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Comment by rdegges | Hacker News Reader

At first glance looks like another competitor for filecoin, storj, etc. Anyone know what the major differences are in the players in this space currently? I'm interested in decentralized storage (low cost), but really have no idea how to judge the different options.

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SAFE Network has been around for quite some time. I believe the project has been around for longer than both filecoin & storj, but it is still in beta phase. Filecoin AFAIK has not reached beta, while Storj is already online, as is it's competitor Sia.

SAFE Network's stack is mostly Rust, which is novel.[0][1]

Among other things, SAFE Network has no blockchain. It has an alternative approach to consensus: "To directly compare the language for the security of the bitcoin vs safe network, bitcoin is secured by ‘proof of work’, safe is secured by ‘close group consensus’."[2]

SAFE Network adds a cryptocoin (safecoin[3]) component to the Beaker browser[4], which builds on the Dat Protocol[5] for distributed apps.

Basically I'm interested in these types of technologies as well.

[0] https://github.com/maidsafe/crust

[1] https://github.com/maidsafe/routing

[2] https://safe-network-explained.github.io/safe-for-bitcoiners...

[3] https://maidsafe.net/safecoin.html

[4] https://datproject.org/

[5] https://beakerbrowser.com/

It has no blockchain, but it does have something called a "datachain"[0] that allows among many things, proof of group membership and recovery from network churn and outages. Here's a more in-depth description.[1]

[0] https://medium.com/@yobanjo/goodbye-blockchain-hello-datacha...

[1] https://metaquestions.me/2016/07/20/data-chains-what-why-how...

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