Would You Rent Out Your Unused Drive Space?

Press2ToContinue writes "There is a new idea out there, proposed by Shawn Wilkinson, Tome Boshevski & Josh Brandof, that if you have unused disk space on your HD that you should rent it out. It is a great idea and the concept may have a whole range of implementations. The 3 guys describe their endeavor as: "Storj is a peer-to-peer cloud storage network implementing end-to-end encryption would allow users to transfer and share data without reliance on a third party data provider. The removal of central controls would eliminate most traditional data failures and outages, as well as significantly increasing security, privacy, and data control. A peer-to-peer network and basic encryption serve as a solution for most problems, but we must offer proper incentivisation for users to properly participate in this network."

Comments

Wuala used to have this

[ButcherCH]

That's more or less what Wuala used to have but they dropped this quite some while ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... For details why the dropped it http://www.eurecom.fr/fr/publi...

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Donwulff]

Oh, yeah, they should've said that in the summary - the difference to Morpheus, Freenet, Mojonation, Chord etc. (in no particular order) is that with Storj (which, somehow, is supposed to be pronounced "Storage" according to their site) is that to participate at this stage, you'll have to buy (currently) 300 dollars worth of their freshly minted cryptocurrency. No thanks.

Additionally from their FAQ: "As described in the MetaDisk whitepaper, we will use Florincoin as an initial solution. Eventually, we will transition to a system with more direct and scalable access to the Bitcoin blockchain via proof-of-existence. As blockchain technology improves we can use systems like Factom to provide faster throughput, and Ethereum to create enforceable contracts on data storage." So... they're in large part relying on technology not even developed yet. I get the modern rush to put software out before anybody else (Or say, 20 years after...), but this does sound like a prime example of putting the cart before the horse.

Re:Nope

[fustakrakich]

And the worst problem of remote storage is that you need an internet service provider at both ends to access it. Maybe it's the second worst. Liability issues involving content would be the worst.

Re:Nope

[The MAZZTer]

As for bandwidth, what I don't get is how do you get your files back if you can't guarantee the people you rented disk space from actually have their machines turned on?

Easy, do it the same way RAID does it: redundancy.

Re:Nope

[Rei]

Yes, but they need to make sure that they incentivize it correctly. Having purely a "per gigabyte" cost isn't reasonable. That's only accounting for the capital costs of buying the drives. They also impose wear costs per write and bandwidth costs per seek, and probably come costs for their usage of processing time and ram and the like.

Then there come issues of what sort of uptime / reliability / access times they want to guarantee? Surely they're going to have to distribute a given set of data out in a distributed fashion where any X percent of systems can be down or too slow at a given time and they still get their data back in a reasonable time. But how do you decide how much the system owner gets compensated under different downtime ratios / length of downtime / average access times / peak access times / etc? It'll be a tricky balancing act. Also access times vary from region to region, so certain regions could be more valuable for certain users than others, and some more valuable in general than others. Some people may not want to have their data in certain areas at all. And the system will have to decide when it decides a user to be too unreliable to store a fraction of a given dataset on and to store it on a different system instead. Then there's other things people may want to take into account, such as how green the power is

Technically possible, and a good goal, but quite a complicated challenge to do well.