Decentralized Cloud Storage Services (Storj, Sia, etc.)

[Deozaan]

This was originally a response to the Crashplan thread.


Has anyone here heard of some of the new(ish) decentralized/distributed cloud storage services, such as Storj or Sia?

They're cheaper than, e.g., Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc., and have additional features such as privacy, since your data is broken up into little chunks, encrypted, and distributed across the drives of many different "storage farmers" who rent out their disk space.

Sia seems to be a lot cheaper, but also seems a bit more convoluted to set up. Storj is more expensive (than Sia, but still cheaper than Amazon S3, etc.) but appears to be fairly simple to set up. They've even partnered with FileZilla so now Storj services are built in to the latest version of FileZilla. Storj also offers 25GB free for 12 months. They might be worth looking into if you need cheap cloud storage.




Full disclosure: I recently learned about these services and decided to allocate some of my HDD space for a Storj farm to get an idea of how it works. So I get paid a few dollars worth of the Storj cryptocurrency each month for renting out some space on my HDD. As far as I know, there's no way to choose which farmer your data gets sent to, so there's no way for me to directly benefit from referring anyone. That said, there's a chance that if you do use Storj, some of your data could end up on my HDD and I will be compensated for renting out my space to you.

I also tried to rent out some space using Sia, but as I said, it is more convoluted. It requires you (as a "farmer") to put up some collateral and I wasn't sure enough that I had things configured correctly to want to risk losing my collateral.

[4wd]

I recently learned about these services and decided to allocate some of my HDD space for a Storj farm to get an idea of how it works. So I get paid a few dollars worth of the Storj cryptocurrency each month for renting out some space on my HDD.

-Deozaan (August 26, 2017, 10:56 PM)

Damn, no ARM implementation ... there goes that use of the RasPi 

[Deozaan]

I recently learned about these services and decided to allocate some of my HDD space for a Storj farm to get an idea of how it works. So I get paid a few dollars worth of the Storj cryptocurrency each month for renting out some space on my HDD.

-Deozaan (August 26, 2017, 10:56 PM)

Damn, no ARM implementation ... there goes that use of the RasPi 

-4wd (August 27, 2017, 01:49 AM)

Check again:

https://docs.storj.i...re-on-a-raspberry-pi

But note that it needs 1+ GB of RAM. So it needs to be one of the later models of the RPi.

[4wd]

I recently learned about these services and decided to allocate some of my HDD space for a Storj farm to get an idea of how it works. So I get paid a few dollars worth of the Storj cryptocurrency each month for renting out some space on my HDD.

-Deozaan (August 26, 2017, 10:56 PM)

Damn, no ARM implementation ... there goes that use of the RasPi 

-4wd (August 27, 2017, 01:49 AM)

Check again:

https://docs.storj.i...re-on-a-raspberry-pi

But note that it needs 1+ GB of RAM. So it needs to be one of the later models of the RPi.

-Deozaan (August 27, 2017, 03:31 PM)

Got a RasPi 2B sitting here, I think it just found a job ... Thanks!

[Deozaan]

Got a RasPi 2B sitting here, I think it just found a job ... Thanks!

-4wd (August 28, 2017, 12:10 AM)

Cool. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts once you've had some experience with it.

I tried following those instructions to get it working on my Odroid C1, which IIRC is comparable to the RPi 2B, but it didn't work for me. But that was a couple of months ago and I can't remember exactly what the problem was, and I've since re-flashed the SD card in the interim. So I'm just running the Storj share client on my Windows machine.

And if anyone here actually tries out the storage part of Storj, I'd like to hear your thoughts on that as well.

[wraith808]

So I get paid a few dollars worth of the Storj cryptocurrency each month for renting out some space on my HDD.

-Deozaan (August 26, 2017, 10:56 PM)

Storj cryptocurrency?

[Deozaan]

So I get paid a few dollars worth of the Storj cryptocurrency each month for renting out some space on my HDD.

-Deozaan (August 26, 2017, 10:56 PM)

Storj cryptocurrency?

-wraith808 (August 28, 2017, 05:52 PM)

Yeah. The cryptocurrency world is booming. There is over $160 billion worth of value in various cryptocurrencies these days. Bitcoin was just the beginning (and is still the top dog, ranked #1). Take a look at CoinMarketCap for a quick look at the top cryptocurrencies ranked by market cap (value of each coin/token times the total number of coins/tokens). Storj (~#70) is a token that runs on the Ethereum (#2) network.



If you haven't been following cryptocurrencies, you owe it to yourself to do your due diligence on them. I was so proud of myself last year for finally doing something wise with my money by sticking a nice chunk of change into a CD at my bank so I could earn a return of 1.30% APY. That's $13 per year for every $1,000 locked up with the bank. That was a very competitive rate among all the banks I've looked into. I've been following cryptocurrencies with increasing attention since Renegade introduced me to Bitcoin about two years ago, and this year I looked deeper into crypto and regretted last year's investment decision. Bitcoin is up over 600% since this time last year. Ethereum is up over 2800% since this time last year. In my opinion, banks are quickly becoming obsolete. (And by that I mean over the next decade or two for the average person.)

Again, do your due diligence and "invest" wisely. There's plenty of risk involved. But there's also plenty of reward to be had.