See http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Devcoin and proably other pages also of the Devtome wiki, which itself pays devcoins from that 90% to people who write articles for the wiki. See front page of the wiki, and page about getting paid for writing articles, etc etc etc.

-MarkM-

Yes. This is the kind of thing GNUnet is working toward.

Until this kind of thing itself alone without graft/bribery using an external currency works smoothly, I think adding graft/bribery is probably just going to make it even harder to get it "right".

Rabid free-market folk I suppose would say look if someone offers more money for deleting all data that originated from you than you offer for retaining it, tough luck, man up and offer bigger bribes.

I wonder how much those people are offering not to have them shot on sight?

-MarkM-

Yes, but by other currencies I meant currencies such as megabit-hours of storage, megabit per second seconds of bandwidth, persistence of reachability at any hour of the day or night, still having your data next year when you need it, not flying by night with all your data, not conspiring to try to DOS you somehow in your use of the system and on and on like that.

-MarkM-

If it is not about backups, isn't the cost of it being offsite driving up the price needlessly?

Wouldn't your sister be better served by borrowing or renting a disk drive from you for her to use at her site, thus paying just for one sneakernet movement of the drive to her then someday maybe one sneakernet move of it back to you, instead of paying by the month for remote access to a drive at your site?

Or is this sister at the same site as you?

If you have reliable long term lack of need for storage, and she has reliable long term shortage, that seems a perfect setup for a used disks market even: sell her a spare disk and buy a better one later if some day you find you do afterall need more.

The closer you approach the fly by night laptops scenario the closer you get, it seems to me, to a situation where buying momentary storage instead of buying the media itself that the data is stored on starts to look reasonable. If you only need a few petabytes for a few minutes or hours, it might well make more sense to use it remotely rented by the minute or hour than to buy or rent a few petabyte drives for your own location.

So I think we need to figure that yes we are looking for fly by night laptops, however outre that might sound, and thus look for solutions targeted precisely at making distributed storage reliable even on aggregations of fly by night laptops.

Having to make rather extreme assumptions about the nodes being so utterly unreliable, to the point where we are not trying to insure our data against the occasional failure of a machine somewhere in our network but, rather, are trying to insure it against maybe even a 51% attack in which 51% or more of our nodes are with malicious aforethought carefully co-ordinating and tracking data looking for a moment in time at which all of them agreeing to refuse us service at the same time, deleting all copies of our files they have access to, can do us the most harm (for the lols, even, maybe) we can figure we want to ensure the default number of copies of any item of data should be far far higher on our proposed network than the maybe 3 copies to a dozen copies or so things like GNUnet and Tahoe-LAFS and so on typically figure people will configure their data to demand.

Our disk space is thus likely to make up in sheer volume required to keep many more copies of everything than a more reliable network would need a lot of any cost savings it might experience by imagining the space used is "essentially free due to being not in use" (when in fact just like mining, actually spinning up the drive instead of letting it hibernate might well drive up the electricity bill...)

There definitely are projects aiming toward the desired goals, except for the part about money.

Maybe anonymity might not be that great a feature once money is involved, since if Moriarty offers to store my data I might prefer to pay someone else more just to keep it out of his hands rather than pay him to store it for me? If I have to assume that the vast majority of the copies I am paying for of my data will deliberately vanish just at the very moment when I most need them, the price I will be willing to pay per copy maintained will be far far lower than if I am more confident that the vast majority of the copies will survive and be instantly available to me at high bandwidth from numerous sources...

Projects are working on all this, I have looked into those I could find, visited their Freenode IRC channels, given them a test drive and so on. From what I learned so far I have the impression that the main thing preventing GNUnet for bothering to have a currency yet is they are still tuning exactly what any such currency would actually buy, or maybe a better way of saying it would be, given some kind of currency, what exactly should a node consider how valuable compared to what else in order to intelligently decide what exactly to spend how much currency on.

That is, I got the impression that GNUnet was still in the process of working out what needs to be able to be compared in value in order to make purchasing decisions.

Thus I am still thinking that once GNUnet works well at actually trading the commodities it has at hand then would be the time to look at how best to set up mechanisms by which a node can be configured to give some nodes preferential treatment above and beyond that which is "deserved", so that bitcoins or whatever else could then be used to bribe any nodes of your choice into giving your node resources that your node has not "earned" by its own contributions. At that point markets could compare what bribes various nodes are willing to accept and nodes unwilling or unable to contribute their fair share of work/service would be able to shop around to choose who to bribe for what "unearned" resource-usage.

Bear in mind denial of service attacks, too. A market driven only by pennies might be quite vulnerable to anyone willing to throw dollars at it for a few hours to disrupt it. You might think there are a thousand laptops online at any given instant that have copies of your data safe and sound because each one of them each already learned you pay an entire satoshi per year per copy, but then suddenly one moment find every one of them threw away your data without notice due to hearing of an offer of a hundred million satoshis per decade per gigabyte per copy from someone else who might renege on their offer the very moment they realise their offer accomplished its goal of having everyone delete all copies of your data to make room for theirs...

-MarkM-

Yes! Thank you.

But just because I am interested in bitcoin and indeed even devcoin and litecoin and on and on and on does not mean I want to part with my precious bitcoins for something I can instead buy with other currencies. How about some of the people who want to PROVIDE THE PENNIES make some concrete offers of how many pennies per what span of time they are willing to pay to have how many copies of how many bytes distributedly stored?

-MarkM-

Actually I think what I am not seeing is what the barriers are to mass storage services such as Amazon S3 getting so cheap from so many suppliers that the original poster's complaint that offsite storage is too expensive ceases to be a real driver for this kind of project.

The original idea at top of thread was basically gosh surely we could provide the same product cheaper just with ad hoc networks of random fly by night laptops.

Now the idea seems rather to be gosh surely there are trickles of pennies to be made by doing that.

A friend told me a few years back that big stores like Wal-Mart can actually be amazingly efficient at providing low prices.

I believe that there are more and more free open source "S3-compatible server" packages out there, would something like that be more suitable for your purpose, allowing people to directly compete with Amazon from home and thus maybe by competition drive down Amazon S3 service prices?

-MarkM-

EDIT: Earlier in speculating how much having to handhold ignorant people who consider it their right to remain ignorant might drive up costs, I forgot to also speculate that marketing might also drive up costs. Paying for enough advertising to obtain enough customers to maintain a trickle of pennies might end up costing more than the number of pennies it brings in, until marketing capital such as subscribed mailing-list members and so on help shift you toward the cost of retaining or up-selling existing customers more than the cost of acquiring new customers.  A huge marketing budget might well be able to make cheaper services seem less attractive than services so ridiculously expensive that they can afford a huge marketing budget...

Sure, but chances seem good to me that the best price will turn out to be available to me from all the various nodes for whom I have been faithfully storing data and returning it intact upon demand, and similarly for my peers, so that the only "customers" forced to deal with the people who want some trickle of pennies when they fire up their laptop for a few minutes or hours will be other fly by night laptop-storage-by-the-second-minute-or-hour types like themselves.

In short, why bother to pay even pennies to people who aren't even responsible enough themselves to want off-site backups yet nonetheless want to convince you to pay them to store your backups for you, if you can instead store other people's backups for them in return for them storing yours?

Two different goals though... It sounds like you want to build a mom and pop iTunes or Pirate Bay or Malware Incorporated or Cheap Pr0n Emporium.

It might be better to base your pricing/accounting on the actual contents of the files instead of caring at all about how big or small they are: consider how valuable they are even if small if they are "better quality" in some way.

Everyone could advertise whose personal private data they have copies of, how encrypted it seems to be according to their cracking attempts so far, there could be betting markets on whether there will turn out to be another layer of encryption beneach the outwardly visible layer, and the people who actually gave these files away freely could choose whether to buy a download of a copy of such and such a day's crypted backup from this distributed market or not on any given day, maybe taking into account various threats by various sites to take it off the market if no one buys a copy within the next such and such span of time. Name your backups provocatively so more people will share the file thinking it of particular interest or value. Etc.

Is this to be about the data stored, or the volume of storage, or the bandwidth? What is the obstacle, if any, to running something like Tahoe-LAFS or GNUnet etc yourself to build up mutual reputation with other nodes, why do you need some trickle of pennies for doing what normal participants simply "just do"? Why should I even consider having to pay you to store data for me instead of doing mutual data distribution with others who have storage and a desire to move some of the data stored on it offsite?

-MarkM-

EDIT I guess what I am getting at here is that reliability and volume of storage and bandwidth usage are plenty of currencies already, in fact each could be adjusted separately so that for example if I provide vast amounts of storage for huge lengths of time but at low bandwidth, what I will tend to get in return is lots of space for plenty of time but at low bandwidth. If I want to spend general purpose currency of some kind to increase the speed, I can upgrade my own speed with that money, thereby resulting through reciprocity with my peers in better bandwidth for my own usage. I can buy more storage or more speed or more duration simply by buying it for/from my own site, no need to buy it from others' sites. Simple reciprocity will cause what I get from others to adjust in accordance with what I provision locally aka what I pay to/for my own site.

EDIT2: Even considering it as a prospective seller looking to make a trickle of cents, why would I want to pay you more cents to store data than I am being paid for storing data, whether I am having you store data others pay me thinking I am storing it or having you store data I want stored? If it is all about wanting a trickle of pennies the tragedy seems to arise that until some of us actually obtain some pennies there aren't going to be any to be trickled. I can't give you pennies I do not have, and if I give you more than I earn I will go broke...

(I can however give you blocks of data you asked me to store for you, if will take those instead of pennies maybe we can do business?)

What, no Tor nodes in Galveston?!?

Also, isn't "at least" kind of like a wordy way of coding ">=" ?

Thus if someone saw for themselves one percent of the company's funds and saw that the amount they were looking at was actually all by itself regardless of how large or small a percentage of the funds the company actually has equal to or greater than 75% of all the claims so far all added together, wouldn't they use such a term?

That 75% or more of the value of all claims so far was not claimed to have been any particular percent of the total funds the company actually has, was it? If so I missed that part; how many percent of the company's total funds was it claimed to have been?

Sheesh.

-MarkM-

For this we are not really talking about offsite storage so much as we are talking about download rates and volumes.

(One copy of the blockchain can be made available to multitudes, so its more about bandwidth of how many copies are wanted how fast and how simultaneously than how many WAL-BITS can fit in their bit-warehouses.)

-MarkM-

EDIT: A problem exists in the form the blockchain currenty takes normally in the reference client.

If it were a file that many can utilise at once, then one copy could exist on dropbox and everyone could share access to that copy, it could appear on their disk like a normal folder, automatically kept in synch by dropbox.

Unfortunately the reference client does not use a blockchain storage type that would work with such an approach.

A straight swap still seems simpler. Want one of your blocks back? Gimme one of mine. Tell me which of yours you want and I'll reply telling you which of mine I want. Probably first wanting just a specific function of the block, only progressing to gimme the entire block if actually the whole block is needed/wanted not merely indication that the other party has enough of its bits to be able to answer the specific query.

"You want me to tell you what the bits at each of that list of 1024 bit-offets into the file are? Fine, I can do that if you undertake in return to tell me what the bits at each of this list of 1024 offsets into one of my files is".

If you are actually wanting cheap storage you buy, then a bunch of corner-store / mom-and-pop / kid in basement operations are probably not a cost-effective solution. A Wal-Mart approach is more likely to be able to get prices down and keep them down.

If you actually want the small private operations setup for reasons other than actual cost, then buy as much storage as the total of local and offsite storage you want, then trade storage with others who do the same.

I know that arguing not to use bitcoin to account these swaps might seem to imply my response is not bitcoin-related, but bear in mind I am looking to do offsite backups of bitcoin-related things such as bitcoin exchange servers and such. The relatedness / relevance to bitcoin lies not in method of accounting for the swaps of backup-storage-space but, rather, in that it is bitcoin users looking to backup bitcoin-wallets and bitcoin-websites and bitcoin-exchange servers and such.

It seems overly complicated and off-purpose to go looking to sell people storage space on my site to raise funds with which I can then go looking for other sellers to buy storage from on their site. It is simply I want to put N copies of X gigabytes offsite and am prepared to store X * N gigabytes similarly for others.

Of all the software suites I have looked at so far for accomplishing this kind of thing, so far GNUnet is looking like most appropriate. Though I suppose in principle I could also throw backups onto Freenet too if I chose to, what the heck, who knows, I might be able to find them there later if it turns out GNUnet fails me somehow. Maybe use GNUnet and Tahoe-LAFS and, just to be nasty to Freenet folk, throw copies onto Freenet too?

See that last part though, ouch, heck, what stops anyone from just leeching off of Freenet? Hmmm.
 
It might well be that the seemingly high prices the original poster is trying to avoid are not so high really at all when you really look into the nitty gritty of providing such a service.

It might also be that prices are driven crazy-high by involving the ignorant masses while not charging by the hour for help desk or other support services, thus having to do handholding of millions of idiots who do not want to pay by the hour for handholding thus basically force you into charging everyone for some high average number of hours of handholding in order to cover the biggest idiots who require the most-inordinate amount of handholding.

Offering the service only to the qualified I.T. departments of businesses maybe the price per terrabyte-month + price per terrabyte-mile could be held down below what those trying to attract the ignorant as their desired customers are forced to charge?

-MarkM-

I am not trying to hide the origin or destination of funds. The origin of funds used to buy units of tokenX is customers of the or a tokenX "market maker". The destination of funds used to buy units of tokenX is whoever or whatever that market-maker chooses to spend the funds on, which likely will from time to time include buying units of tokenX from customers, probably at a price per unit less than that for which they sell them to customers.

Similarly for funds used to buy units of tokenY, tokenZ and so on.

-MarkM-

An address-squatter's dream, like domain names, 1-800 numbers and such... Grab a dictionary for a quick peek at initial search targets, but a list of trademarks, especially if biassed by market cap of the trademark owner, might also be useful.

A long term "investment" and maybe a more initially-expensive one than back in the days when I got windows.com, windows.org and windows.net for free on spec from the NIC and am still owed $3.50 by e-bay for their inability to find me a buyer for the matched set thus never yet actually refunded "refund" of the $3.50 they charged my credit card for trying to find a buyer.

(No wonder I have a still lingering lack of being impressed by this purportedly great auction site known as e-bay... )

-MarkM-

I have been thinking of going slightly further, using "market makers" so that all actual cashing-in and cashing-out takes place at third party businesses. Basically those third parties should be the only customers I need to know, all the activity on my markets would basically just be various pseudonyms of theirs with only they needing to know which of "their people" correspond to which deposit or withdrawal they perform on behalf of "their people".

Also any histories anyone might like to keep would also be up to them, since the Open Transactions server uses "triple signed reciepts" instead of "transaction histories" thus is designed fundamentally from the get-go to track balances, not histories of how the balances came to have the values they at some moment in time happen to have. The whole point is that everyone agrees, and crypto-signs the fact that they agree, what the balance of an account is and once that agreement is reached and signed it is simply a fact, with any speculation about which of how many possible pasts such a present could have emerged from being pointless speculation.

Basically people would buy tokens from third parties and sell them to third parties, just as some people already do with World of Warcraft gold and items or EVE Online ISKs or whatever, all such purchases and sales being totally outside of the servers that actually keep track of what gold or items or ISKs or whatever various characters in the games actually have in their possession at any given moment.

(Or like e-gold was purchased from third party "market makers" and sold back to such "market makers" instead of the users buying directly from or selling directly back to the e-gold server/system itself.... Which didn't stop e-gold being shut down...)

-MarkM-

Wow, a boxed set of Bentley-rebranded Physical Bitcoins! Cool!

-MarkM-

Tahoe-LAFS is designed more for deployment oneself than for trading space with others.

That is, if you are going to have multiple sites yourself, Tahoe-LAFS might well be one of the best ways to utilise such sites.

But with multiple parties providing the sites, something more like GNUnet (but maybe able to be deployed on more operating-systems than GNUnet currently supports) would be more suitable.

-MarkM-

TL;DR what do you want offsite storage FOR? Do you actually want it at all or are you really wanting gun money, troop payroll financing, candy pocketmoney or what?

I suspect that using an accounting token that has uses other than simply keeping everyone's usage within the bounds of their contribution will provide un-useful incentive to abuse, thus that it is preferable not to resort to such tokens unless it is mission-critical that people who do not use the service themselves provide the service.

For off-site backups, for example, the desired feature is not the volume of storage space but the relocation of storage space from on-site to off-site.

Paying for off-site storage using tokens (currency) that people who are not looking to buy such storage space will actually want for other purposes entirely simply serves to attract every hacker faker freeloader etc who is interested in buying drugs, guns, troops, candy, liquor, or gosh knows what else, desiring neither to provide offsite storage nor to obtain offsite storage but merely to obtain their desired guns, troops, drugs, candy or whatever at other people's expense by fooling/repurposing other-purpose token (currency) networks to the new/different purpose, whether it be the financing of drugs, weapons, troops, candy, or whatever.

If however the only thing the tokens can buy is off-site storage, and the only way to obtain them is by providing off-site storage, the tokens might manage more easily to bypass folks looking to accomplish such re-purposing simply by being not too obscure but simply too limited in liquidity on general token/currency markets to be as attractive a target as other more general-purpose tokens such as bitcoins.

Thus if you are on the demand side, that is, actually wanting the service, directly trading the service itself (storage) as provisioned on your site for the service itself (storage) as provisioned on someone else's site might be a much less attractive setup from attackers / freeloaders / other-purpose-financiers point of view.

Basically, if I want to store N copies of my data, then I need an amount of storage N times the size of my data.

If some of those copies are to be stored off-site, then I still need as much storage, I just happen to need some of it to be located off-site.

Thus it seems reasonable I provision storage N times as large as my data and that for each copy of my data I am able to move off-site I free up as much space on-site as I consume off-site.

I might want N to be larger if third parties are involved, in proportion to the reliability I attribute to such third parties, but basically if we all plan to have a certain amount of storage and are looking to swap on-site storage for off-site storage, not to leech gun-money, gum-money, troop-payroll money or whatever other kind of money from wherever we can whenever we can by making whatever representations those we leech such things off of need to be told / need to hear / need to see in order for us to thus leech... maybe we would be better off simply trading such storage directly instead of trying to make our network a desireable target for repurposing attacks?

-MarkM-

We already know from history that bitcoins are worth at least $30 USD each, so anyone parting with them for less is presumably either in desperate need or is playing the ups and downs and confident they'll be able to replace the coins they sell at a lower price than they sold them for.

If it is hard to find people willing to sell at current ridiculously low prices that is a *good* thing.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Ooops I forgot all the huge robberies. Robbers might well figure getting more than 1/6th of the actual value for their loot is reasonable rate for fencing stolen goods.

I just read a thread that showed how... it amounted to "bitcoind help", focussing on "bitcoind signmessage" and "bitcoind verifymessage" but also explicitly showed a message "I control this", signed, and the actual verifying of it.

Cant find the thread instantly for some reason.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Looks like it could do with a guide, or a way to tell it filename of message instead of trying to actually type the message:


Aha, missed a blank:


And verifying it:


-MarkM-

Which is one of the options I suggested, basically: use bitcoin app to sign something. For a pool, where what is to be secured is precisely their bitcoins and the address you are to send them to, it seems reasonable to assume they can lay their hands on some bitcoin client that can do such signatures, so it should not be as unfeasible as assuming they have acccess to GPG/PGP.

Just be sure to heavily stress that they should not use for that purpose any bitcoin address a thief stealing either of their two factor authentication devices would thereby get hold of the private key of.

-MarkM-

It is kind of sad to be forced to the expense of insisting on having the information, and of checking it, and of having to store it, securely at that, and after all that expense not even be permitted to sell it so it would pay for itself.

Its not as if the powers that be pay for all that work they insist be done for them.

Maybe said powers should simply provide a signed-statement-of-identity site where Gox et all can just paste a signed message and get back a yes or no as to whether it is signed by person it claims to be from, without the Gox et all even knowing who it is that it is claiming to be, only that whoever it is, it is?

-MarkM-