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Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

Also, there's really no reason for this to be a special device. It easily be a blob on your computer's hard drive. An availability problem for laptops, but you'd best have that problem solved anyway since residential internet connections aren't exactly 100% uptime affairs.

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Also, there's really no reason for this to be a special device.

It will vastly increase reliability, though. I can think of many reasons why having it on a general purpose hard drive is a really bad idea (turned off accidentally, freezes due to bad apps, virus infection, etc, etc).

Come to think of it, there's really no reason you couldn't do both, and I wonder if this system does.

It's 100% an availability problem, and integrity of the network is important. Desktops/laptops would give ~20% availability, a dedicated device will give ~80%. Think of how much the common user leaves a computer on vs a router or NAS.

You would probably want to build in some kind of automatic reputation system. You wouldn't want people to be able to use more space than they are making available to other people and nodes that are temperamental or have bad availability would drop in reputation and therefore not be relied on as much (You probably want to distribute data over both high reputation and low reputation nodes).

In general although I like the idea of an open source version of this I think the problem becomes so much harder as you don't have a central authority to prevent misuse of it and therefor have to build that into the protocol from the beginning.

Hmmm, I think this may be one of those wedges that gets stuck in my brain and ticks over for a while. Its quite a fun problem to try and solve.

I absolutely agree, but I don't think it would be all that difficult to have a network of peers judge the reputation of a node. Yes, it would be possible for individuals to inject bad information, but unless they can compromise an extensive portion of the network, that information would be overridden by that of legitimate nodes. Then all you have to do is make it so that it would cost more to compromise the network than you would gain by compromising it.

If bitcoin can use a peer-to-peer system to come to a consensus on the validity of financial transactions, it should be possible for a peer-to-peer cloud storage system to come to a consensus on how reliable a node is, and how valuable it is to the network.

That's exactly what we're building at https://degoo.com

Interesting. So what are you doing in terms of samwillis' comment about user reputation?

Also, there's really no reason for this to be a special device. It easily be a blob on your computer's hard drive

Uh... If it was on your computer's hard drive and your hard drive failed, it wouldn't be much use as a backup system, would it?

The point is that your backups would be replicated to blobs on other people's hard drives, so you'd still be able to recover your data.

Whoops, I understand now! Thanks.

This sounds like http://www.wuala.com/

You can do this with CrashPlan for free today.

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