After becoming intrigued by the concept of using blockchain technology for a solution to decentralized storage. I saw a few currencies that had similarities, seemingly aiming to do just that.
The concept is that you rent out your hard-drive space and ultimately receive payment in the currency. From my research, the currencys Sia, Storj and MaidSAFE are all similar, here is an article which gives a short comparison of each.
I decided to share my drive space with Storj, mainly because it looked as though everything was up and running, and had been for a while. It was a breeze to set up, download the Storj-Share application and dedicate some hard-drive space in the easy to use GUI application. You can even use any external drive or storage device, which is what I did. To test the waters, I simply used a couple 8gb USB drives and left it running for 3-4 days.
I checked regularly to see if things were running smoothly or if my drive space was even being used. Yes, things worked fine, and around 10% of my drive space had already been used up. I believe this would have been higher if I had a more stable internet connection(Storj rinses your bandwidth, be cautious!).
After about a week of renting out my drive space, thinking things were going well, I came to check on the application. The drives weren't shown in the GUI panel! I tried to use the IMPORT CONFIG to restore the previous drives and configuration but it was to no avail. After a few hours google searching and trying different suggestions to restore the drives, I gave up. It seems Storj development has been placed on hold, and it all seems a bit flimsy to be storing anything valuable. I'm not 100% clear on how the data would be recovered from an offline node, all I know is each file is split into multiple fragments and stored across multiple drives on the network, this ensures privacy and protects from the data being stolen. If anyone can clear up EXACTLY what happens if a Storj node goes offline for good, will the data still be available by the original uploader? I have not since restarted the node as I would have to reformat the drives etc. If a solution is possible I would rather wait to restart Storj-share for the sake of not losing whatever data is stored on the drives.
As well as renting out my drive space with Storj, I decided to mine some Sia (as you need at least 500 before you can start using the service), I haven't been able to use the service as of yet, this is because Sia takes an age to synchronize, as well as taking a while to mine the initial 500 coins. I will update you all on my experience once I do try it!
I've not tried MaidSAFE, nor read up on it much, but if you guys have, or have further info I'd be happy to hear!
Let's all work together to keep the blockchain revolution Steeming along.
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