I today want to talk about a concept "BlockChain Cloud Storage"- not as an investor but from the technical perspectives. I don't know if it is going to be successful, make investors rich nor I am recommending any stuff to any of my readers because simply I am not good at this "guru gyan". As a technical person, I am just interested in the concept it has brought up which seems revolutionizing to me. Again I will keep it simple to the best of my ability.
So, all of us use cloud storage services - Dropbox, Google drive, amazon cloud, Mega, iCloud, wewwwww we have a lot of options. And the technology is so beautiful right? I don't have to carry my hard disk all around which is so vulnerable to damage, can simply put my stuff on cloud servers and can access them anywhere via Internet - which one every have these days. Easy! Simple! Life Changing!
Yeah I am too dependent on dropbox myself, all my photos go there. But I had one question - why hard disk? Why not penddrive?
Hahaha.. I have too much of data man..Penddrive never suffices.
Ok Ok! So, Why do we need a blockchain based cloud storage system in the very first place?
Centralization is sort of a big problem. The data on the "cloud" is getting stored in the servers of the chosen cloud service company. The servers are centralized, they have central point of failure.
You trust one company, a small set of people to take care of all your data. And its not just one person, they are many individuals like you and over the top now most companies are relying on these cloud storage service providers - may be like a cost cutting measure compared to maintaining dedicated storage servers in-house or simply because these providers are actually doing it more elegantly.
Now, the servers can get damaged, corrupted, misused for higher profits, hacked - as we know how everything on internet is so vulnerable to hacking, seized by government!
Actually there was a case where US government did shut down the service of a cloud company and confiscated all the data - I guess the company was MegaUpload.
So could now sense some problem?
Damn! I never thought of it that way! Can blockchain resolve this problem?
I think so. But since you are so quick in understanding the technical things, let's go one level deeper to figure out how can blockchain help.
Remember we had a detailed discussion about blockchain few days back.
(link: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@manilagg/blockchain-a-revolutionizing-technology )
We learnt that blockchain is a decentralized ledger where each of the computers on the network keep a record of all transactions and this keep even the hackers at bay. This concept can be extended effectively to apply it to cloud storage.
Rather than just storing some accounting information, these nodes spread across the globe in the blockchain network can store our actual data making our data fully decentralized.
Your file is going to be stored on multiple nodes in the network. Since your files are not controlled by any one single party/company, you have more privacy. Each fragment is heavily encrypted with a key that only you, the owner of that data has. And let's assume a hacker is able to get into one of the nodes and access your file, it will only be partial and hence not compromising.
What's even more is that Blockchain cloud storage is going to much cheaper - may be around 2USD per terabyte per month!
Fantastic! I am falling in love with this technology more and more. Just last question, do we have currenly any company providing the "BlockChain Cloud Storage Service"?
Yeah we do. A couple of them like Siacoin, Storj, Filecoin. These platforms functions by using the unused extra hard drive space around the world. If you have some extra space in your computer and wish to earn some bucks, rent it out to these guys!
Large centralized cloud storage providers need to build huge facilities for keeping the servers which ultimately result in inreased price for users, but because projects like this Siacoin, build on blockchain, utilizes pre-existing servers, they don't need to make large investments enablng both the company and the end-user to save money!!
Do any of you still think blockchain is not revolutionizing? Do comment.