Blockchain Based Cloud Storage Update
I like to check in on the progress of the blockchain based cloud storage projects from time to time and since it had been awhile since I had looked at some of the services I thought I would provide an update on some add a few new ones that I have learned about.
Arweave
Arweave is an interesting project. It aims to store data permanently on what it calls the permaweb. It is an interesting idea, you can bundle a number of web pages together in one upload and serve them forever from the Arweave permaweb, you can store photos forever, store web page archives forever (a permanent Wayback machine). I have not looked at all the projects built on top of Arweave, but the most consumer friendly is probably ArDrive. If you want to check out Arweave and perhaps ArDrive you can head over to https://faucet.arweave.net/ and get a small sample of free Arweave tokens to try it out. I will be sure to check in on Arweave once in a while to see how things change and progress.
If you want to know more about ArDrive here is their explainer video from Youtube.
BitTorrent
Most computer geeks probably know about or have used BitTorrent to download and share files. BitTorrent was all the rage for awhile and it does make sharing files fast if there are multiple people willing to seed those files. Most people probably think of BitTorrent being used for piracy, but there are many legal uses for BitTorrent as well. I had not heard that there is also a BitTorrent token, but apparently there is. From what I can tell, and maybe I am wrong, it appears that the BitTorrent token can help speed up BitTorrent downloads. From a computer geek prespective BitTorrent is cool, but honestly it seems like the BitTorrent token is just a way to bolt on some kind of blockchain nonsense to the BitTorrent protocol. If I am wrong let me know in the comments. Maybe I am missing something.
Storj
Storj couldn’t seem to decide what it was. They were going by two names for awhile, Storj and Tardigrade. Now they appear to be just back to Storj. I like the idea of Storj, and the idea of taking part in the network. I personally run a storage node and share some space with the Storj network. It is an interesting project but their communication and branding has not exactly been stellar throughout the time I have taken part in the project. I still don’t know what the whole rebranding to Tardigrade was about. They are the only blockchain/decentralized project that I know of that is S3-compatible making it possible to use them with some popular tools like Filezilla and Rclone.
Just a small update on some blockchain based cloud storage projects. If you know of others or have some insights on any of the projects please let us know.