I remember back in July last year, I helped a friend of mine—Lao Zhang, who runs a node service—move a server. Back then, he showed me the data center bills. The most expensive part wasn’t the server itself, but a whole bunch of “backup solutions”: dual hard drives, off-site backups, redundant nodes. They all look like duplicate investments, but he said something that really stuck with me: “When something truly goes wrong, no one complains that backups are too expensive.”
Recently, when I reexamined the storage design of @BabylonLabs_io , that quote came back to me.
When many people look at the data scale mentioned in the Babylon docs, their first reaction might be: whether it’s tens of TB or a few TB, for today’s infrastructure it’s not really a problem.
But what’s really worth paying attention to isn’t the size of the capacity—it’s who has the ability to bear that cost over the long term.
Suppose a system needs to maintain the data for 100 counterparties. Single-copy storage might still be acceptable, but once you add full backups, the requirement doubles immediately. From a security perspective, that’s reasonable—data without backups can’t be considered truly reliable.
The problem is: as redundancy costs keep rising, can small operators still afford to participate?
If only well-funded large nodes can cover the full costs of storing, validating, and recovering data, then the network may become safer but also slowly more centralized. In the end, it’s not cryptography that limits decentralization—it’s infrastructure costs that filter out ordinary participants.
A secure network isn’t only about whether the algorithms are strong enough; it’s also about whether the people maintaining it are diverse enough.
I don’t think a data requirement on the order of 8.6 TB will directly affect Babylon’s development. But as the number of counterparties grows, storage strategy, cost allocation, and the operator ecosystem will become key variables.
Truly excellent infrastructure doesn’t just aim to “avoid mistakes”—it also makes it possible for more people to participate.
For Babylon, the next phase may not be about technical limits, but about how to strike a balance between security and openness.
#baby $BABY
Recently, when I reexamined the storage design of @BabylonLabs_io , that quote came back to me.
When many people look at the data scale mentioned in the Babylon docs, their first reaction might be: whether it’s tens of TB or a few TB, for today’s infrastructure it’s not really a problem.
But what’s really worth paying attention to isn’t the size of the capacity—it’s who has the ability to bear that cost over the long term.
Suppose a system needs to maintain the data for 100 counterparties. Single-copy storage might still be acceptable, but once you add full backups, the requirement doubles immediately. From a security perspective, that’s reasonable—data without backups can’t be considered truly reliable.
The problem is: as redundancy costs keep rising, can small operators still afford to participate?
If only well-funded large nodes can cover the full costs of storing, validating, and recovering data, then the network may become safer but also slowly more centralized. In the end, it’s not cryptography that limits decentralization—it’s infrastructure costs that filter out ordinary participants.
A secure network isn’t only about whether the algorithms are strong enough; it’s also about whether the people maintaining it are diverse enough.
I don’t think a data requirement on the order of 8.6 TB will directly affect Babylon’s development. But as the number of counterparties grows, storage strategy, cost allocation, and the operator ecosystem will become key variables.
Truly excellent infrastructure doesn’t just aim to “avoid mistakes”—it also makes it possible for more people to participate.
For Babylon, the next phase may not be about technical limits, but about how to strike a balance between security and openness.
#baby $BABY