I guess? I will note, though, that if you search for any of the things I said--such as "video encoding crypto"--you'd find them in less time than it took to ask me for a list. Here are a handful of ones I can think off of the top of my head.

Storj, Filecoin, Sia; Golem, Akash, iExec; Livepeer, Helium, Orchid (the last one being mine)

Like, some cryptocurrency projects are working on "big business". I keep hearing that Helium has been getting carrier partners for its LTE hotspot rollout, and its IoT hotspot product is not inherently any more stupid than Amazon Sidewalk ;P.

https://twitter.com/MessariCrypto/status/1514694855070556170

Do these coins somehow actually verify that the storage sellers are actually storing the files they claim to store? If not, the introduction of blockchain to the equation sounds like an unnecessary externality.

Impossible to cheat: Assuming "ongoing storage costs", on every payment cycle, rotate the blocks somewhere else (non-predictably). The hashes are probably stored on blockchain, so the receiver can verify them. So to cheat, you need to produce a collision or miss out on your payment.

Practically that's impossible, since the network would need to swap the whole datastore once every payment cycle.

Say each block is stored on three nodes, then these nodes could each generate a nonce, compute a hash of the stored block (using all nonces as IV) and then vote on whether they still have the original file or not. This is much more feasible, as only nonces and hashes are transferred (a few dozen bytes instead of e.g. 64MB blocks). In that case they can store nothing and instead cooperate to generate spoofed hashes, so you probably want some auditor nodes.

I am not sure why any of these would strictly need blockchain to solve the problem of safely storing data in a pool of untrusted, unreliable nodes.

Yeah, I wonder how their pricing compares to e.g. S3. The Filecoin website claims "hypercompetitive pricing" but does not actuall dress that to numbers: https://filecoin.io/store/#decentralize

It sure is a neat hack if they have changed to PoW to Proof-of-Storage, but whether is it actually usable for real-world applications of storing data at scale?

I think the point of a lot of blockchain tech is not to actually solve a real-world problem. For most of these problems you don't need blockchain or there is little extra value to be derived from blockchain. Most of the time, the real-world problem solved by selling "something something blockchain" is that the person selling it needs to earn money somehow.

Honestly, if you pay me money for, I'd sell you "something something blockchain" if that's what you want me to do. Though shutting up about telling you my opinion ("fuck blockchain") will cost extra.

Not sure about others, but Filecoin uses cryptographic storage proofs to verify that data is stored correctly.

Otherwise I'd agree with you, if there is no guarantee that data is stored correctly, there is no point, might as well use S3.

Indeed, here is an explanation of the proof protocol used: https://spec.filecoin.io/algorithms/pos/post/

I wonder if that has ever been tested by bad actors. For Bitcoin, the proof of how the network is resilient against sub-50% attacks is simple enough.

For the file storage people, there's a bunch of startups (like Storj and SIA) that have an S3-like API but slice up the files and store the (encrypted) chunks on the disks of "miners" who get paid each month for disk space and bandwidth used. Because most were started during the ICO boom they all use a blockchain token, even though there are usually centralized servers keeping track of which client uploaded which file. The clients could pay normal currency to those servers, who could distribute it amongst the miners.

I used to have a spare PC with a 13TB HDD mining Storj for a couple of years and it worked fine, but converting the tokens to currency I could use was a major hassle.

What's the point here? Why would anyone use this over S3 or whatever?

S3 has quite a significant markup over the HW and electricity costs. Sometimes up to 10x, you can see this by how much discount percentages sales reps are willing to apply to cost of storage. Many of these smaller providers charge a smaller markup and are thus cheaper than (non-discounted) S3.

Cheaper storage alone is enough to lure some people away. There are also people that simply hate AWS for reasons of their own and choose a startup provider for ideological reasons. Finally there is the obvious application of encrypted storage, to store material that is illegal in your jurisdiction.

S3 is highly redundant, so there's quite a bit of software and networking alongside the HW and electricity.

And even then, go with Blackblaze or Wasabi or R2 or whatever S3 competitor that is cheaper.

Similar to IPFS or Freebase, these censorship-resistant distributed storage solutions can help oppressed journalists in third-world countries get the stories of their oppression out.

Still sounds useless. Those third world countries aren't blocking AWS..

For child porn