Economic Models Of Long-Term Storage

My work on the economics of long-term storage with students at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Research in Storage Systems stopped about six years ago some time after the funding from the Library of Congress ran out. Last year to help with some work at the Internet Archive I developed a much simplified economic model, which runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Two recent developments provide alternative models:

• Last year, James Byron, Darrell Long, and Ethan Miller's Using Simulation to Design Scalable and Cost-Efficient Archival Storage Systems (also here) reported on a vastly more sophisticated model developed at the Center. It includes both much more detailed historical data about, for example, electricity cost, and covers various media types including tape, optical, and SSDs.
• At the recent PASIG Julian Morley reported on the model being used at the Stanford Digital Repository, a hybrid local and cloud system, and he has made the spreadsheet available for use.

Below the fold some commentary on all three models.

IT Improves Productivity!

In The Productivity Paradox David Rotman writes:

Productivity growth in most of the world’s rich countries has been dismal since around 2004. Especially vexing is the sluggish pace of what economists call total factor productivity—the part that accounts for the contributions of innovation and technology. In a time of Facebook, smartphones, self-driving cars, and computers that can beat a person at just about any board game, how can the key economic measure of technological progress be so pathetic? Economists have tagged this the “productivity paradox.”

Some argue that it’s because today’s technologies are not nearly as impressive as we think. The leading proponent of that view, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, contends that compared with breakthroughs like indoor plumbing and the electric motor, today’s advances are small and of limited economic benefit. Others think productivity is in fact increasing but we simply don’t know how to measure things like the value delivered by Google and Facebook, particularly when many of the benefits are “free.”

My view is that IT is only one of the factors driving the decrease of productivity in the general economy, but that there are some areas of the economy in which IT is greatly increasing productivity. An explanation is below the fold.

Cloud For Preservation

Imagine you're responsible for preserving the long-established digital collection at a large research or national library. It is currently preserved in home-grown software, or off-the-shelf software that's been extensively customized, that you are responsible for running on hardware run by your institution's IT department. You are probably not a large customer of theirs. They are probably laying down the law, saying "cloud first", especially as you are looking at a looming hardware refresh. Below the fold, I examine a set of issues that need to be clarified in the decision-making process.

The Economics Of Bitcoin Transactions

Source

Izabella Kaminska's BIS trolls bitcoin reports on analysis of the economics of Bitcoin transactions from Raphael Auer at the Bank for International Settlements. She starts:

Bitcoin aspires to take over the world. But as we all know (according to poorly sourced conspiracy forums), the world is currently run by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the central bank to central banks. That means Bitcoin needs to displace the BIS in the near future if it is to get anywhere.

But it takes one to know one.

So here's the dominant global payments system calling out the aspiring global payments system in an excellent piece of professional trolling this week

Auer's is indeed an excellent piece of work. Follow me below the fold for some details.