Storj (pronounced “storage”) is a p2p decentralised data storage system that makes use of people’s free computer hard disk space for secure low-cost cloud storage of data.
Storj has its own crypto currency (SJCX) to pay incentives to users who give up storage space on their computers and who faithfully keep copies of files, returning them on request.
In his article Storj Vs. Dropbox: Why Decentralized Storage Is The Future, Bitcoinmagazine’s Cameron Gray says
The future of cloud storage is decentralization. Imagine being able to rent out your extra hard drive space through an autonomous network and getting paid for it in a cryptocurrency. This is being made possible thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto and platforms such as Storj, Maidsafe, Ethereum and others. Now that we have the ability to tie P2P currency to resources such as storage space, bandwidth usage, and CPU power, services like Dropbox and Google Drive will be getting a run for their money.
He also quotes a Storj infographic which predicts substantial savings of storage costs
Storj claims that buying and selling hard drive space in an autonomous network would reduce the cost of cloud computing by orders of magnitude, 10-100x cheaper.
It makes sense that existing hard disk space, used without centralisation, should be cheaper than maintaining server farms, employees and other costs typical of the large commercial cloud storage providers like Drop Box, Amazon, Google and others.
But such use comes not without some tricky problems of verification. Vitalik Buterin, the initiator of Ethereum, goes into some detail on those problems and on how they can be solved with clever coding. Secret Sharing and Erasure Coding: A Guide for the Aspiring Dropbox Decentralizer
But fortunately those are behind-the-scenes things that normal users won’t have to worry about.
Other contenders for disrupting the commercial cloud storage market are Buterik’s Ethereum and up and coming MaidSafe. It will be interesting to see if out of these, a dominating system emerges.
Meanwhile, one could say – corporate server farms watch out – some real competition from the open source p2p community is on the horizon…