First of all: thanks for the work & the top-notch uptime! 🙏 I think many people are not aware of how important an efficient & highly responsive image-server cluster actually is. Spoiler: it's critical.
Now, I've got two questions:
$50K in labor
I'm not really a dev-ops guy, so for me to better understand this number: could you please give a more detailed overview of this number? How many hours by how many devs?
$10.5K in new computer equipment purchases
What would happen to these if, for whatever reasons, you drop support/development for Hive in the near future? It's prob. more cost-effective to buy & host those yourself, but it creates the problem, where it takes a certain amount of time until that threshold is reached, in comparison to just renting those resources. And even if it's reached: since it's paid via DHF, it should always be able to be used for Hive. (open-source vs closed-source)
I don't plan to provide hourly breakdowns of work done and cost/worker that BlockTrades does because it is too sensitive to publish publicly (BlockTrades does a lot of contract work and contract work represents a substantial portion of our income).
But I can say that the hourly rate we're requesting for this task is much higher than will be typical for our hive-related work, as a large portion of the work was done by our most experienced and expensive personnel.
In an ideal world, we could have waited till someone cheaper was available to do the work, but this work was done under a couple of constraints: 1) we needed the initial setup done extremely quickly because of the Hive HF deadline and 2) we needed someone with direct access to our primary data center.
At this point, some of the work can be passed off to lower-cost personnel (and some is), but I don't plan to drop the main architect of the existing design entirely from the task, not only because he knows the system well, but also because he's extremely talented and has a lot of good ideas for how to improve the system.
It should be noted that we didn't really "want" to do this task. I was actually hoping someone else would take it on as part of the initial hardfork work, but no one else seemed interested, and it was a critical piece that had to be done and done correctly (e.g. to avoid potential loss of images from old posts).
I plan to ultimately get us to a more decentralized solution where multiple Hive enthusiasts are hosting portions of the data in some redundant fashion. But the equipment we purchased will be be used in that system and I don't have any "other" use for it here (we already have plenty of fileservers for our own internal needs). I think it's a better solution to distribute the data among Hive enthusiasts than to centralize the storage on an S3-like solution. Among solutions being considered are https://ceph.io and a privately-run IPFS network.
Thanks for the detailed answer! I think it's important that we debunk any speculation from malicious people trying to justify their reasoning about why the DHF would be abused.
It should be pretty clear that having no image-server is nearly as worse as having one that is not highly reliable. And as you said: nobody else wanted to do the job. Developing & setting it up was probably more expensive than it could have been, but based on the time constraints & the circumstances, we can't expect anything better than what you delivered.
So, again: kudos to you and your team for making sure Hive could deliver on its primary social application and obv. this proposal should be voted for! 👍
Upvoted for visibility. (And BT's answer).
For sure we needed something that works now while we figure out something for the future. I like IPFS and Ceph as technologies. The make-up of IPFS lends itself to having greater decentralization in the image hosting - including, after some dev, low-friction ways for community members to contribute. There was a guy working on something like this for the prequel-Chain, could try found out who that was and see how far they got. Future stuff of course.