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Comment by djangowithme | Hacker News Reader

Are you running IPFS nodes for unloaders to keep data persisting? From what I understand, as soon as the last available node stops broadcasting, the pinned object is gone.

How do you deal with illegal content? Aka people using this service to host bad content.

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The message data is encrypted client side and stored in a cloud service of your choice (dropbox, s3, google, azure: default).

We don't host any data, it's stored in the users data store; the user controls all their data.

Would it be possible to shard the encrypted data across multiple backends (e.g. across multiple providers or across multiple accounts on a single service)? It might be useful/interesting/fun to use erasure coding to increase redundancy and availibiliy.

Yes, people can redundantly shard their data to multiple cloud storage services. We plan on offering such a service if there is demand for it.

When Prabhaav mentions it's encrypted client side, we should elaborate and also mention that it's encrypted such that we can't see it, so we have no way of knowing if you are transacting illegal content.

An interesting architectural point is that because you as the user choose your storage provider, you are essentially hosting bad content along with your storage provider. We and Blockstack simply provide you with a means of transporting your data to others without getting in the middle.

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