Inspired by this reddit thread, I wonder: what’s the minimal area you’d have to pulse with an EMP signal (with, let say, a nuclear attack as explained here) to have Storj lose files?
Looking at the current map of nodes, it might be that nuking Germany and its neighbours would be enough. But, you know… I’m not sure.
not really an expert, but i know the fundamentals, for the most part atleast.
first a bit on EMP’s.
initially discovered during all the nuclear tests, usually a achieved by a high altitude nuclear detonation to blanket the largest possible area.
an EMP being basically flux in the EM spectrum so violent that even wires of rather short ranges will have positive and negative voltages at either ends, a sort of induction of electron motion / electrical charge on or in the wires or metals so they become electrified from the EM flux, this shorts out stuff, and can even atleast in theory burn the traces or wires… depending on the magnitude of the EM flux.
EMP’s can be caused and have been caused by many different events, to mention a few…
nuclear detonations, cosmic rays / supernovae, CME’s / solar outbursts, lightning / powerful electrical discharges.
and many more i’m sure, but to keep it simple ill use these as an example.
they each have a different scale… generally you can just correlate it to the release of the energy and then account for the inverse square law, meaning basically… most things dissipate by the inverse square of the distance.
like a point light source… it will be weaker the further away you get.
but lets cut it down even further, there are two primary factors the storj network would be prone to effects by… the sun and nuclear detonations for EMP effects.
man made EMP’s are fairly weak and will not cover immense areas… maybe 60-80KM radius maybe less … i duno the exact numbers… but one could blackout a city…
the solar ones are the more disturbing as they can last days or weeks and basically have the same effect as a constant nuclear detonation in the atmosphere.
there are such events described in history which telegraphs would function without power, because of the energy was supplied by the sun… basically the energy was so dense… that the telegraph system functioned like a solar cell.
tho i don’t think EMP has an effect on life… tho some species might be more affected than others and i think its a very poorly investigated topic, so there may be unknown effects… but for the most part EMP’s are not considered harmful to life in general.
so yeah to finally answer your question…
taking of a few cities or many cities would be dangerous or could be dangerous for the network.
but then again… HDD’s aren’t that exposed… most PSU’s have protections that should break the circuit, and let the PSU short out before the hardware in the computer shorts out… that is, so long as the computer is inside a metal case.
datacenters likewise have cages for a reason… not only does it keep people out, but it works as a faraday cage, making the content of the cage impermeable to EMP effects…
ofc in theory thats just a matter of how powerful the energy levels are, but when a metal cage starts to break from the EMP energy, i would bet you that our fragile bodies would have their neural paths burned long before that.
the solar Carrington level events are the most dangerous and would at the very least put the information age world at its knees, but that is also why we really want to move to Photonics.
because the problem is really that our technology is electron based.
and even a Carrington event, i’m not sure that data would really be destroyed… it would just be offline for quite a while…
anyways thats my 1 satoshi on the subject…
also aren’t your setup protected against EMP’s…
come on man, you need to up your effort lol…
lol… me to, but i want to change that with a fiber gapped connection to my server room, conductive paint that is electrically grounded and a proper UPS power filtered / solar powered setup…
i know, i know… but i can dream lol
long story short…
so long as the sun doesn’t decide to go medieval on our asses, the network should be fine…
It feels like if an EMP (whatever the source) could actually make Storj lose files, we would have greater issues to deal with on the planet…
A theoretical nuke that could EMP an area of that size would wipe out all life on earth. I don’t think we need to protect data against a doomsday scenario that nobody will survive.
You would need all the infinity stones
Isn’t it enough to destroy servers running satellites?
If were talking about the most extreme disasters why not have a asteroid also hit earth, Who is gonna wonder if my data is safe at this point? I think if we are talking about a scenario minds well go all out right, No storj isnt invincible to any kinda disaster that effects earth in itself Less storj is hosted on another planet maybe…
If we’re doing asteroids we also need tsunamis to add water damage
That is true it would be included in an asteroid impact especially if it landed in the ocean. “Looks Up at the tsunamis I better save my data this is it. SAVES to Storj”
So, you say, we should start some storage nodes on other planets? We’d probably have to bump up the audit timeout then.
You’d need a new geofencing area for that to ensure availability… or eehm… that word doesn’t make sense anymore off planet… What’s geofencing in space called? 
Hm… What a wonderful idea, let’s be the first storage company having redundent data stored on the moon. Considering we’re kind of part of the cyptospace with the payment token, the phrase “Storj to the moon” would take a whole new dimension 
Can’t be fence, since without gravity it would go away. It has to be relative position defined shield, known as RPS since now
Or… Geoshielding?
Spatioshielding maybe? 
If you are taking about AP1 train then you are looking at human 3C annihilation size EMP, lol
Thanks for sharing the map, now I know why my storj is kind of slow given the few nodes we have here in Asia
The usage depends on customers in near locations. In Asia we have a small amount of nodes comparable to Europe or Americas.
Since you say your node filling slow, that’s mean that there is not so much customers in Asia using Storj, otherwise smaller number of nodes would be filled quickly.
If you mean that you are the Customer - then it’s likely the reason, we need more nodes in Asia.
I’m the customer, so yeah, agreed with you that we need more nodes in Asia.
Just one quick question, is it possible to ping or speedtest my storj connection to diffferent region? (to test my connection speed if I store at another region)
