Free Storage for Non-Profits/Open Science Research Organizations

[Cmdrd]

As an expansion of the Tardigrade offering for COVID-19 researchers, a satellite for non-profits/open science organizations where free storage is offered to these organizations while SNOs provide free storage and bandwidth to said satellite, but possibly with node reputation/audit status being tied to another satellite to discourage nefarious behavior and also only permit well vetted users, possibly even filtering out for users who have only been with the network a short time.

Just an idea to expand on this initiative, having a more permanent solution like this for organizations working to better humanity would be awesome. As an SNO I think this would be a great addition to the Tardigrade/Storj network and be an overall benefit. If something like this came about I would definitely consider throwing 10% of my storage capacity to something along these lines.

[jocelyn]

love this idea, opening it up to votes…

[SGC]

One could let projects submit suggestions for why their project should WIN the test data storage pool!!! xD that could be a great marketing opportunity

or depending on the size one could split it into multiple piece… and make the test dataset have a real world purpose aside from just being test data, but generally make it into a competition of sorts, with amazing science projects able to win insane amounts of storage, mainly for good PR.

and long term maybe some major benefit to humanity.
but lets be honest, the most science ever does is prove how wrong it was in the past… xD

(reasons and ramblings below)
define free… i mean one would have to implement some sort of restrictions… and so log as it is optional and one could back out of it again without having to do an entirely graceful exit.

Personally i don’t see a reason to participate in this, tho i do see this as a perfectly good way to do advertisement through existing storage on the network… so i would like to participate in it, until i need the storage for profit…

ofc this creates the issue that when the network gets filled people will back out and this part would be squeezed the hardest…

there would also be the consideration of management of this storage space… i mean free storage is free storage… how many zetabytes can my one man non profit get… its totally legit… wink i swear i’m not going to rent it out to storj…

but clearly a valid way to make some people use it, one could bake it into storj… and make it part of the test data that always need to be circulating… and then one wouldn’t have to dedicate storage for it… that would simply be a ratio storj would control, even tho one could ofc have the option to say a node would be 100% for that purpose or that it would be 50/50.

ofc that would mean storj would be paying us for storing science data, i duno how big the test dataset on the network has to be, but i assume it will be substantial…

or depending on the size one could split it into multiple piece…

excellent idea, might take some work to really implement it, but that kinda depends on how everything is built… something of which i have little clue.

[Cmdrd]

For sure, these would be details that Storj Labs would have to work through in order to provide something like this, for not only validating an organization but also reliable SNOs. There are a number of ways this could be handled, the actually probably easiest approach is allowing SNOs the capability to opt in to something like this on an existing satellite and allocate a certain amount of storage to that type of use case. Organizations that would fit a criteria developed for this would be assigned a certain amount of storage based on justified need in small increments as the network can accommodate it while ensuring no abuse of service.

There would be a lot to do in this area, definitely not just a switch to flip and it goes into place. Definitely more of a long term goal of something to implement due to the administrative overhead on Storj Labs and buy in from SNOs. This was more just an expansion on the current storage capacity Storj Labs is providing for researchers for COVID-19, as an SNO I don’t mind also giving up a bit of potential revenue so that something like this could be sustainable and provide some organizations much needed performant storage. Could also go a long ways towards building and improving on the Storj reputation and viability as a platform.

[SGC]

yeah the way i see it, this needs to be advertisement, because lets face it, without storj making money… there will be no free storage for whatever projects this would benefit.

so think of the marketing benefit from being able to give a way like let say 2 petabytes of storage space.

the winner will be the highest voted project, and maybe anyone can vote… might as well make it as word of mouth can be a powerful marketing tool…

1 Petabyte for the best/highest voted project.
and then maybe 100 TB for the 10 runner ups

(addendum) nah 100 for the 3 runner ups
and then 50TB for the 7 next
and 10TB for the last 35 projects making it still a grand total of 2PB and more wide spread use case / marketing / participation.

one want to aim wide to inspire many to participate.
2 Petabytes if we have over 5k storagenodes, would only mean less than 20%
should dedicate 2 terabytes of disk capacity for it… i would gamble thats an easy sell, so might not even need storj to invest much.

and really a time limit on the storage would be a wise idea… but then again… storage technology moves at such a pace that it might not matter… if one sets a reasonable time limit… like say 3 or 4 years… i mean 2 is to low… in 3 years we might all have 60tb solidstate drives in our gear… so … yeah most likely pointless to even set a time limit. it just subtracts from how great it sounds to a project.

anyways just thinking out loud here… but i think this could be great pr