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Comment by prirun | Hacker News Reader

I read that Internet Archive keeps 2 copies of all their data. Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy, mostly IMO because of incompetent management. They pay their node operators, the guys that actually maintain the hard drive space, $1.35/TB/mo to store data. (However it costs Storj 1.8x that because of erasure coding). They still have way more available capacity going unused, so it's likely they could lower the payout rate even further and have talked about doing that.

Internet Archive could buy Storj, probably for not much, keep 1 copy of their archive on the IA custom server setup they have now, keep the other copy on Storj, and free up half of the IA disk space. Storj automagically uploads data to 54 nodes, any 29 of which can reconstruct the original data (54/29 is where the 1.8 expansion factor occurs).

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"Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy,"

"Internet Archive could buy Storj"

Insanely convoluted solution that only someone with crypto-brain would ever come up with. You are really suggesting the Internet Archive should buy a bankrupted crypto company so they can store their data? What?

It's more productive to explain why the idea doesn't work, since people can learn from that.

nonsense is not owed a response.

And yet, here you are responding

Yes, and that's a great idea. Chapter 11 protects companies from their creditors. If a suitor comes along offering to buy the company that is in Chapter 11, the creditors can go to the judge and request that the judge allow the purchase to go through as a way of settling the company's debts. It happens all the time.

Why buy the rights to store data on a bunch of random people's hard drives instead of buying a bunch of hard drives? It's just not efficient.

The major problem with the (low) payout on Storj is that 29/54 node requirement is still too high for reliable long-term data retention.

Also, even if you live in the least-expensive electricity places in the world, residentially it will cost you more in electricity to keep those platters spinning 24/7 [than the payout].

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It is popular in the hobby cryptomining community to replace your under-desk spaceheater with a Monero mining rig (I also do this), and then only run it during wintertime (b/c it is effectively free mining, if you were already going to be running a resistive spaceheater).

Unfortunately, this cryptomining solution doesn't lend itself well to distributed-datastore cryptos because they are offline the majority of the year (i.e. files inaccessible).

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As a part-time miner since 2012... I really wanted to like Storj, but if you want to get paid to replace your spaceheater at home, mine Monero on surplus CPUs (for reference: new $500 Ryzen798003xd mines at 5.5khashes/s; obsolete i5 still gets 3.8kH/s). Storj is in bankruptcy for fiscal reasons due to its impossible logistics.

How many BTUs or kJs is that?

I have a combined 2800BTUs of Monero heating capability, which is equivalent to a standard US "spaceheater" running on medium heat.

Localized beneath my main office computer desk, this allows me to further reduce heating of my entire domicile.

That’s pretty impressive I’m going to look into it.

For the past several years, this annualizes to about three weeks of free winter heating (via bespoke XMR). I mine solo, but I imagine if you "pooled" it would be similar incomestream (but more reliable). I have had a year of "no winnings," but I persist with the odds to warm myself and the network.

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Half of my kilohashing runs on obsolete i5 equipment (==free-to-me, minus geektime) – Monero Foundation strives to operate with GPU- & ASIC- –resistance; processors haven't gotten that much faster (in the past decade), and a surplus i5 isn't that much slower than a new $500 Ryzen (~2/3rds hashrate).

Monero's Windows7 client still works (fully supported), so perhaps you now have a use for your dusty-old laptop?

Should you need to upgrade the hard drive (mining currently requires full-blockchain, which is ~300GB and growing), you might as well experience linux (installing UbuntuOS is easy once you've created the USBmedia).

It is definitely not worth purchasing additional equipment, with residential rates, just to mine monero. I like warm toes, and have lots of spare CPU cores.

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Reminder: this is only "free electricity" if you're offsetting RESISTIVE HEATING (i.e. not a heatpump). To actually reduce your powerbill and save the planet (the smarter choice), you should install a heatpump for wintertime heating.

This isn't a "guaranteed moneymaker," it's to heat your geeky underdesk toes – you are just making a fancier resistive spaceheater, which occassionally pays for itself.

The building is heated by heat pumps my studio is one large room in the building 60’x 30’ 25’ (20m x 10m x 8m). This would be where some oomph is needed.

Honestly, this is a perfect use-case for the old MacPros (2009-2012) – particularly with the dual Xeon configuration [†] – they are notorious for their turboprop fans and exhorbitant powerbills.

You can usually get one for free (or less, "doing them a favor") via social media. I just gave one away (because the receiver had a better use for it than my XMR mining).

Make sure you use fan-boosting software, to keep everything less than 80°C. See you on the network!

[†] A MacPro5,1 with 12 cores will hash at about half the rate of a modern AMD Ryzen7 chip, using twice the electricity – perfect for your localized toe-heater (they also have incredible airflow, with MacFanControl software; in Linux, disconnect the PCI fan [∑] and the four CPU fans will full-blast). GPU is irrelevant for monero-mining (the stock GT120 [or 57X0] is perfect for this).

[∑] it's useless – or you can disconnect CPU_B_BOOST (fan), which is even more useless (but more-difficult/dangerous: do NOT disconnect _A_)... this makes the BIOS full-blast all remaining fans

NB: Newer i5s (mid-2010s) will hash at identical rates, but use much less power [not ideal for this situation] – but they tend to not have great heatsinks so you may have to run less cores.

I have an xserve that could work and the last Mac G5 tower dual processor dual core with multiple graphics card.

The GPUs won't help you (with Monero); honestly, I don't think the G5 is capable either (but don't know with certainty).

Among the most important parts are having dual-channel RAM that is fast, and the G5 is going to not be capable of that.

Maybe they could start a Archive@Home project for volunteers to donate unused disk space for the greater good.

I know I'd love to run something like this!

They do have that. All archives have torrents.

Which means somewhat popular, somewhat larger have backups. Important would be backups for things nobody else is interested in. The ones where one person in 10 years will ask for.

And half those torrents are missing half their files because the torrent generator races with the upload process and often runs on a half completed upload.

This has been a problem for years at this point and they still haven’t fixed it, it’s frankly bizarre.

https://getdweb.net/ is that project.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222

> As noted the Internet Archive is experimenting with filecoin.io and storj.io and is always open to suggestions about how we might do our jobs better, and improve our service. We also host regular meetups (and have hosted summits and a camp) related to the Decentralized Web. See: https://blog.archive.org/tag/dweb/

Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46613324 - February 2026 (119 comments)

u/stavros proposed "Elephant" as well, which could be implemented today without Archive.org's explicit assistance.

Elephant system design - https://gist.github.com/skorokithakis/68984ef699437c5129660d... (A distributed, voluntary backup system (high-level design document))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637992 (additional context)

(TLDR Every Archive.org item has a torrent, enabling distributed replication and serving of archived items and their contents, Wayback is a bit trickier; you can also ask your local nation state and museum/preservation apparatus to colocate some IA racks, if one is so inclined; The Internet Archive’s entire annual budget ($30M-$40M) covers 200PB storage plus all operations)

Isn't storj a crypto thing? I don't think they'd want to be involved. I get the sense they are idealists

They are idealists but also like cryptocurrency and decentralization. I recognize that's pretty rare since the late 2010's reputation of various coins and their environmental impact but IA is heavily associated with (and received much money from) FileCoin:

https://ffdweb.org/

(and I am not saying it's bad, or indeed good, just that the usual expectations of being pro- or anti- cryptocurrency or AI don't easily map to things like the Archive)

The Internet Archive can store data in perpetuity for ~$3/GB one time (estimated based on recent AI driven hardware inflation, used to be $2/GB).

https://blog.dshr.org/2026/01/internet-archives-storage.html

https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/internet-archive-storage.html

https://archive-it.org/vault/

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