They started their ICO on Counterparty and then migrated to Ethereum and in my view at that stage (migration) it looked like they were competing (to me) with what was being called Filecoin... which did not go anywhere quickly. Then SiaCoin also came into place... and took over some great community. But then, the instability of crypto markets killed it quite a bit (in my view).
Distributed storage was a hard game to make business with (if you want to compare it with “THE CLOUD” thing).
Storj took a couple of steps back... at the same time, the market reactions costed lots to many that probably (mistakenly) saw the token as an investment opportunity (even with the token not being a security). Then they decided to re'think the solution and make it more "Enterprise" level. I mean... really Business level, but with the perks of crypto and decentralization mixed in.
This facilitated some perspectives on how to create a healthy economic structure where service providers and customers could both take the best out of it.
If you want to check more info about Storj, check their archived stories at: https://storj.io/blog/archive
Or if you wish to get in touch with other Storj community members, ask questions or find how the Storj team looks like, give it a check at: https://forum.storj.io
This is my working Windows GUI Demo server, which will be sort of an average of what I expect that will appear on the market as service providers I would say. Probably even above in terms of space. Around 4-8TB of space is probably the sweet spot of guess. And in terms of bandwidth, unfortunately, because people don't really all have great routers or know how to configure them efficiently, I can't comment.
The big issue is availability. Having +95% of uptime is quite hard for most "houses" PCs... But as word of encouragement, I can tell you it's possible. I have done it... way above that (once at least).
The next tests I will love to do, are on a proper Linux Server, with more Storage. But before that I need to see how things go... then try out the Client access too, hard!
I mean, I am after 10Gbps connections. If that can be archived at an interesting cost, then, I can use this on HPC (High Performance Computing).
Also, in smaller (in terms of storage requirements) applications, if this is fast enough to replace temporary research buckets that later end up inside HPC clusters, then this can become a very interesting product for the work environment I try to provide to researchers.
Personally, this could even take an interesting business model I am yet studying. Basically providing temporary storage for things that are either very complicated to communicate with (like buoys, small subs, micro-satellites for surveillance or Earth scanning using IR for example, etc), that usually depend on the location to authenticate and upload data.
Being dependent on a couple of servers is way different, when you compare with an infrastructure that has tons of them with high reliability, throughput, encryption and endpoint discovery.
Is it profitable? I am not sure yet. But the promoted amounts sounded very attractive. Especially if you already have something contracted and you are not using it in full.
I will be exploring the next developments on the following up months. If you have any questions, let me know.
On 19 November 2019, Storj just made this update. Intersting to see that Uploads are free to customers... which means that if you are considering a backup solution with Storj, you can already see the advantage here against many other cloud storage providers.
It's not everyday that you need to "restore" things and paying a very small fee if you need to is really interesting.
I will update this post if meanwhile I find more intersting stuff.
This post was re-blogged on Storj Forum.
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