But the question was how hard is it to run a competitor to Infura. And the answer is trivially easy. Infura is just an Ethereum node API that's publicly exposed. Building an Infura competitor literally is nothing more than $100/month it costs to run a Geth node on AWS.

This is true today. But the standard approach in this industry is to start by offering access to an open service and then quickly build in value-add services that aren’t available in the open service. So for example, the smart move would be for Infura to offer a proprietary chain or rollup that gets widely used but isn’t available outside of Infura. If they can pull that off, competition could get much harder.

I second this. If history has thought us anything is that every web3 company will work toward increasing the competitive gap.

Right, this was my point. People don't usually run Postgres themselves (e.g. set up Postgres in a docker container), but it's not very hard to do.

The article makes it sound like Infura has a moat. There's no moat, it's as easy to switch as it is to switch Postgres clouds.

To be clear, I agree with most of their findings, this on is just a bit off.

> People don't usually run Postgres themselves (e.g. set up Postgres in a docker container), but it's not very hard to do.

It's easy to do a basic install.

It's quite hard to do it right, at scale, with workload-appropriate configuration, replication, backup etc.

My point... neither Postures nor Indira, or any other blockchain solution are easy to install and maintain in a fully scaled-up, fault-tolerant, multi-node deployment

How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers? If there's a strong enough need, people will run their own servers even if they'd rather not. "people don't want to run servers" arguably could be rephrased as "people don't have a reason (today) to run their own servers". I'd argue this is a key difference between web1 and cryto centralization and the web2 centralization. If Google announced tomorrow that anyone can buy the gmail contents of any gmail address, you'd bet a lot more individuals would either switch to alternatives or start running their own severs.

> How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers

Every year a decreasing number as everything moves to SaaS and the cloud.

> How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers?

Office 365 financials alone suggest that the answer is "very few, and rapidly decreasing". I work for a ~30k employee technology company that doesn't run it's own email servers.

Should be pretty easy to find the top 100/1000/10000 companies and look at their MX records.

I’d imagine it’s a large number of Office 365, GSuite by Google and Barracuda/ProofPoint which may point to a SaaS thing or an internal server.