Storj – Blockchain-based decentralized storage network

I'm a hacker so when I met the head of storj at texas bitcoin conference I was hammering him with technical questions... they had a sketchy front end in python but when it came down to brass tacks on storage all I got was something like "well for now we're just uploading it to box.net"

I'll go ahead and throw my cryptocurrency into the pile too: www.siacoin.com.

For both StorJ and MaidSAFE, I believe that each has a development team which is taking money and has full intentions of completing their cryptocurrency. We are the same way, have taken around $120,000 from the community and now have a handshake deal with an investor for a substantially larger sum.

Nobody has a working prototype, so there's definitely a race right now. Permacoin looks like the newest of all, only having just released a whitepaper. They also seem to have the most complete whitepaper.

I'm also curious to see what happens in the beginning, and if it hits the elbow, when there isn't sufficient storage space on the network to meet demand.

Whitepaper briefly goes over this. The user or application software get to decide their replication number N. The network is self healing, as in if a portion of a file misses a heartbeat(check in) the network will recover it from the other peices.

To affect a file large amount of nodes would have to go down simultaneously. Again the user has control over this N = 1 - Data failure N = 3 - Good for just average cases. Probably still Sybil attacks possible if the have 20-30% of the network. N = 100 - Are you expecting tactical nuclear strikes or acts of God?

Cool thing is if you increase redundancy to a large number Storj starts to act like a CDN or torrent network. But thats outside the scope of your question.

Note the whitepaper is outdated. We are in the process of rewriting it. Its a better description of Metadisk, which is one of our front end web apps.

The metadata for the file is stored in a blockchain. The actually data may live on a centralized or decentralized source.

Is there a permacoin blockchain running right now?

I'm not an expert on StorJ, but I'm the Permacoin author. As far as I can tell, Permacoin is a possible candidate for the "proof of resource" puzzle that StorJ opaquely says they'll need (though they don't provide any details). Permacoin is fairly conservative, in that we give a specific description of a storage-based puzzle, and argue that it satisfies exactly the same requirements that Bitcoin's current proof-of-work puzzle does. In other words we aimed for security first, useful side effect second (which is why we only claim to support archival storage, as opposed to full featured Dropbox-like functionality).

If StorJ uses a different puzzle construction, and are not rigorous about its security, then there are two possible mistakes to make: 1. it does not correct incentivize the incentivized storage behavior - it may be possible to game their system and avoid storing useful data 2. it does not satisfy important security requirements from Bitcoin - it may be possible to game their system and make off with a lot of storjcoins using less work

I'd take a look at some of my writings for meta transactions and templates here: https://github.com/Storj/Metadisk/wiki

Bitcoin only supports up to 80 byte of data per transaction, our model uses 1 kb or more, which makes unusable for our current platform. We are not creating another cryptocurrency just for the sake of doing so. There are many technical reasons why we can't do this yet.

So we already have a long term plan to implement sidechains or treechains. Currently this is only concept/vaporware, so we are not waiting around until it happens.

That ran through my mind too. Getting paid for your unused storage sounds nice, but what happens when illegal content ends up on your drive?

The idea of "illegal" content will fade, replaced by methods that introduce scarcity to digital assets.

Data is not stored on the blockchain in our system. Simply "file pointers".

Presumably "Cheese Pizza" is slang for child exploitation material?

You are severely mistaken. Read the paper.

Our web application, Metadisk, is being prototyped on the Datacoin blockchain, because it is the only cryptocurrecy that supports data transactions over 80 bytes.