I am referring to the tech and the general idea of decentralized storage, not to Storj as a company. Does a relevant market need and want decentralized storage, or does the massive increase in data center capacity already prove that this idea is merely a niche concept from nerdy technologists that nobody really cares about?
The mixture of two problems it solve:
It feel like crypto currency, this is civilization.. execution just have to be better 
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It already proved itself as the superior technology for cloud storage. It only lacks the proper marketing and frontend for wide adoption.
Unfortunately, we know that when it comes to technological success, the superior option doesn’t always win.
I often get asked if I am (as a storage provider) not scared that I could get in legal troubles for hosting data for other people.
The second most asked question is, if I can see or access the data of others.
I think most people don’t trust decentralized storage yet, because they are still scared of data loss or that other people can see their data. And they think that this can be too complicated. Google for example is just access Google drive, log in, pay the subscription and done.
Storj is not really decentralized. Yes, the data is distributed among many nodes but that only gives two advantages:
That’s it. The whole service is still centralized and has the same downsides as any other such service. For example, if Storj goes out of business, the customers may lose their data.
Not really, all the necessary metadata is concentrated on the servers that Storj (or whatever similar company) controls. If the company goes out of business or whatever, the data may be lost.
Recently, Nine PBS lost access to their “cloud” data because the company providing the service went out of business. However, the data seems to still exist on the servers (which, I guess, were rented from a datacenter) and now the court gave Nine PBS permission to get their data.
If something similar happened to Storj, the data would be completely lost. I doubt that node operators would hold on to their nodes after the satellite has been shut down. Also, it’s not like the customer could go to every node operator and ask them for the data (with a court order or not), because there are a lot of node operators in multiple countries and they do not have the complete data.
So, your data is as much dependant on a single company with Storj (or similar) as it is with Amazon or any “centralized” service provider.
This is only true if the customer uses the native protocol. But even then, a customer can use any other service and just encrypt the files himself before uploading them, just like the Storj uplink does. I am sure it would be possible to make (maybe something like that already exists) a S3 proxy that takes data with S3 protocol, encrypts it and then uploads it to a S3 provider.
It would work very similarly to the S3 gateway that takes the data, encrypts it and uploads it to the Stroj network using the native protocol and in both cases the service provider would not see the data.
On the other hand, a real decentralized service (maybe sia or filecoin) is complicated to use and a large company probably would not want to deal with this, instead they would rather deal with a single company (like Storj or Amazon) and get a centralized service.
power, didn’t even mention the word decentralized. We are talking about different thing, let briefing it:Yeah, it appears we were talking about slightly different things.
Storj as a service provider is just as centralized as Amazon or anyone else. If Storj goes out of business, customers possibly lose their data.
Storj the software is open source, anyone can maintain and improve it, if Storj the company goes out of business, someone else could continue this.
This is true for everything else too - I can run a sia node alongside a Storj node or any other one.
To be honest, I do not know a lot about sia, some time ago I read about it, but did not join. AFAIk, it is more decentralized than Storj, with the coin protocol doing the job of the satellite, so as long as there are nodes running, it should work, even if the original creators go out of business. I may be wrong.
This may be difficult. The way I see it, Storj seems to offer one advantage over the competitors - lower price. Storj may also be faster than some cheap competitors, but to reasonably notice the difference the customer has to have a very large demand (I mean you can saturate a 1gbps connection with probably any of the cloud storage providers).
The protocol is another barrier - a lot of software supports S3 and a lot of centralized service providers support it too, so it’s easy to switch between them. Storj cannot natively support S3 because of how the network operates, so either the customer or Storj has to run a gateway service or the customer has to modify his software to support the Storj protocol.
Since a node has only a tiny portion of a file, the software will still need to get them all and reassemble the file. Its not like you can get a http link to the file without a separate service that does this.
Its the same IMO. The encryption is a small part of this and customers who use other S3 services probably already have it implemented. I’m sure there are also S3 proxies or something that can do it for you.
Open source does not solve this. Yes, someone else can maintain the software, but your data is with one provider anyway. I’m sure there are open source S3 servers too.
The only way to make this more “decentralized” is for every potential customer to run a satellite himself and then somehow get node operators to join it. That would probably be too much hassle.
It’s a little bit more complicated. Every their customer must host a full node, they also responsible to backup their metadata somewhere. If it would be lost, their data will be lost as well, independently of collateral or Reed-Solomon codes. The metadata is not stored on a Blockchain. It’s stored only on that full node.
You can have a similar experience if you would run your own satellite and you will be responsible to keep your metadata in safe. The only problem, that there is no some kind of market to attract SNOs to store your data.
Unfortunately, there is no one truly decentralized storage service which will be fast, decentralized and robust. You always must choose two.
Thanks for the explanation. Keeping your own metadata sounds, to me, better than depending on one company to do it. However this is a choice every customer has to make for himself.
Yes, but you’ll need powerful hardware for this. It’s not optional. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to access your data, for example, from a smartphone, unless you also host a website that provides access to it.
But in exchange, there’s no service provider that will run a full node, Linkshare, or S3 gateway for you; it’s all up to you.