Storj

Three years ago we won a hackathon, threw together a website, and set out to change the way the world interacts with data. Since then we’ve accomplished much of our original vision. Supported by our community, we’ve built a decentralized storage ... [More] network of thousands of farmers, expanding further everyday. We’ve grown to employ over a dozen people, opened a second office, and learned a lot of hard lessons along the way to building the world’s largest distributed cloud storage platform. Now, we can take a deep breath and consider the future of Storj over the next three years.Cloud storage is broken. Excessive centralization has created systemic problems and a large portion of the world’s data is now subject to the risk of the “Big Three” (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms). Cloud storage is not private. The “cloud” is just a collection of other people’s computers and more often than not, the data stored on these services is not encrypted and is routinely hacked.We are passionate about decentralization, and we love free and open-source software. Our mission is to rethink cloud storage, to provide the security, privacy, and transparency it’s missing. That’s why we have built an open-source, distributed cloud platform that aims to fundamentally change the way people and devices own data. Three weeks ago we announced our migration from Counterparty to the Ethereum platform. When we first considered making the move, we were primarily concerned with providing an improved user experience via access to better wallets and tools. As we explored the idea, we realized that Ethereum’s smart contracts and other advanced features could be used to shore up our weaknesses and augment our strengths. Today we’d like to talk a bit about our plans for the future of Storj. Dead Simple File Storage - Hundreds of people have requested this, and we’re excited to make this dream come true. For the past several months we’ve been working with a partner with a massive install base to create a graphical user interface for Storj. We expect to announce this partnership very soon. More User and Developer Tools - We started off planning to build a decentralized Dropbox, but since then our ambitions have grown. Instead of targeting a specific application, we decided to construct the foundation layer beneath them all. The result is a production-ready cloud object store. We’ve already created native and in-browser tools to store and retrieve files. As we continue to build more tools to support more use cases, we plan to reach the goal of thousands of intercompatible file storage apps interacting as equals in the Storj network. Smart Contract Integrations - When we started building Storj, smart contracts were just an idea. They are now a powerful tool for the management of distributed systems but present us with a number of difficult performance tradeoffs. Blockchain-based smart contracts cannot manage distributed storage at scale by themselves, but used in  conjunction with the Bridge model they become quite compelling. In the future, Storj will add smart-contract layers for audit verification. We’re also exploring on-chain structures that will allow the next generation of applications on Ethereum to use Storj as a native data layer, as well as smart-contract enabled economic reputation and bonding systems. Federated Bridges - Storj Bridges provide a set of decentralized access points to the network. Each Bridge helps manage the state of files that are uploaded. This binds clients to specific Bridges. To alleviate this drawback, in the future Storj will take advantage of audit-verification smart contracts to create a federated file management system distributed across a group of Bridges. This will allow clients and applications to use any Bridge rather than relying on a specific one. Micropayments - As the number of transactions to farmers increase on the network, we will need to implement real-time payments with micropayment channels. The Raiden Network is leading the charge in the Ethereum ecosystem, and we plan to work closely with this project to create practical payment channels that will benefit the entire community. Community Collaboration - As part of the upcoming migration plan, we want to create a better balance between the Storj Community and Storj Labs. First, we will be releasing a solution to solve the token supply imbalance. Second, over the next few months we will be working with community leaders to build processes and tools that will help the community self-organize and have more direct access to resources to build cool and useful things like documentation and apps. We would like to thank you for your support over the past few years. You’ve helped us take this crazy idea and turn it into the world’s largest distributed cloud storage network. We’ve come a long way together, and we are excited to continue on this journey with you! [Less]

There are many established coins like Bitcoin and Ether in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. We have been asked many times why we chose to issue our own token specifically for Storj. Here are the reasons why we did so, instead of using an existing token ... [More] or coin: Granularity - Bitcoin isn’t divisible enough to support the granularity needed for micropayments. We described this in a blog post back in 2015. Bootstrapping - When we first started the network, Storj was an empty market. No farmers, no renters, and nothing to buy or sell. Storj only works at scale. Using SJCX to bootstrap the Storj network lets us kickstart the system. It helps us identify and fix problems at scale, and paves the way for a larger, more stable network. Flexibility - Technology develops and changes over time. Using our own token allows us to migrate to the accepted standard, without being locked into a particular technology. Stability - Cryptocurrency markets are volatile. A separate token provides a layer of protection from the volatility of larger markets. Volatility is extremely dangerous for long-term storage contracts. All coins rise and sink with the largest markets, but less violently. Incentivization - Our token has been a very important part of incentivizing community members for their hard work, compensating them for performing tasks like tier-one tech support, marketing, documentation, and development. Our early adopters and backers are up 20 times since inception and we love that they have been handsomely rewarded for their contributions to the Storj network. Micropayments - Hub based micropayment networks require the lockup of funds in channels. These hubs can be funded by the network, rather than the operators (who would require high fees to maintain those payment hubs). This will allow transactions to be quick and only require low transaction fees for the users. Currency - As we grow, we are interested in supporting the broader [ethereum] ecosystem and building long-lasting partnerships. Having our own funding mechanism to align interests and goals will give our strategic partners additional flexibility. Ecosystem - Our token allows for a positive feedback loop inside of the Storj ecosystem. Farmers can earn the token for sharing their disk space, and then use it for renting data storage services themselves*. Future - We plan to use the token in ways raw Bitcoin or Ether can’t be used. For example, the Storj-specific signaling described in SIP0002. We designed Storj to be flexible and modular. The whitepaper says this up front: “Storj is payment agnostic. Neither the protocol nor the contract requires a specific payment system.” However, we believe that using a token is the best payment system for the foreseeable future. We believe that the future is a vibrant ecosystem of many tokens, and we look forward to being part of it.* We launched our billing system for Storj just two weeks ago. Currently only credit cards are accepted automatically, but we do accept SJCX manually (just send us an email). There are no current automatic payment processing options for SJCX, but we are working to build one quickly and add it to the service in the next few weeks. Also, Bitcoin billing for the Storj service is almost ready to be activated, we are just going through the final checks before we deploy it live. [Less]

There are many established coins like Bitcoin and Ether in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. We have been asked many times why we chose to issue our own token specifically for Storj. Here are the reasons why we did so, instead of using an existing token ... [More] or coin: Granularity - Bitcoin isn’t divisible enough to support the granularity needed for micropayments. We described this in a blog post back in 2015. Bootstrapping - When we first started the network, Storj was an empty market. No farmers, no renters, and nothing to buy or sell. Storj only works at scale. Using SJCX to bootstrap the Storj network lets us kickstart the system. It helps us identify and fix problems at scale, and paves the way for a larger, more stable network. Flexibility - Technology develops and changes over time. Using our own token allows us to migrate to the accepted standard, without being locked into a particular technology. Stability - Cryptocurrency markets are volatile. A separate token provides a layer of protection from the volatility of larger markets. Volatility is extremely dangerous for long-term storage contracts. All coins rise and sink with the largest markets, but less violently. Incentivization - Our token has been a very important part of incentivizing community members for their hard work, compensating them for performing tasks like tier-one tech support, marketing, documentation, and development. Our early adopters and backers are up 20 times since inception and we love that they have been handsomely rewarded for their contributions to the Storj network. Micropayments - Hub based micropayment networks require the lockup of funds in channels. These hubs can be funded by the network, rather than the operators (who would require high fees to maintain those payment hubs). This will allow transactions to be quick and only require low transaction fees for the users. Currency - As we grow, we are interested in supporting the broader [ethereum] ecosystem and building long-lasting partnerships. Having our own funding mechanism to align interests and goals will give our strategic partners additional flexibility. Ecosystem - Our token allows for a positive feedback loop inside of the Storj ecosystem. Farmers can earn the token for sharing their disk space, and then use it for renting data storage services themselves*. Future - We plan to use the token in ways raw Bitcoin or Ether can’t be used. For example, the Storj-specific signaling described in SIP0002. We designed Storj to be flexible and modular. The whitepaper says this up front: “Storj is payment agnostic. Neither the protocol nor the contract requires a specific payment system.” However, we believe that using a token is the best payment system for the foreseeable future. We believe that the future is a vibrant ecosystem of many tokens, and we look forward to being part of it.* We launched our billing system for Storj just two weeks ago. Currently only credit cards are accepted automatically, but we do accept SJCX manually (just send us an email). There are no current automatic payment processing options for SJCX, but we are working to build one quickly and add it to the service in the next few weeks. Also, Bitcoin billing for the Storj service is almost ready to be activated, we are just going through the final checks before we deploy it live. [Less]

Over the past couple of months I have been discussing the Counterparty platform with the Storj team and community. A consistent theme of these conversations is discontent with the functionality and usability of the platform: The official ... [More] Counterparty wallet software, Counterwallet, has had no major updates in over two years, and provides a confusing interface for new users. Last year, multisig ceased functioning because Bitcoin made raw multisig transactions non-standard. Tokens in multisig wallets were rendered inaccessible. There is still no concrete migration path for multisig wallets without direct miner intervention. This makes us worried that other features will cease to function in the future. Because Counterparty uses the Bitcoin blockchain for transactions, which is currently having issues with transaction backlog, our users have experienced extremely long transaction times (hours to days). Because Counterparty transactions create small inputs and are heavier than normal BTC transactions, users have experienced extremely high fees for transactions. For the February farmer payout we paid over $1,600 in transaction fees, or about 13% of total payouts. This is not sustainable or scalable. Our work on micropayment channels for Counterparty offers promising routes to addressing the problems above but is unlikely to be broadly useful. Micropayment networks require broad adoption to be effective and secure. It is unclear whether the Counterparty ecosystem can support a robust layer 2 network. The Counterparty ecosystem is small. Very few other organizations are using it at scale. To create our micropayment tools, we’ve had to fund large upgrades to the Counterparty protocol. It’s not sustainable to finance protocol upgrades while also developing our network and products. Many community members and thought leaders have suggested migrating SJCX from Counterparty to the Ethereum ERC20 token standard. ERC20 tokens have been issued by a number of prominent projects including Augur and Golem, and have wide support in the Ethereum development community. Use of an Ethereum-based token offers clear solutions to the problems listed above: Development is extremely active. Features are added regularly and bugs are dealt with quickly. Ethereum transactions are usually confirmed in seconds to minutes. Ethereum fees are currently negligible. Future layer 2 solutions like Raiden are promising, and explicitly support ERC20 tokens. Furthermore, the Ethereum platform provides many additional benefits:  The ERC20 standard provides out-of-the-box interoperability with a wide variety of wallets and tools. Ethereum’s smart contract platform can be leveraged to build a more robust and decentralized storage system. Future integration with Ethereum opens exciting opportunities to provide data services to smart contracts and Dapps. We will participate in a larger community of protocol maintainers, sharing the burden of upgrades with many other engaged organizations.  In a nutshell, we believe that a simple 1:1 conversion of Counterparty-based SJCX to ERC20 SJCX solves the quality of service issues and allows us to participate in a more active and robust development community. As a result, we will be migrating SJCX to a new Ethereum-based ERC20 token that we feel better serves the Storj ecosystem and its stakeholders. Over the next few weeks I will be working with the community, the team, and the thought leaders to prepare a clear migration plan. As always, the process will be transparent and public. We understand that there will be lots of questions, so please keep an eye on our announcements for drafts and community hangouts to discuss the process and answer questions directly.   We believe the technical migration process will be straight-forward. Farmers will use a simple tool to convert their tokens from the old to the new protocol, and then change their payment address in the Storj Share application. We welcome feedback, collaboration, and ideas as we go through this transition. Sidenote Back in 2014, when the ecosystem was smaller and Storj couldn’t even afford a plane ticket, I drove up to Blacksburg, Virginia with Bo Shen, now founder of VC firm Fenbushi Capital, for a dev retreat. I got the chance to spend a lot of time with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and chat about our crazy idealistic decentralized platforms and where they might lead. A couple of interesting ideas came out of that meeting. First, on the sage advice of Bo Shen, we both participated in each other’s crowdsales. Considering the growth of both tokens, that was a pretty good move. Second, Vitalik wrote a very insightful post about how one might build decentralized storage called Secret Sharing and Erasure Coding: A Guide for the Aspiring Dropbox Decentralizer M of N which I highly recommend reading. Now that we plan on native Ethereum integration, that post is having a lot of impact. Third, I’ve never been that great at statistics, so Vitalik really helped us in the early days with some math that not only showed that decentralized storage is viable, but also that it could be even more durable than traditional centralized cloud storage platforms. Lastly, he left me with a sense that Ethereum was going to be a really strong and useful platform for Storj. Unfortunately, the Ethereum genesis block was created a year after we had a token and the ERC20 standard didn’t exist until late 2015, so there just wasn’t an opportunity to integrate from the start. But we have been watching Ethereum as it grew, successfully overcame The DAO hack, and launched the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. Ethereum has clearly solidified itself as a great token platform, as well as highlighted some of the awesome advanced features that the blockchain can offer. We are excited for the future, and even more excited for our future with Ethereum. To Vitalik, a personal thanks. To the whole Ethereum ecosystem: it’s time, let’s go and decentralize the data and the world! Shawn WilkinsonCEO/CTO Storj Labs Inc. [Less]

Over the past couple of months I have been discussing the Counterparty platform with the Storj team and community. A consistent theme of these conversations is discontent with the functionality and usability of the platform: The official ... [More] Counterparty wallet software, Counterwallet, has had no major updates in over two years, and provides a confusing interface for new users. Last year, multisig ceased functioning because Bitcoin made raw multisig transactions non-standard. Tokens in multisig wallets were rendered inaccessible. There is still no concrete migration path for multisig wallets without direct miner intervention. This makes us worried that other features will cease to function in the future. Because Counterparty uses the Bitcoin blockchain for transactions, which is currently having issues with transaction backlog, our users have experienced extremely long transaction times (hours to days). Because Counterparty transactions create small inputs and are heavier than normal BTC transactions, users have experienced extremely high fees for transactions. For the February farmer payout we paid over $1,600 in transaction fees, or about 13% of total payouts. This is not sustainable or scalable. Our work on micropayment channels for Counterparty offers promising routes to addressing the problems above but is unlikely to be broadly useful. Micropayment networks require broad adoption to be effective and secure. It is unclear whether the Counterparty ecosystem can support a robust layer 2 network. The Counterparty ecosystem is small. Very few other organizations are using it at scale. To create our micropayment tools, we’ve had to fund large upgrades to the Counterparty protocol. It’s not sustainable to finance protocol upgrades while also developing our network and products. Many community members and thought leaders have suggested migrating SJCX from Counterparty to the Ethereum ERC20 token standard. ERC20 tokens have been issued by a number of prominent projects including Augur and Golem, and have wide support in the Ethereum development community. Use of an Ethereum-based token offers clear solutions to the problems listed above: Development is extremely active. Features are added regularly and bugs are dealt with quickly. Ethereum transactions are usually confirmed in seconds to minutes. Ethereum fees are currently negligible. Future layer 2 solutions like Raiden are promising, and explicitly support ERC20 tokens. Furthermore, the Ethereum platform provides many additional benefits:  The ERC20 standard provides out-of-the-box interoperability with a wide variety of wallets and tools. Ethereum’s smart contract platform can be leveraged to build a more robust and decentralized storage system. Future integration with Ethereum opens exciting opportunities to provide data services to smart contracts and Dapps. We will participate in a larger community of protocol maintainers, sharing the burden of upgrades with many other engaged organizations.  In a nutshell, we believe that a simple 1:1 conversion of Counterparty-based SJCX to ERC20 SJCX solves the quality of service issues and allows us to participate in a more active and robust development community. As a result, we will be migrating SJCX to a new Ethereum-based ERC20 token that we feel better serves the Storj ecosystem and its stakeholders. Over the next few weeks I will be working with the community, the team, and the thought leaders to prepare a clear migration plan. As always, the process will be transparent and public. We understand that there will be lots of questions, so please keep an eye on our announcements for drafts and community hangouts to discuss the process and answer questions directly.   We believe the technical migration process will be straight-forward. Farmers will use a simple tool to convert their tokens from the old to the new protocol, and then change their payment address in the Storj Share application. We welcome feedback, collaboration, and ideas as we go through this transition. Sidenote Back in 2014, when the ecosystem was smaller and Storj couldn’t even afford a plane ticket, I drove up to Blacksburg, Virginia with Bo Shen, now founder of VC firm Fenbushi Capital, for a dev retreat. I got the chance to spend a lot of time with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and chat about our crazy idealistic decentralized platforms and where they might lead. A couple of interesting ideas came out of that meeting. First, on the sage advice of Bo Shen, we both participated in each other’s crowdsales. Considering the growth of both tokens, that was a pretty good move. Second, Vitalik wrote a very insightful post about how one might build decentralized storage called Secret Sharing and Erasure Coding: A Guide for the Aspiring Dropbox Decentralizer M of N which I highly recommend reading. Now that we plan on native Ethereum integration, that post is having a lot of impact. Third, I’ve never been that great at statistics, so Vitalik really helped us in the early days with some math that not only showed that decentralized storage is viable, but also that it could be even more durable than traditional centralized cloud storage platforms. Lastly, he left me with a sense that Ethereum was going to be a really strong and useful platform for Storj. Unfortunately, the Ethereum genesis block was created a year after we had a token and the ERC20 standard didn’t exist until late 2015, so there just wasn’t an opportunity to integrate from the start. But we have been watching Ethereum as it grew, successfully overcame The DAO hack, and launched the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. Ethereum has clearly solidified itself as a great token platform, as well as highlighted some of the awesome advanced features that the blockchain can offer. We are excited for the future, and even more excited for our future with Ethereum. To Vitalik, a personal thanks. To the whole Ethereum ecosystem: it’s time, let’s go and decentralize the data and the world!Sidenote TwoThank you to Counterparty for supporting Storj throughout its early development stages!  Shawn WilkinsonCEO/CTO Storj Labs Inc. [Less]

We’re excited to announce that Storj is officially out of beta! Our platform has been completely free of charge as we stabilized our technology and optimized performance. To start, every registered user can use up 25 GB storage and 25 GB bandwidth ... [More] (every month!) free for 12 months. What happens when I go over the limit?If you go over the free allowance and you have payment information on file, you will only be billed for your usage above the free allowance. Currently, that’s 25 GB storage and 25GB bandwidth every month. If you do not have payment information on file, you may be rate limited until you submit your payment information. How much does it cost?Storage is $0.015 per GB per month, and bandwidth is $0.05 per GB. This is about half the cost of competing services, and a large percentage goes directly into the pockets of our farmers.Can I keep using Storj for free?Great question! We just launched our referral program, so you can invite your friends to Storj and get an additional 50GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth once they join and spend $10. There’s no limit, so invite away! Log in and head to the referrals page.Can I pay in BTC or SJCX?Currently, we don’t have automatic billing options for using cryptocurrencies, but we plan on adding them in the near future. In the meantime, we will manually accept BTC and SJCX payments for large users. Please contact [email protected] for more information. Thanks as always for your continued support, and for making the open source and distributed web possible!INVITE FRIENDSCheers,The Storj Team [Less]

We’re excited to announce that Storj is officially out of beta! Our platform has been completely free of charge as we stabilized our technology and optimized performance. To start, every registered user can use up 25 GB storage and 25 GB bandwidth ... [More] (every month!) free for 12 months. What happens when I go over the limit?If you go over the free allowance and you have payment information on file, you will only be billed for your usage above the free allowance. Currently, that’s 25 GB storage and 25GB bandwidth every month. If you do not have payment information on file, you may be rate limited until you submit your payment information. How much does it cost?Storage is $0.015 per GB per month, and bandwidth is $0.05 per GB. This is about half the cost of competing services, and a large percentage goes directly into the pockets of our farmers.Can I keep using Storj for free?Great question! We just launched our referral program, so you can invite your friends to Storj and get an additional 50GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth once they join and spend $10. There’s no limit, so invite away! Log in and head to the referrals page.Can I pay in BTC or SJCX?Currently, we don’t have automatic billing options for using cryptocurrencies, but we plan on adding them in the near future. In the meantime, we will manually accept BTC and SJCX payments for large users. Please contact [email protected] for more information. Thanks as always for your continued support, and for making the open source and distributed web possible!INVITE FRIENDSCheers,The Storj Team [Less]

Amazon S3, the world’s largest cloud storage platform, went offline last week, taking down a large percentage of internet services with it. Trello, Quora, Heroku, and Slack are just a handful of the many services that were affected. It was also ... [More] reported that even IoT connected thermostats and lightbulbs stopped working. We now know the cause of the outage to be a mistyped command during routine server maintenance. My heart goes out to the engineer that committed that error (as an engineer I’ve definitely made mistakes like this), but this unfortunate outcome simply should not have been possible. As the world becomes more and more connected, and we become more reliant on platforms like S3, we will face increasingly negative impacts in our lives when they fail. What might be a minor inconvenience today, like not being able to change the temperature on your Nest, might be your connected self driving car slamming into a highway construction barrier because it lost access to a data feed tomorrow. While these types of terrible failures may be far in the future, that is clearly the direction we are headed, and the impact that these kinds of service failures have today is very real. No one would build a piece of critical infrastructure like a bridge, only held together with a single bolt whose failure could bring the whole structure tumbling down. And we shouldn’t build internet infrastructure with single points of failure either.We built Storj because we wanted to create a more robust, distributed system for object storage. After all, the cloud is just someone else’s computer, so why does it have to be Amazon´s? Though there are still some problems to solve to improve security, privacy, durability, and easy of use, Storj is now fully functional: We have resolved all the fundamental problems, while continually optimizing the code to find the best solutions. Because Storj doesn’t host infrastructure, but instead uses a distributed and decentralized network of devices, we offer a very special value proposition that no other traditional storage network can offer. Should our object storage service fail completely, users would still be able to retrieve their data. This is possible today as long as the application keeps copies of network locations and authorization keys. We are working on building this into our various tools and libraries by default, so every application will have this functionality without requiring any additional developer/user effort. For extra safety, the encrypted shards of data are distributed redundantly on different types of hardware and networks which are located in many different countries, keeping crazy singular failure events from disrupting functionality.The future is bright with innovation, but let’s make sure we build those innovations on platforms that really can’t fail, rather than those that just promise not to. Let´s provide services that don’t cease to function due to a single error, but keep functioning perfectly even when the entire system has failed. This is the promise of decentralized, distributed, and crowd-sourced platforms and one we are turning into reality here at Storj.Shawn WilkinsonCEO/CTO of Storj Labs Inc. [Less]

Amazon S3, the world’s largest cloud storage platform, went offline last week, taking down a large percentage of internet services with it. Trello, Quora, Heroku, and Slack are just a handful of the many services that were affected. It was also ... [More] reported that even IoT connected thermostats and lightbulbs stopped working. We now know the cause of the outage to be a mistyped command during routine server maintenance. My heart goes out to the engineer that committed that error (as an engineer I’ve definitely made mistakes like this), but this unfortunate outcome simply should not have been possible. As the world becomes more and more connected, and we become more reliant on platforms like S3, we will face increasingly negative impacts in our lives when they fail. What might be a minor inconvenience today, like not being able to change the temperature on your Nest, might be your connected self driving car slamming into a highway construction barrier because it lost access to a data feed tomorrow. While these types of terrible failures may be far in the future, that is clearly the direction we are headed, and the impact that these kinds of service failures have today is very real. No one would build a piece of critical infrastructure like a bridge, only held together with a single bolt whose failure could bring the whole structure tumbling down. And we shouldn’t build internet infrastructure with single points of failure either.We built Storj because we wanted to create a more robust, distributed system for object storage. After all, the cloud is just someone else’s computer, so why does it have to be Amazon´s? Though there are still some problems to solve to improve security, privacy, durability, and ease of use, Storj is now fully functional: We have resolved all the fundamental problems, while continually optimizing the code to find the best solutions. Because Storj doesn’t host infrastructure, but instead uses a distributed and decentralized network of devices, we offer a very special value proposition that no other traditional storage network can offer. Should our object storage service fail completely, users would still be able to retrieve their data. This is possible today as long as the application keeps copies of network locations and authorization keys. We are working on building this into our various tools and libraries by default, so every application will have this functionality without requiring any additional developer/user effort. For extra safety, the encrypted shards of data are distributed redundantly on different types of hardware and networks which are located in many different countries, keeping crazy singular failure events from disrupting functionality.The future is bright with innovation, but let’s make sure we build those innovations on platforms that really can’t fail, rather than those that just promise not to. Let´s provide services that don’t cease to function due to a single error, but keep functioning perfectly even when the entire system has failed. This is the promise of decentralized, distributed, and crowd-sourced platforms and one we are turning into reality here at Storj.Shawn WilkinsonCEO/CTO of Storj Labs Inc. [Less]

Amazon S3, the world’s largest cloud storage platform, went offline last week, taking down a large percentage of internet services with it. Trello, Quora, Heroku, and Slack are just a handful of the many services that were affected. It was also ... [More] reported that even IoT connected thermostats and lightbulbs stopped working. We now know the cause of the outage to be a mistyped command during routine server maintenance. My heart goes out to the engineer that committed that error (as an engineer I’ve definitely made mistakes like this), but this unfortunate outcome simply should not have been possible. As the world becomes more and more connected, and we become more reliant on platforms like S3, we will face increasingly negative impacts in our lives when they fail. What might be a minor inconvenience today, like not being able to change the temperature on your Nest, might be your connected self driving car slamming into a highway construction barrier because it lost access to a data feed tomorrow. While these types of terrible failures may be far in the future, that is clearly the direction we are headed, and the impact that these kinds of service failures have today is very real. No one would build a piece of critical infrastructure like a bridge, only held together with a single bolt whose failure could bring the whole structure tumbling down. And we shouldn’t build internet infrastructure with single points of failure either.We built Storj because we wanted to create a more robust, distributed system for object storage. After all, the cloud is just someone else’s computer, so why does it have to be Amazon´s? Though there are still some problems to solve to improve security, privacy, durability, and ease of use, Storj is now fully functional: We have resolved all the fundamental problems, while continually optimizing the code to find the best solutions. Because Storj doesn’t host infrastructure, but instead uses a distributed and decentralized network of devices, we offer a very special value proposition that no other traditional storage network can offer. Should our object storage service fail completely, users would still be able to retrieve their data. This is possible today as long as the application keeps copies of network locations and authorization keys. We are working on building this into our various tools and libraries by default, so every application will have this functionality without requiring any additional developer/user effort. For extra safety, the encrypted shards of data are distributed redundantly on different types of hardware and networks which are located in many different countries, keeping crazy singular failure events from disrupting functionality.The future is bright with innovation, but let’s make sure we build those innovations on platforms that really can’t fail, rather than those that just promise not to. Let´s provide services that don’t cease to function due to a single error, but keep functioning perfectly even when the entire system has failed. This is the promise of decentralized, distributed, and crowd-sourced platforms and one we are turning into reality here at Storj.Shawn WilkinsonCEO/CTO of Storj Labs Inc. [Less]