
Storj: Not a Dropbox Killer - davidgerard
https://shitcoin.com/storj-not-a-dropbox-killer-1a9f27983d70
======
blunte
Unfortunately for the author of this amazing (and cringeworthy) exercise,
skeptics often put in a lot of effort, but receive practically no reward
compared to the con artist.

Even the people who agree with and appreciate the effort of the skeptics are
few compared to the number of irrational people who gladly follow the cons.

This is a bit radical (and probably outside the interest of HN), but if we
somehow could remove personal financial need from society, imagine where our
technologies might be driven?... instead of where they typically get hijacked
and driven.

Television was once lauded as the future best thing to ever happen to
education, but we know how that turned out. Same with the internet and web.
And so on. Blockchain technologies are now the hottest and most ideal way to
build a scam, because the audience is greedy and the technology is well beyond
the comprehension of the average person.

~~~
ivm
Not radical at all, greed ruins everything.

The more we can decrease it in society – the more freedom we'll all get.

~~~
vortico
How do you suggest we do that?

~~~
aaron-lebo
Build great stuff and don't be greedy - set an example. Make those greedy over
mediocrity look bad. Build for the sake of building, because that's reward
enough.

~~~
dsacco
Maybe that's enough of a reward for you, but personally I work because I like
to get paid. The fact that I enjoy my work immensely is just a happy accident.
There are things I enjoy doing even more than my work - much more so! - and if
I did not need to get paid, I'd be doing those things instead.

~~~
proofofstake
Just wondering: If you got so rich from crypto currency that you could retire,
would you retire? Start your own company? Just do fun stuff? Or keep working?

I myself work, to occupy myself with interesting problems, so I would keep
doing this, regardless of my wealth.

~~~
dsacco
Wealthy enough to really never work again? Yes, I'd absolutely "retire." I'd
still "work", in the sense that, say, angel investors work, or people own real
estate; I'd also still write software in my free time.

But for the most part, no I wouldn't continue doing what I do now because I'd
stop consulting and I would never again be an individual contributor. I'd
probably devote "professional focus" to investing and academic research in
math and cryptography while traveling all over the world like Tom from
Myspace.

I think in conversations like this the dimension people like myself are
talking about is freedom. I'd still work on what I'm passionate about even if
I was wealthy, I would just cease doing it in a way that I don't have total
control and direction over my work. That circles back to my original point -
my passion for my work is not nearly enough of an incentive for me to do it if
I'm not doing it with total autonomy.

~~~
nevertoolate
But, but what about love, friendship and the feeling of connectedness? Is
freedom what people should desire?

------
axiom
Looks like the Storj coin is trading higher now than when it first launched.

[https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/storj/](https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/storj/)

The level of fraud and stupidity in the ICO world is pretty shocking. It's not
going to be pretty when the bubble bursts.

~~~
nebabyte
There was that SEC report a while back that sounded like it was gonna end the
wild west era of ICOs, and though I don't keep up with ICO news I haven't
heard of any big new launches in a while.

~~~
davidgerard
Almost all crypto market action is in China. And the ICO market there is so
pathological that it's the _exchanges_ asking for regulation.

[http://news.8btc.com/okcoin-ceo-host-non-public-ico-
regulati...](http://news.8btc.com/okcoin-ceo-host-non-public-ico-regulation-
meeting-in-beijing)

~~~
mdpopescu
The incumbents are always in favor of regulation, it prevents competition.

~~~
davidgerard
I think in this case it's more that they already have various governments
breathing down their necks, so a show of regulation is just the thing - and
trying to blame the terrible assets they're trading, rather than being blamed
themselves for putting them up for trading.

------
to3m
bookchin:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/storj/comments/6llxpn/so_long_frien...](https://www.reddit.com/r/storj/comments/6llxpn/so_long_friends/)

I followed the storj reddit for a while, since I bought into the crowdsale
with Bitcoin. (Since sold. There was some kind of pump the other week on
bittrex.) After the crowdsale, they appeared to be really rather disorganised.
They took the $30m, sent everybody receipts, and then... nothing. No
newsletters, no mails, no nothing, aside from occasional promises on reddit
from one of the founders that things would improve. But they never really did.
Couldn't even be bothered to wipe their noses and put their pants back on for
long enough to click 'send' on a form email ;) Top marks for actually having a
product, though...

BTC and ETH have appreciated significantly since the crowdsale finished, so
heaven knows how much that $30m is worth now, and/or what they're going to do
with it...

~~~
wakkaflokka
I wonder if there's something illegal or fraudulent about raising all that
money and then doing a half-assed job on the project?

I understand there's a thin line between a failed business venture and
outright fraud/lying, but stories like this seem so slimy.

~~~
Fifer82
I don't think so. Is that not 90% of Kick starters purpose?

~~~
tptacek
No. You can't sell equity on Kickstarter.

~~~
jstanley
ICOs aren't equity either.

------
thinbeige
A blockchain is at the end of the day nothing else than a distributed database
where everyone can run nodes.

This is a hell of an effort and everyone who is using this 'feature' needs a
very good reason and use case which justifies the costs.

Every new ICO should answer the question if a distributed BFT database is
required. If yes is the benefit big enough? If not then just forget it. Or
invest and sell the first minute this scam is on an exchange.

About Storj and similar coins: why do I want a decentral Dropbox? If I want to
host my files in the cloud, what is the benefit of having a distributed
decentral BFT db?

~~~
cosinetau
> why do I want a decentral Dropbox?

The easiest reason I can think of is privacy and anti-censorship. From current
events, some groups may experience more and more trouble hosting their content
on "public" providers like Google, Dropbox, or Amazon.

Decentralization is an astute counter.

------
aaron-lebo
How much storj you wanna bet that Gordon Hall guy is the only person in the
world who understands the entirety of Storj? Scary.

What relation does he have with the project? He's not even listed on the team:

[https://storj.io/team.html](https://storj.io/team.html)

 _There was a $30MM ICO which ended May 25th. The price of ETH was $177 at the
time. Not bad! Dropbox’ first seed round was only $15,000._

I don't get it. Don't understand why people want to get a lot of money, put a
ton of pressure on themselves, and then put out a shoddy half-baked, half-
finished product. You see this with almost all software now but the
cryptocurrency craze has made it endemic. People who have shown nothing are
getting 30 million dollars in funding. Shouldn't you earn it first? Isn't that
healthy?

You guys don't need $30 million dollars to do stuff like this. You're lying to
yourself if believe you do. This is $30k effort. How about putting your head
down, shutting your mouth, building something great, and then showing the
world? Is that crazy? You can only assume these people are more about $$$ than
what they are building.

~~~
sp0rkyd0rky
hi, i'm gordon. and yeah, unfortunately i might be the only person who
understands the entirety of the core library. yeah, that's scary. but i
wouldn't bet any storj tokens on it because the payoff wouldn't be so great.

i'm not listed on the team anymore, because i - along with several others left
the project during and after the token sale (empty handed, mind you) for
various reasons.

i agree, storj didn't need $30mm (but did need more than $30k though, to be
fair).

> You can only assume these people are more about $$$ than what they are
> building.

a reasonable assumption, but let's draw the line between those _building_ and
those _profiting_ , because this assumption is not fair (or accurate) in
describing the people who actually did the building.

~~~
subsubsub
Hi Gordon, sorry if this is too far off topic, but what software did you use
to make your awesome github profile photo?

~~~
sp0rkyd0rky
Haha, `libcaca` FTW
[http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca](http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca)

------
brndnmtthws
It's worth checking out Sia, which doesn't seem to get much attention:
[https://sia.tech/](https://sia.tech/)

It works, they have an active development team, and the network keeps growing:
[https://siahub.info/map](https://siahub.info/map)

~~~
nissehulth
Agree, Sia does look very promising. But plenty of work needs to be done
before it is a real product. The first-use experience isn't good right now.

~~~
brndnmtthws
How many technically challenging products have been overnight successes?

One thing that is really confounding about all the anti-blockchain rhetoric on
HN is that people seem to expect these products to be finished
instantaneously. Building great products takes years.

~~~
nissehulth
True, but if you visit a site like [http://sia.tech/](http://sia.tech/) , in
my opinion it gives the impression of a product ready to use today. Though if
you look at their roadmap [https://trello.com/b/Io1dDyuI/sia-public-
roadmap](https://trello.com/b/Io1dDyuI/sia-public-roadmap) , you get another
(more realistic) picture.

------
dna_polymerase
What bugs me the most about the whole ICO game is that it casts a long dark
shadow about the whole blockchain stuff. Storj as well as other ideas in the
realm are based on great ideas and I'd love to see them succeed. However, that
Storj was able to obtain $30M in funding is really just awful. Sooner or later
the cryptocoin market will crash and when this day comes and those projects
still have no inherent value a lot of people will be pissed and leave the
whole blockchain thing.

~~~
blfr
People didn't leave the Internet because of the dot com bubble burst. If
blockchain has an advantage over more centralized approaches, it will bounce
back as well.

~~~
dna_polymerase
In the dotcom bust investors lost their money, not the users. In the crypto
world you are an user when you are invested (in smaller or larger extent). I
agree, if blockchain apps really prove to be more powerful a possible bust
won't really hurt, but in this state we are right now (no real world adoption
for most of the stuff) a bust would be toxic.

~~~
JetSpiegel
In this ICO bubble clueless investors are losing their money too. There's
enough scams to go around for everyone.

------
redm
A flip side of the (crypto)coin so to speak.

I invested in Storj, and I also put some resources behind farming. First,
there are lots of issues, but that's to be expected with an early product. At
least there is a product. Second, this is a very different project than
Dropbox, a centralized cloud storage originally built on AWS. Comparing the
two is exactly fair, and the long term value proposition of Story is very
different from Dropbox. Third, They are building the platform, and as it
improves, the clients will get better, simpler, and a community will form;
give it more time. Fourth, Dropbox was founded in 2007; it took substantial
time to get the front end polished and working well. This product is more
about the AWS side of the Dropbox equation than the Dropbox side.

Finally, some results on my Storj farming. Not super easy to use, not super
efficient, but working, and I expect it will get better. I have farmed about
15TB of data (storage) since the ICO. Its growing too; so there are real
paying users using it.

~~~
dsr_
15TB is a lot for an individual, tiny for a business. What is your current
estimate of time to breakeven?

~~~
redm
I don't think there is a path to break even for storage alone, today. The real
earnings seem to be in the transfer rates, but traffic is too low to ever
consider it as anything other than an experiment. I heard Storj was going to
prioritize farmers by latency and bandwidth; now that I've been reading about
the turmoil, I'm not confident it will happen anytime soon.

My payout last month was ~$5 and I was in the top 30 by payout, if I remember
correctly, but I had only received a couple of TB of data. This month has been
much better, so maybe ~$100 but mostly because of data transfer. I've seen
peak bandwidth of over 400Mbps in and out (800Mbps combined).

Interestingly, a number of the top earners have been trying to game the system
by uploading a small amount of data until the shard ends up on their node and
then doing the massive transfer to generate more Storj than the cost of the
transit.

------
octalmage
To be fair this is how most pre-release software looks. I'm sure it works
great on their test servers, but it takes time to document and fix all of the
edge cases.

------
rburhum
I understand the appeal of ICOs and cryptocurrencies and distributed storage
that is automatically shared, decentralized, etc etc. But a part of me says
"is this complexity necessary?". The appeal of a service like Dropbox is that
it is simple. Most engineer friends I had at the time when services like Box
and Dropbox started popping up, laughed at the idea... "It is just a fancy
ftp". Now they all use these services in one way or another.

Simplicity is often an important overlooked killer feature.

And this is exactly the polar oppossite of that!

A friend of mine that has been doing ICOs behind the scenes (there is an
entire methodology that makes them successful that include some questionable
marketing techniques) has been pushing me to do an ICO. But one of the
requirements is that the service you provide is directly tied to the currency
itself. This file storage service is a perfect example of that. A
cryptocurrency looking for a service that works with a paradigm vs a service
that just centers on being useful for customers. I am just not interested in
doing that...

I can't deny that this has been useful and profitable for him. Here has been
doing successful multimilliondollar ICOs where he charges 100k a pop. To me,
it just seems like such a scam to take advantage of this bubble, that I'd
rather just build a healthy successful business "the old way"

~~~
ve55
So they're basically an ICO consultant or contractor? It looks like it's just
as profitable to him as it sounds.

As far as those marketing techniques go, I'm aware of a lot of them such as
paying for press releases or articles and paying users to shill their ICO
everywhere, buying twitter followers, etc, but I wonder how much worse it
gets. I guess it depends on the ICO and those behind it, some obviously 'just'
use shady tactics while others completely lie and defraud investors.

~~~
rburhum
sadly much worse. Without getting into many details, part of the tactics
involves writing a pseudo paper and then getting endorsements from high
profile people within a specific community. It is legal, but shady as hell
IMHO.

------
api
"Too complex."

This. Developers really must spend a lot more time and mental energy on UX if
they intend things to be used by anyone other than developers with lots of
time in their hands.

------
sp527
What's the likelihood that ISPs will levy higher rates on bandwidth for things
like Storj and Filecoin? This 'next-generation' model of enabling people to
profit off of cheap/unlimited internet packages seems like a juicy target.

~~~
bastawhiz
Probably not much because Storj is effectively broken and Filecoin basically
doesn't exist yet.

------
djhworld
As far as I can see their idea is to incentivise people to "rent out" hard
drive space to the Storj network, and get StorjTokens in return, although it's
not quite clear from the website what you can do with these coins or what
value they hold.

I think it's interesting, I guess protocols like BitTorrent don't work for
personal files as you need seeders to be available at all times....I'm half
inclined to think Storj might suffer from the same issue if every node that is
storing replicas of your blocks goes away - or will the financial "incentive"
be enough for people to keep their nodes alive.

What happens if the value of Storj just drops to the floor?

------
abrkn
I'm the author and didn't notice this post on HN. I have reviewed another
blockchain product! The review will be live on shitcoin.com at around 7 AM EST
on Monday.

------
amelius
Does anybody here know of a good video/tech-talk that gives an in-depth
introduction to blockchain technology? Something at academic level, and good
for a Sunday afternoon? Thanks in advance!

~~~
dave7
This is much more basic than academic level, for which you could maybe start
with the original Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin white paper? - but this video is a
fantastic introduction
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8)

------
Rjevski
I'm still curious as to how is this profitable to whoever created it. There is
a shit ton of code in this project - this same amount of code written for an
employer or commercial project would net the author quite a bit of money - so
what's the benefit creating this abomination (that doesn't even work) versus
just working on something actually useful?

------
anovikov
This one has done whole lot more for their money than vast majority of other
ICO 'startups' that have nothing but nice site and a water-filled, meaningless
whitepaper.

------
mmargerum
Seems like this competes more with the free

[https://upspin.io](https://upspin.io)

------
paultopia
Wait wait wait isn't Storj what Pied Piper ultimately turned into, plus a
cryptocurrency for extra hype?

Life imitating fiction imitating life...

~~~
bousaid
This was started long before Silicon Valley...

------
tym0
People that chain commands without && makes me cringe, I had an Infra guy
delete a prod website once like that...

~~~
andyroid
No idea how command chaining could be involved in that (would love to know
though!) but if somebody mistakenly takes down a production service from lack
of command chaining, let's just say command chaining would probably be the
least of my concerns.

------
paulcnichols
shitcoin.com is an inspired domain name!

~~~
hyperfekt
I was surprised he managed to snag it. At the current rate of ICO
proliferation I expected there to be at least two dozen waste reusal coins
already.

------
mungoid
Ive been looking for more 'technical skeptic' posts about cash-grab cryptos,
so this author better post more articles like this.

Got tired of hearing about some new amazing, world changing crypto coming out
and then spending hours researching only to end up with a bad taste in my
mouth. Both for the community and the tech itself.

------
brad0
Good write up! It's great to see people testing out these projects.

