure rate of a single host may be to "safe", offering the failure rate of as many hosts as needed to match the guarantees of most cloud storage providers today.
> There's nothing illegal about price discrimination, it's a common buisiness practice and something companies strive for
We weren't talking about price discrimination, however, but anti-competitive practices which are illegal in many places. If AWS advertises storage for $0.02/GB/mo but tries to charge Netflix $0.05 or refuse service, they're going to hear from a state AG.