Just found an article about this new project on Indiegogo, for a new “distributed” cloud that is P2P.
Looks pretty simple, you pay upfront for a little box with storage inside of it, and you are agreeing to host other users data, while gaining a certain amount of space for your own use, that is encrypted and sharded, with self healing…seems like it could potentially be a competitor of Storj for standard home users that don’t need a ton of cloud storage space, and are more willing to pay for a 1 time payment option versus a monthly subscription.
Anyone else see this, and if so, what are your thoughts?
the way I understand it is a “pay to play” model. If you want to use storage space in their cloud, you have to purchase one of their boxes so that you can contribute to their cloud. From their FAQs: sounds like a break down of 50%, 25%, and 25%, for storage space for others, redundancy, and then web services, respectively.
They just need a sweet compression algorithm and I almost liken it to a “pied piper” platform. (sorry for the silly reference, but I just finished watching Silicon Valley again…)
It looks like it is some kind of SIA implementation where the device takes your files and then “slowly” uploads them to the network. And my guess is that retrieval from the network is equally slow. We’re not talking added minutes here, it can be days to retrieve if your device is knocked out. But I haven’t tried it in practice so don’t know for sure.
Either way, backing up data to a distributed network is only half the struggle. Storj is about scale and performance. You don’t just put your data in the cloud to back it up, but you can USE your data. This will continue to be built out, so that Storj is effective as an immediate resource, not just a way to pull data from a glacier like backup solution. Nothing wrong with that kind of a model, but it’s not what Storj is about.
It reminds me a little of Symform which is now defunct. They didn’t have a box or anything, but you could share an amount of space and could store half that amount for free.
While I liked the idea of not having to deal with money exchange at all, it never performed well and wasn’t reliable. However, I found Storj when looking for an alternative to Symform. So I guess I’m grateful for that.
But both the space for space and the concept of a dedicated device could in theory be added to Storj. Though I don’t know how reliable such nodes would be.
I’m not going to put a black box on my home network. If it’s not open source, it’s a “no go” for me, even if the project is Italian like me. I won’t even waste time to explore the technology.
