The battle for decentralised storage

The cloud has become one of the most important innovations within the data storage arena. Dropbox, Apple’s iCloud, and Google all use the ability to store our data or files in the cloud. This means that wherever we are in the world, as long as we have a connection to the internet, we can access our files.

For businesses or individuals, the benefits this brings are great. However, cloud storage brings its own issues. Say we are storing our data in the iCloud. What we are essentially doing is sending all our files to Apple for them to store on a large server. We then re-download our files from that server whenever we need to use them. Two issues arise from this. Firstly, from a security standpoint, if Apple’s defences are not strong enough, then a would-be attacker could manage to gain hold of a trove of important and private documents. Secondly, as a major US corporation, having all our personal details stored by Apple leads to ethical questions. If, and it’s a big if, one day the NSA requests all these files, Apple would have to put up a strong fight to resist.

The Marriot’s recent hack highlights the issue of us as citizens relying on companies to store our personal data. This is just one of many hacks that have occurred in recent years.

As a result of this, there has been a rise in blockchain-based decentralised storage, with the emergence of Sia, Storj, and Filecoin to name but a few. Their aim is to store data on spare hard drive space of people’s own computers. For example, if you had a 100GB hard drive but only used 50%, then I can store my files on your spare space. If you store my files, I can then pay you in your native currency for your kindness.

By using blockchain to accomplish this, not only are they creating a peer-to-peer storage network, but they are also protecting people’s security, as a blockchain makes the issue of hacking much more difficult. However, blockchains have been proven to struggle when scaling up. Whether a blockchain is suitable for data storage is a decision for people much smarter than I am. However, the concept is one that is no doubt interesting.

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