Decentralized, end-to-end encrypted Cloud Storage | Hacker News Reader

Decentralized, end-to-end encrypted Cloud Storage

storj.io

38 pointsdoener14 comments

Interestingly, just yesterday this was trending on HN: https://shitcoin.com/storj-not-a-dropbox-killer-1a9f27983d70

FWIW I did a similar test with IPFS recently and had no problems and it worked phenomenally. I know people have issues with Filecoin (IPFS's native token) and I myself am confused about some of the outstanding unsolved issues with it, but IPFS itself works really well.

I've been very curious about IPFS, but I can't find any descriptions of the limitations and guarantees of the protocol.

For instance, what is the durability of the files I store there? How long do they exist? How much can I store? What is the availability of the files stored? What about latency?

Great questions, and not to be unnecessarily pedantic, but IPFS is not a method of storage. IPFS is a replacement for HTTP and has a lot of attractive qualities and works in production today.

Filecoin is a method of incentivizing decentralized storage on IPFS and many of the questions you've asked are either totally or partially unsolved.

Those questions will ostensibly be solved by groups (possibly Protocol Labs, the creators of IPFS and Filecoin, possibly others) over time. That's kind of the bet you have to make if you buy Filecoin, but it's not a bet you have to make to use IPFS today or build a solution on IPFS that works at least for your ends but not all ends.

Hope that makes sense - it's worth digging in more on the forums themselves as to which of those problems are more or less solved and what the possible solutions are.

What is to stop it from just being used for storage though? I see no reason to just use IPFS as a place to dump static files, besides ethical ones.

Sorry just to be clear - you can literally not use IPFS for storage, it doesn't "have" memory or compute or anything. It's a protocol.

Ipfs doesn't provide a storage service as such, so:

> what is the durability of the files I store there?

You don't get the files distributed automatically. They're stored permanently only on clients which pinned them. (Either via user action, or because it's a storage service)

> How much can I store?

As much as you want. But you don't get mirrors by default.

> What is the availability of the files stored? What about latency?

Depends which nodes copy / cache your files.

Exactly right. Especially the last two points are important: no mirrors by default and depends which nodes copy and cache your files. The big challenge ahead for them is how to get various implementations (Filecoin ideally) to make it simple to get dependable nodes to copy/cache/return/etc your files when needed. I'm very excited about it and think they will get there, just important to understand the present vs. future of what works and may work.

This is pretty much why syncthing is really cool (but for some reason hasn't caught on).

You just install one single binary (or a package form your distro, preferentially), and it shows a clear and non-tech-user-oritented UI.

Also, it's closer to dropbox that storj. Storj stores files on the cloud (think S3), syncthing sync across machines -- much like dropbox.

I may have missed something in the whitepaper, but using a confidentiality-only encryption scheme like AES-CTR seems bad because it enables trivial attacks on file integrity (bit-flipping attacks and such). How does Storj protect the integrity of a file? I see that proofs of retrievability are used, but PoRs don't guarantee protection against integrity attacks in general.

Hard drives are famously prone to failure: I understand that filecoin and storj pay 'miners' to store files, but what happens in case of failure? It doesn't seem that there are any penalties for losing files (other than losing out on the expected income) – this does not seem very resilient.

This, along with Siacoin (http://sia.tech/), will likely be the future of decentralised cloud storage.

They have active developments and have (somewhat) clear roadmap. I'm a bit concerned about their strategy to overcome the big ones right now such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Seems like a really long way to go.

The "25GB free" thing bothers me. Nothing wrong with free stuff, but this sounds like something rather undecentralized.

Let me be the first to say this is probably a terrible idea.

Some reasons:

1. Decentralized storage? What the hell for?

2. Blockchain hype anyone?

3. "Where only you have access to your data" It's called NextCloud, or OwnCloud. This app should be called WheelReinvented.

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