Integration with Storj for Decentralized Storage

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I stumbled onto Syncthing because it was mentioned in a recent article.

Storj is a crowdsourced P2P network that allows encrypted and private storage. Very similar goals to Syncthing. We figure if the data is encrypted client side and split into pieces you can store it on devices other than your own. Since the data is stored hundreds of independent devices, and not a centralized service or server the user retains control over the data. If you would like more technical details feel free to read our whitepaper (bottom of our website).

Wanted to figure out if there was interest to integrate Storj into Syncthing. If there is interest from the community we would be happy to provide support, bounties, and/or sponsorship to help get it done. Happy to answer you might have.

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Looks like I can’t post more than one link as a new user:

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Synching does not support sharing data with arbitrary devices. Each relationship needs to be explicitly approved from both sides, which I think does not fit in with your model.

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I would define the relationship to be between the user and the network. We offer an abstracting service that treats that as one, so you don’t have to individually deal with each relationship.

In my mind Storj would appear as a single device that you could sync with. For people with limited amount of devices or bandwidth/storage I think it could be a very useful option. Only the user would have control of this data because neither the service or network have the keys, proper mapping, or metadata associated with the data.

The integration could offer singular relationships between devices, but I think that would defeat the purpose of decentralization.

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I found about storj a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been playing with it¹. I like the idea of shared encrypted storage on the internet very much, specially after watching the Node Summit talk: The cloud is Dead - Long Live the Fog!. The cloud sucks, but these people are hacking it in a cool way.

Syncthing is better for me than other ugly closed things like dropbox because I have full control over it and I decided that my data must never leave my home network. However, it sounds appealing to keep a backup in the fog, as they call it, for a few of my things. They will never be readable by anyone because the decryption keys will not leave my home network, and it gives me guarantees that I can’t have with my small set of relatively co-located devices.

The goal of both projects sounds complementary. And an integration like the one proposed certainly would require work and will possibly encounter unforeseen difficulties, but it makes sense to me.

There are other projects like IPFS, so this work could open the door for some crazy new ideas.

¹ Of course, there’s a snap: https://github.com/Storj/storjshare-daemon/blob/master/snap/snapcraft.yaml :D:D:D

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FYI there’s also Sia, which is really similar to Storj (from my understanding). However, Sia already has a working version released.

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Sia is pretty cool, but Storj is further along. It stores about 10x more data, and recently came out of beta. Plus I don’t think most people here want to download and sync a blockchain, or buy cryptocurrency which is required in Sia but not Storj.

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There is also MaidSafe which is direct competitor to Sia and Storej and then there are things like infinit.sh which alows to create decentralized storage network on your infrasturcture with your defined redundancy, dedup, encryption… it’s only problem is that it is not opensource : (

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@super3 I wouldn’t mind syncthing compatibility with storj, more options the merrier.

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Did this happen? I’m looking for an open source Dropbox replacement, and the combo of Syncthing and Storj seems like it could be that… (Correct me if I’m wrong!)

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It did not, and will not.

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Hi there!

I have been using Syncthing for years on all sorts of devices and I really love it. Thanks to all the people responsible for creating and maintaining it!

I have recently started using Storj and thought about the possibility of having it as an untrusted (encrypted) device, a feature that was not available on Syncthing back when this thread was first created. The idea was to have Storj as some sort of backup for folders being shared through Syncthing.

But I see from this thread that the idea of a Syncthing integration with Storj was not well received by the Syncthing community. Would it be possible to elaborate on why this is not a good idea?

Thank you for your attention!

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I don’t think it’s decided that it’s a bad idea; from my side it just look like an ill defined idea, and no one has put in the legwork to define what it means or how it would work, or why.

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