Alright shitcoiners, we know your desktops are cluttered with shit.

If only there were an easy to solution to offload that junk to a blockchain...or something.

WELP...luckily many projects are working on just this.

One being Storj.

Let’s dig in…

Storj (ticker: STORJ)

Mid-Tier Shitcoin

Wtf is this shit?

Storj (used to have ticker SJCX for you OG’s out there) is a blockchain-based cloud storage solution. Compared to traditional (centralized) storage options such as Dropbox, Amazon, etc...a decentralized network can provide more security and lower fees for usage. And even peer to peer networks, such as torrents, don’t provide the privacy that Storj can offer.

ANYWAYS….Storj has two primary users: Farmers and Renters. Farmers make their computing resources (bandwidth and storage space) available for other users (Renters) to use. Renters pay a small fee to the Farmers in exchange for the ability to store files on the Farmer's resources. Farmers are paid in STORJ.

Storj utilizes file sharding, parity, and end-to-end encryption.

Think of a shard as a piece of a file. So, instead of uploading your entire file to be hosted by one Farmer, your file is split up into pieces to be distributed across several Farmers' resources. This adds privacy to your data, none of the Farmers can view your file in its entirety.

Additionally, only you know how to access your entire file. This means that only you know which Farmers to pull your data from. This is a major difference from torrents...torrents publish shard locations publicly for fastest download time as privacy is not as much of a consideration. In the torrent world, you are offering files to the public anyways (usually).

Storj uses a distributed hash table called Kademila...kind of like a database...that tells the Renter where the pieces of their files are located. The Renter has a private key to access the hash table, so only they can obtain the sources of the original file.

Next, it is worth considering the fact that a Farmer might go down, thus some of your data may be lost or at least unavailable. Storj plans to continuously improve upon their audit system and reward good Farmers who provide consistent uptime. Still, Renters can choose levels of redundancy for backups of their data and improved uptime.

Understanding how torrents work will help in visualizing all of this, Being comfortable with how torrent users receive data in fragments, from multiple seeders, to obtain the entire file. If you have questions about this, tweet at us :D

They also have Storj Labs, a company that sells a hosted version of the Storj platform...basically instead of having to spin up your own instance of the Storj software, Storj Labs will do that for you.

Who tf is behind this shit?

The two founders are Shawn Wilkinson and John Quinn. Shawn is the Chief Strategy Officer and John is the Chief Revenue Officer. Ben Golub is the interim CEO and Executive Chairman. Shawn seems to have graduated from college in 2014, then jumped right in to start Storj. He was a computer science major at Morehouse College. John on the other hand, received his bachelors in 1995, so he is certainly older than Shawn. John’s background seems to be in private banking, having worked at Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse in the past.

All in all, mid-tier shitcoin...we’re personally not major advocates of storage platforms for various business reasons, but Storj does have a for-profit company, so let’s see how they do.

Hope you learned some shit.

Chat soon!

- Mike and Aaron