[bringtheaction]

You can have a blockchain without miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake

Now I agree that a lot of ideas for how blockchain will be used are just unnecessary and stupid, but there are some good ones as well.

You mentioned file storage but actually I think blockchain could be useful for this. Allow me to elaborate.

I don’t want to rely on Dropbox or Google or any other single company for the long-term storageof my data. And I don’t want to accidentally upload unencrypted data. And I don’t want a single company to decide what platforms they will support.

I want an open protocol and a nice open source client. Different people have different wishes. For me that would be far more attractive than the centralized storage you are suggesting, because it’s not just about the servers and the storage it’s also about the people and the software ecosystem around it.

And besides, if I gave like hundreds of GB of data to one company then they could easily start charging me more in the future and I might not be able to do much about it. With a distributed system I think there is a better chance that competition might drive prices down more.

And that’s just one kind of use-case. There are more as well.

I think blockchain in general is cool and also I like projects that aim to make worldwide payment be really fast and cheap and for the banks to hold less power over my money.

[icebraining]

There are already open file storage protocols, and open source clients that supports many storage providers. I use git-annex, which supports about a dozen commercial services, plus any machine that supports SFTP, SMB, Webdav or rsync, among others. And of course, it encrypts everything locally before uploading.

What's the point of the blockchain?

[piracykills]

Sure, you can sync to your own drives or to several commercial storage providers, but it's not as cheap as it should be. We're talking geographically distributed storage on an open marketplace, cryptographically enforced for extremely cheap prices.

Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services which could even attempt to compete on price with something like Sia today (Filecoin and others in the future potentially), but they're only in single DCs and if they lose your data you have no one to go after. In the cryptocurrency-based systems, this is all automated.

For as many incredibly stupid and useless applications of blockchains as there are, this isn't one of them in my opinion. It may not be unique, but it's actually something that could have a competitive edge over a centralized service.

[throwawaylolx]

Not sure how git-annex works, but with blockchain your files are automatically distributed among geographically diverse nodes, and there's an embedded payment method to reward others for hosting your content--all while not having to communicate with a corporation or any other third party and providing pretty good built-in security.

Dropbox got a similar response, no? That it can be replaced by rsync.

[drak0n1c]

New non-blockchain distributed ledgers like Hedera Hashgraph can support 300,000 transactions per second. That's enough to decentralize servers, or host an open-source MMORPG. No more single point of failure.

[bringtheaction]

Sure but I don’t want to own the storage drives myself. Also I want it to be simple as Dropbox. I have other things to do than to dick around with storage and syncing and all that — believe me I did spend a lot of time on it already.

The point of the blockchain is to allow me to rent storage space on other people’s computers.

[throwawaylolx]

Funnily, Google invested in a file storage blockchain solution.

[bringtheaction]

That’s fine by me. I don’t care who specifically is hosting my encrypted files as long as they are just one of several nodes in a distributed network.

[s73v3r_]

A centralized server, just instead of Dropbox or Amazon, one you rent, is still better at that.