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Comment by beedrillzzzzz | Hacker News Reader

Hey congrats, the product looks great! Love to see the rise of e2ee tools.

Why did you all decide to go with Storj, a fairly centralized distributed storage aggregator, rather than a decentralized storage network like Filecoin or Sia/Skynet?

Who pays for the storage on Storj? For a tool to be decentralized, the user needs a means to pay a node directly and the ability to seamlessly move between providers, ie interchangeable and zero lock-in. Does Storj allow crypto payments and this type of mobility?

Also noticed the app runs on Firebase/Google, are there plans to move away from this?

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Thanks for the great questions!

Reliability, performance, and a scalable infrastructure were strong selling points of Storj for us, and hence, we decided to go with them to provide a more seamless experience in terms of data upload and fetch. We also use Filecoin for immutability of user data, and as another layer of global redundancy.

Currently, we pay for storage/egress to Storj. Users can pay using dollars/crypto on our platform and we convert it to relevant Storj tokens to pay for storage. It is not automated yet, but yes we plan to automate it soon. Also, Storj does accept Storj tokens as payments.

About interchangeability, we plan to provide the migration functionality on our end to users.

We started with Firebase/Google because it was easy to setup. However, our team has been experimenting with different blockchains to sync the different file-ids and file-hashes. This would provide even more dApp developers to develop apps on top of Slik. We have a potential fit, and expect that to be integrated in H1'2022.

Thanks for the reply.

As many other comments suggest, I think it would be great to provide clear documentation to users that they can:

1. Run the entire app themselves, with their own chain/storage nodes etc - its the only way to really guarantee/prove the software is decentralized.

2. Access your data from both any centralized providers (such as yourself) or a local instance, ideally its so transparent you can literally select a different gateway in the app and keep working all within 5 seconds.

This is the bare minimum I would personally require before adopting a "decentralized" software tool.

Looks like you all are taking an incremental approach and not quite there, its a tough problem to solve but I wish you luck!

What I'm getting with Web3 is essentially FileCoin or Sia is like an API layer where Companies (DApps?) can build on top of.

It looks like this may be an existential threat to the current Tech Giants since their data is centralized whereas these new DApps are not.

Looks like they use FileCoin and Storj

Yep, but the important part is that

1. Users pay for their own storage, as directly as possible, otherwise they are not in control.

2. Any centralized APIs are fully interchangeable, ideally you can literally select a different gateway in the app, and keep working all within 5 seconds.

How would Storj be centralized when its node operators have a much lower barrier to entry compared to Filecoin?

Yep I agree, among other things, Filecoin's ridiculous minimum specs definitely reduce the network's decentralization - really not a fan of this.

With Storj I cannot say I have run a node but the first (required) step is literally registering an account and providing all your personal details on the Storj website, if there is an advanced way around this, its not easy to find in the documentation.

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