> No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded)
You could hardly say a market dominated by a giant state-sanctioned cartel was a good example of a commodity market in the state of perfect competition.
> So the question is: who would be interested in taking the supply side of the filecoin network, when there is no profit to be made?
There would likely be some short term economic profits at the beginning, which would attract market entrants. The economic profit would tend to zero over time, but keep in mind economic profit as a concept incorporates the notion of the entrepreneur paying themselves a competitive wage for their time.
Point still stands. All else being equal, oil from Saudi Arabia is the same as the oil from Canada or Denmark. If you don't want to use oil as an example, use coffee, milk, chicken meat, soy, cotton, oranges, electricity, potable water...
> There would likely be some short term economic profits at the beginning, which would attract market entrants.
The first market entrants are the ones selling extra capacity they have. For those that already have sunk costs of the disks, sure, they can make a profit on this. My point is that once that capacity is gone and there is more demand for data, people will have to actually go and buy disks and let them run 24/7, and this would cost more per GB stored than they will be able to sell.
You could hardly say a market dominated by a giant state-sanctioned cartel was a good example of a commodity market in the state of perfect competition.
> So the question is: who would be interested in taking the supply side of the filecoin network, when there is no profit to be made?
There would likely be some short term economic profits at the beginning, which would attract market entrants. The economic profit would tend to zero over time, but keep in mind economic profit as a concept incorporates the notion of the entrepreneur paying themselves a competitive wage for their time.