Bitcoin Forum

Here's a recent white paper I found linked at Reddit: http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf

Andrew Miller1
, Ari Juels2
, Elaine Shi1
, Bryan Parno3
and Jonathan Katz1
University of Maryland
Cornell Tech (Jacobs)
Microsoft Research

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=217984

We propose a modification to Bitcoin that repurposes its mining resources to achieve a more broadly useful goal: distributed storage of archival data. We call our new scheme Permacoin. Unlike Bitcoin and its proposed alternatives, Permacoin requires clients to invest not just computational resources, but also storage. Our scheme involves an alternative scratch-off puzzle for Bitcoin based on Proofs-of-Retrievability (PORs). Successfully minting money with this SOP requires local, random access to a copy of a file. Given the competition among mining clients in Bitcoin, this modified SOP gives rise to highly decentralized file storage, thus reducing the overall waste of Bitcoin.

Is not it what Ethereum is trying to achieve ?

I believe it doesn't matter as there are so many avenues for Bitcoin that all are welcome. It's like dropping a toothpick over a forest out of an airplane and then parachuting down to find it ;)

What helps some projects helps all of them. What hurts some of them makes the remaining and future projects stronger. Every database in the entire world is fertile ground.

I am in favor of more projects working towards an end goal but my question is why just Archival Storage and not regular storage.

Maidsafe also has a similar project in work with decentralized storage and enough capital to fund the idea from the Mastercoin and Bitcoin public offering.

That said having a redundancy is always a good idea.

lol...whitepaper refers to bitcoin's PoW algorithm as SOP (scratch-off-puzzle), no intrinsic value.  I find the premise of the whitepaper fascinating.  Looks like there is already some activity on GitHub related to this project.  The more the merrier in my opinion, yeah things like maidsafe and storj are awesome, but the more experiments out there running the sooner things will shake out and the superior products will be left standing.

I think having the info publicly available (such as public archives) was part of the plan.

Perhaps if you encrypt your stuff and make your "encrypted info" publicly available, then it could be added to the storage system.

Probably part of permacoin 2.0 but they need to start simple.

2  hundred terabytes? uhm...they are very pessimistic :D

Anyways, i see no date :( When will permacoin come true?