

Storj Crowdsale - trundlingtrain
http://storj.io/crowdsale.html

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Taek
Why does storj need 6 million dollars? What are they planning on doing with
it?

One problem with Storj is that their technical contributions to the field have
been very minimal, the best I can tell is that they've introduced
'BitCumulis', which is a 'modular' design for integrating multiple solutions
such as those presented in MaidSAFE and ethereum. They haven't actually made
any convincing contributions to the bigger problems.

From what I can tell, storj is a front-end that is waiting for other teams to
solve their proof of storage and proof of bandwidth problems. And I don't
understand how that calls for 9800 BTC.

~~~
tinkerrr
For those who don't know about the MaidSAFE project, The Whitepaper (a good
read):
[https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-...](https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-
Safe.md) here's their code:
[https://github.com/maidsafe](https://github.com/maidsafe) This project is
something that's quite interesting in its scope. It goes to see how successful
they'll be in implementing all of this, and how robust the system would turn
out (e.g. would someone lose data if 10% of the network magically disappears
overnight)

~~~
walden42
IMO this deserves a lot more attention than storj. It's everything storj has,
plus a whole decentralized internet infrastructure upon which other
decentralized applications can be built. It seems the most logical way
forward.

~~~
thefreeman
Same. I have tried submitting a few different pages on the site but it never
seems to get any traction.

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kordless
I'm working on a highly distributed coop cloud built with OpenStack and
Bitcoin: [https://www.stackmonkey.com/](https://www.stackmonkey.com/). The
appliance is in beta as of yesterday, but the site is still in progress.

I'm at a slightly different layer of the stack - one that might be
advantageous for users wanting to run decentralized offerings like Storj and
Maidsafe without having to do the deployments themselves. If any of the Storj
guys are interested, we should talk. I'm also somewhat interested in the
crowdfunding aspect and technology behind it.

~~~
super3
Yeah I came across that a few weeks ago. Glad to know you are making progress.
Can you contact me via hello@storj.io, and lets figure out some ways we can
work directly together. Storj doesn't believe in competition, we instead want
to find ways to collaborate with those in the decentralized data space.

~~~
kordless
Emailed you! Thanks!

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leni536
The whitepaper:
[http://storj.io/paper/storj.pdf](http://storj.io/paper/storj.pdf)

Where can I find some precise protocol specifications? The whitepaper is full
of handwaving about the critical parts (namely Proof of Resource).

~~~
tinkerrr
I think they are mostly waiting for MaidSAFE to solve that problem, which is a
group that's actually serious about the intricate technology that needs to go
into this, and all the special cases (e.g. how many times do you need to
replicate a chunk of data to make sure it isn't lost when people turn off
their computers). See
[https://github.com/maidsafe](https://github.com/maidsafe)

~~~
Taek
I've been mostly unimpressed with MaidSAFE approach to the storage problem.

They (last I checked) are approaching the problem by using quadruple
redundancy, no erasure coding. This opens some attack vectors, because an
attacker only needs to control 4/4 pieces, something that takes a probability
of (attacker control)^4 . Their proof of storage also seems to use nonce's,
which require precomputation before uploading the file, and means a limited
amount of proofs before you have to fetch the file and compute a bunch of
other nonce's.

The biggest problem with MaidSAFE's stuff is that it's all over the place.
There's no concise document that explains proof-of-storage. Their approach
seems enormously complex, which to me indicates a huge likelihood of
undetected vulnerabilities (complexity is bad when you want security).

------
sqs
How does this relate to Filecoin?

[http://filecoin.io/](http://filecoin.io/)
[http://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf](http://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf)

~~~
leni536
I really couldn't find any precise information about storj but the dummy
slides are showing some really different scheme for POR.

Also I think filecoin has a mistake. If it ever gets popular then it is
possible that the difficulty would be quite high (in the scale of GBs). In
that case you can't effectively mine only if you share at least 1 TB of your
hard drive below that the expected reward for a block would be near 0. It
would drive the network to centralization. The expectation reward for a block
isn't linearly proportional to your shared disk space but a convex function of
it.

On the other hand it would be possible to implement mining pools which could
somewhat solve this problem.

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mu_killnine
I wish there was some way to participate in this using my NAS. I don't want to
keep a PC online all the time just to service other folks' storage requests.

Sounds like a neat idea for a homebrew Synology package.

~~~
super3
Check out some of the numbers before your decide anything:
[http://blog.storj.io/post/88303701698/storj-vs-dropbox-
cost](http://blog.storj.io/post/88303701698/storj-vs-dropbox-cost)

------
placeybordeaux
Why did they create their own cryptocurrency with this? Why not just pay
people for their storage space in bitcoin?

~~~
Taek
They need to store things in the blockchain, namely meta-data. I think there
are also a few other changes that they made to the blockchain structure that
would have made it very hard to simply use Bitcoin.

I imagine that they'll at least merge-mine with Bitcoin.

~~~
super3
This exactly. We also wanted to separate the payment protocol from the data
protocol.

If sidechains or treechains become viable we plan to merge it back in to
Bitcoin proper.

