Startup company Storj has a new twist on an old service, they are offering secure, distributed storage but the storage is located on hard drives which consumers are renting to them. You can set up an account and get 1.5 cents per gigabyte you give to them. You certainly are not going to get rich running out and buying some SSDs to use but if you have a few old HDDs kicking around perhaps you would like to make a few crypto-coins on the side. They current have 8200 farmers and more than 15000 users so there is certainly some interest. On the other hand residential internet stability and the reliability of consumer hard drives could lead to unexpected interruptions to your access. Drop by The Register for links to sign up for the service or sell some space if you are interested.
"The network consists of the internet and a shared community of “farmers”, users who rent out their spare desktop hard drive space and bandwidth. Payment, at $0.015/GB, is via a cryptocurrency: namely, Bitcoin."
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Suggested edit: The quote and
Suggested edit: The quote and the article do not have the same money referenced. $0.015/GB is not 1.5 cents per gigabyte.
$0.01 = 1 cent
$0.01 = 1 cent
half cents are a thing, there
half cents are a thing, there is just no physical currency for it (currently).
LMAO you are so fucking
LMAO you are so fucking stupid
$0.015/GB x 1,000GB = $15.
$0.015/GB x 1,000GB = $15. Is that per month? That seems pretty good.
From the github:
paymentModelFunction = function(gbHours, telemReports, downloadedBytes) {
gbHoursScaled = (gbHours – mean(gbHours)) / sd(gbHours)
telemReportsScaled = (telemReports – mean(telemReports)) / sd(telemReports)
downloadedBytesScaled = (downloadedBytes – mean(downloadedBytes)) / sd(downloadedBytes)
basePayout = 30
ghHourPayout = 12.2221 * gbHoursScaled
telemReportsPayout = 0.1452 * telemReportsScaled
downloadedBytesPayout = 12.6849 * downloadedBytesScaled
finalPayout = ghHourPayout + telemReportsPayout + downloadedBytesPayout + basePayout
}
https://storj.io/share.html
S
https://storj.io/share.html
What can you even do with
What can you even do with bitcoins?
This seems like a really,
This seems like a really, really, really bad idea even on the surface. The likelihood someone would use this service to store docs they don’t want on their own drive seems very high. This might include child pornography. No effing way.
I have 2TB to spare on my
I have 2TB to spare on my home server.
I might install the client on a VM and see how much I can get for it. If I can actually have 1.5 cents/TB, that would mean I can make back the money I’ve spent on a 2TB HDD in 2 months. The formula for payout calculation is real convoluted though.
Having reasearched it a bit,
Having reasearched it a bit, this looks extremely sketchy.
1) The payout formula is convoluted
2) They pay you in their own special cryptocurrency (while charging customers real money)
3) That special cryptocurrency goes into a special kind of wallet, maintained by a third party, the operation of which depends on you having bitcoin
I can imagine a billion ways in which renting out your storage can turn out to be at best a waste of your time and at worst a reason for the authorities to seize your devices and/or bank account.
Yeah, I am a bit skeptical on
Yeah, I am a bit skeptical on this service because they are paying out in SJCX (their own Storj altcoin) and not direct BTC or $USD and @quest4glory's concern that it could be used for illegal activities and much like people that want to be TOR exit nodes they could get caught up in the crossfire of an investigation.
It is a neat idea and something I imagined as a kid (the general concept of distributed storage on everyone's computers/devices in a big decentralized cloud) and I think there was even a company that tried something like it a few years ago where you rented space and got space elsewhere in return?? I am just not sure Storj is going to be the group to pull it off though. I could be wrong and I don't think it's an outright scam per se but I would not go out and buy a petabyte of storage to farm Storj coin hehe. If you want to try it out, use a VM and take advantage of your free space and maybe make a couple bucks? Sure and then let us know how it works out/ what you think of it :-). I was wrong about BTC after all, it's still around and I probably should have held onto mine so you never know ;-).
Been using this pre-alpha
Been using this pre-alpha have, the tech is awesome but don’t expect to get rich.
Is it easy to setup? Does it
Is it easy to setup? Does it use a lot of system resources (CPU/RAM) for the software?
Sounds like total BS to me.
Sounds like total BS to me. This would mean that a 6tb drive will net you $1,080/yr USD. So just get a couple machines and stuff them full of many 6tb drives and retire. Of course, if there were that much profit to be made from just a handful of off the shelf drives, then they wouldn’t be sharing it with you and me. They’d be doing the storage side of things themselves, *too*.
AWS is not exactly a perfect
AWS is not exactly a perfect comparison but if they could charge a similar price they would still turn a profit. https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/
That of course assumes that you were being paid for all the storage you offer, as opposed to only what is used and as was pointed out, the payment is in a cryptocurrency which is not well recognized.
The advertised 99.99999% uptime, aka 3 seconds of downtime a year, is intriguing. That would take an enormous amount of redundancy and network finesse just to deal with a reboot of a system attached.
It is certainly one of the more interesting stories I ran into this week.