According to a report by EMC, current global storage capacity is around 1.5 zettabytes (1.5 million petabytes) [1]. With Commercial off-the-shelf hardware, storing 1 PB of data carries a fixed cost of around $100,000 USD [2]. Thus, the cost of today's storage capacity is around $150 billion USD. (About what the United States government pays every year in interest [3].) Those numbers are expected to increase an order of magnitude by 2020. Thankfully this does not apply to the interest payments.
With numbers like that, and with cloud storage prices sitting very far away from marginal costs, protocols and incentive structures like IPFS and filecoin are going to be of great value to enterprises, governments, and consumers. I would not be surprised if, by 2020, a majority portion of the data online was stored in such a system; with exponential growth, a new majority share is created every ln(2) / rate years. In the case of the "data universe", which grows about 40% annually, doubling time is about 2 years [1].
With numbers like that, and with cloud storage prices sitting very far away from marginal costs, protocols and incentive structures like IPFS and filecoin are going to be of great value to enterprises, governments, and consumers. I would not be surprised if, by 2020, a majority portion of the data online was stored in such a system; with exponential growth, a new majority share is created every ln(2) / rate years. In the case of the "data universe", which grows about 40% annually, doubling time is about 2 years [1].
[1] http://www.emc.com/leadership/digital-universe/2014iview/exe... [2] http://www.backblaze.com/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-... [3] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/44716