Print Page - Storj just raised $3 Million from Google, Qualcomm, etc

Quote from: phytosaw22 on February 23, 2017, 03:16:10 PM

Storj just raised $3 Million from Google, Qualcomm, etc

http://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-startup-storj-targets-enterprise-cloud-3-million-raise/

Congrats to @super3 for getting funded and earning something from his efforts.

My prior analysis and debate with @super3 (the creator of Storj) is linked below.

I (@AnonyMint) was one of the original people who thought of the idea of proof-of-disk-space back in 2013 and dismissed it as flawed (although Charles Hoskinson cited an earlier white paper on proof-of-retrievability).

"Decentralized" proof-of-storage (or proof-of-retrievability) will always be centralized:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1501211.msg15295133#msg15295133
(this is why Storj, Sia, MaidSafe, etc are all nonsense)

Also the reason Google (and other majors) invested perhaps has something to do with the following:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1501211.msg15311153#msg15311153

And my analysis that existed before the final analysis linked above:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1354274.msg13833591#msg13833591

It is possible that they took my idea and have run with it? See the idea I gave them:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1501211.msg15323545#msg15323545

My current thinking is still the same as that idea linked above. We don't need a monolithic network that guarantees our file is stored (because as I argued at the links above that can be gamed and centralized). All we need is offer to pay enough when we retrieve the file periodically (and often enough) and the free market will store the file.

In any case, the storage of files is always going to be dominated by large server farms which have economies-of-scale.

Edit: thinking about this a bit more just now, I think perhaps the value these investors see in this is that if they change the model to one where proof-of-storage is also signed with a known identity, then the Sybil attack is eliminated and such a system becomes a way to have a homogeneous market composed of many competing vendors. So Google would see this as a way to expand their cloud storage business and economies-of-scale. I am nearly certain the project is headed this way. In other words, forget the dark markets crap and think of this as a system for large server farms to offer a unified service model.

But I doubt that means anything stupendous for the Storj token and marketcap long-term (of course there will be a spike on this news). The most widely-used crypto-currency will end up being used with such a technology. Note the $3 million was not for tokens, it was for investment in the company.

Quote from: iamnotback on February 23, 2017, 07:04:05 PM

Edit: thinking about this a bit more just now, I think perhaps the value these investors see in this is that if they change the model to one where proof-of-storage is also signed with a known identity, then the Sybil attack is eliminated and such a system becomes a way to have a homogeneous market composed of many competing vendors. So Google would see this as a way to expand their cloud storage business and economies-of-scale. I am nearly certain the project is headed this way. In other words, forget the dark markets crap and think of this as a system for large server farms to offer a unified service model.

But I doubt that means anything stupendous for the Storj token and marketcap long-term (of course there will be a spike on this news). The most widely-used crypto-currency will end up being used with such a technology. Note the $3 million was not for tokens, it was for investment in the company.

Note the edit. I have PM'ed @super3 and asked for his comment.

I suppose this is also relevant:

Quote from: iamnotback on February 23, 2017, 11:37:43 PM

Btw, I presume we don't know what quality of redundancy we are buying, i.e. the quality of the hosts. Are these home computers that are unprofessionally (un)managed or data centers? So if we compare that $1.30 to Google's $6.99, are we comparing apples-to-apples. What about access bandwidth costs? If I request the data a zillion times per month.

Quote from: iamnotback on February 23, 2017, 10:05:46 PM

Quote from: bl234st on February 23, 2017, 10:02:11 PM

Quote from: iamnotback on February 23, 2017, 03:24:37 PM

The reason we have 100s of shitcoins (even speculators don't realize they are shit, e.g. MaidSafe (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1801903.msg17953382#msg17953382)) and nothing really substantial is because nothing other than PoW (and its flaws) can function without whales:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1799665.msg17950272#msg17950272 (<--- read all my comments in the linked thread, not just the linked one)

Maidsafe is crap? I would love to see you post that on their forum instead of this shit-hole. C'mon Shelby, it's too easy to make a comment like that in this wasteland. Do it! Just Do it!!!! Grrrrrrrrrrr! Lamo!

It isn't worth my time to go argue with them. Carry on with that delusion and you will eventually (another 5 years of promises, technobabble nonsense, and hand waving?) reap what you've sown.

There is nothing wrong with the concept of a Torrent like Dark web network for distribution of files that are otherwise difficult to obtain on more efficient server farms. But we won't be mainstreaming content storage on home computers. Server farms will always be more efficient and mainstream. As for the token and earning money from hosting content on your home computer harddisk, brouhaha. Even a rough estimate on a napkin would indicate it is not viable to resell your Internet connection bandwidth for more than you pay for it, especially since you pay orders-of-magnitude more than it costs Google ::)

The main criticism is that even to the extent that we could create a more efficient cloud storage system comprising a common system incorporating a myraid of vendors by incorporating a signed proof-of-storage along with a blockchain record, the monetization of the system with a token is nonsense (other than as a gambling casino for speculation), because the most widely used crypto-currency will end up being the one the market prefers to use to pay for the cloud storage. These tokens (Sia, MaidSafe, Storj) are not going to be very long lived (because they haven't solved the major problems of crypto-currency), even though their proof-of-storage technology might end up being useful and used. Likewise, the technology for proof-of-storage will end up being used with the blockchain that solves the major problems of blockchains (e.g. centralization of consensus, etc). These projects are just incubators of experiments in cloud storage homogenization technology, not long-lived token+blockchain systems.

Quote from: iamnotback on February 26, 2017, 12:35:34 PM

In addition to my prior critique (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1801241.msg17956009#msg17956009) of "proof-of-storage", I see some additional flaws in the idea expressed as quoted below:

Quote from: AusKipper on February 25, 2017, 09:19:31 PM

Coins are issued by the network based on the following formula:

-1 coin = 1gb hosted for 1 month.
-Any downtime (detected by pinging) reduces profit 10x (ie, if your mining machine is down for 1 day, you lose 10 days worth of profit for that uptime month)
-100% of your "storage" has to be downloadable by the network within 1 hour, tested by the network randomly 4 times per month (uptime month of 30 days, not calendar). If you fail this test your profits over this period are reduced by double the amount of failed download, eg, you are hosting (mining with) 4gb of space, a random download attempt occurs and only 90% of the 4gb is downloaded, then your profits are reduced by 20% untill the next random download test.
-When you start mining you do not receive profit for the first uptime week of 7 days (this is to stop people that had some downtime simply creating a new miner on a new wallet straight away)
- Ping checks are performed every 15 minutes, you need to fail 2 to be considered "down". Thus you can install an update and restart without "down time".
- Miners are also rewarded the transaction fees of the network, spread evenly to the miners based on earning.

None of these quoted are objectively provable to the public-at-large, i.e. on a blockchain. For example, proof-of-storage can work from the perspective of the owner of the data to be stored, but not from a public perspective (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1501211.msg17956593#msg17956593).

Network performance can't be proven. This is one of the fundamental reasons we have to deal with Byzantine fault tolerance on networks. How do you prove to a blockchain that the ping time you measured was accurate. You can't. How do you prove downtime. You can't. If you say voting, then you have Sybil attacks on voting. Byzantine agreement can't remain unstuck without a hardfork or whales. Etc..

Sorry this is entirely impossible. It violates the basic research and fundamentals. Much more detail is in my unpublished white paper wherein I start from first principles and try to explain these fundamentals (but ends up being far too much to summarize to laymen, so I don't know if that version of the whitepaper will be the one I end up publishing).

So this is what I mean with my criticism that proof-of-storage can't even really work well even for file storage in the Storj model where each user encrypts the data to be stored (in multiple variants), because it is impossible to insure fungible performance for the data retrievability.

Bitcoin Forum

Alternate cryptocurrencies => Altcoin Discussion => Topic started by: phytosaw22 on February 23, 2017, 03:16:10 PM