The use of hard drive mining is extending its presence in the crypto market. Just this past week both Burst and Storj has reach the top 100 in market cap based on coinmarketcap.com.
Today we focus on Storj token currently ranked ~98th and ~11,400 satoshi. The token is an ERC-20 token therefore transactions are based on ETH platform and the token can be stored on an ETH wallet, which includes hardware wallets like the Ledger Nano S. There is currently a cap of 500 million tokens and an additional 245 million tokens locked up by its developers for future use. The locked tokens are intended for future investing and enhancing of Storj.
Storj was introduced around 2014 as a peer to peer sharing and storing data on hard drives. The way to mine the token is through the use of sharing hdd space on the Storj's platform. In order to earn Storj the hdd space you share, being a seller, must be used by someone else, a buyer. So basically buyer of hdd space pays an amount set by the seller for an amount of hdd storage and the payment to the person selling their hdd drive space is in Storj.
There are increasing value to Storj due in part that the developers are finding new ways of using the token. For instance if users who have Storj tokens wants to rent out hdd drive rather than spending fiat they can use Storj as payment. If you were wondering the data being stored via use of Storj platform is encrypted hence people who rent out their hdd space will not have access to the files. Storj will offer options for renters to purchase redundant hdd space to store data in case user who is selling their hdd is offline there are additional backup nodes.
The goal of Storj is to decentralized cloud storage. An ambitious goal as there are massive investment in this field by companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alibaba. Storj's website advertises their rates for storage is much more affordable than Amazon.
I personally have not used this storage program and will likely not use it in the future as I do not have much that needs to be stored in the cloud. Others may need it for storing movies, music, programs, etc. The copyright of materials or storage of illegal material is a concern however Storj is unable to know if users have broken the rules. This is because the developers of Storj has no access to the data hence can not review its content for compliance with the law. This is a big sell point that no other big company can offer. The data only accessible by user who has the correct credentials.