Storj has made waves in the name of complete decentralization of your cloud storage. As businesses and consumers alike are moving to the cloud, Storj provides an innovative means of solving the problem, “How do I keep my valuable information out of the wrong hands?” Winner of the Bitcoin Hackathon at this year’s Texas Bitcoin Conference, the company gives users the ability to not only secure their information using P2P technology and encryption, but users can also earn money for their extra hard drive space with Driveshare. Storj has also released a beta of their most recent application called Metadisk, giving you true ownership of every bit, byte, mega and gigabyte of your information.

The company launched last month and raised nearly 1,000 BTC with the pre-sale of their network access tokens. The Storj press release follows:

The Cloud is Powered By Storj

“It is time for the cloud to truly become a cloud, made up of a vast multitude of resource droplets that are added and subtracted as the cloud forms, moves and changes shape.” –Metadisk Whitepaper (2014)

AUGUST 26, 2014 —The world is getting smaller as the speed of information is growing. Natural resources are becoming more scarce and yet the population of computer-enabled Gen-X’ers is becoming more vigilant as innovations in communication and trust abound.

As we continue into the future, we will see a sharp increase in the demand for more information that is accessible – for a generation used to Internet-access on demand and wi-fi enabled everything, the expectation for readily-available data and immutable space for it will continue to grow.

A startup with its origins in Bitcoin has proposed an innovative solution to this problem. Aptly named, Storj – the company launched last month with a pre-sale of their network access tokens, STORJCOIN X raising over 900 BTC.

Led by two entrepreneurs with a growing community behind them, the Storj platform and the coin are both key elements to the beginnings of a future where all computer storage will be decentralized. Its first release will be a user-friendly web application called Metadisk – a web based drag-n-drop file storage system.

Described as an entry-point into the Storj network and currently available as a developer-prototype, Metadisk is the first of its kind that allows trustless storage and client-side encryption. Projects like Maidsafe, and Tahoe-LAFS were the first to demonstrate the feasibility of decentralized storage and the use of trustless nodes across the network. Using similar principles, Metadisk communicates with the Storj network to locate available resources (hard drive space) and then transfers the file to at least 3 separate locations to maintain the 3x redundancy considered the industry standard for cloud storage.

However, to achieve the scalability, security, and cost effectiveness of a truly secure storage system, the company must think outside the box (a centralized server box that is!). Projects like Bitcoin, Bittorrent, public key encryption, and cryptographic hash functions encompass the missing elements needed to establish a self-managed network of trustless nodes cooperating together, where the coin will serve as a means to pay for and exchange storage space and bandwidth.

“This model harnesses the powerful free-market force of self-interest to drive the network’s growth and efficiency while remaining decentralized,” explains Shawn Wilkinson, Co-Founder, from his home in Atlanta, GA. By incorporating Bitcoin technology into the platform, Storj is able to utilize an open-ledger system to keep the nodes of the network in check. Through the use of encryption and hashing of the file we can ensure that files can’t be accessed or tampered with, even on untrusted hardware.

Since the release of the Metadisk prototype, members of the community have been developing numerous apps to demonstrate the power of the Storj network.

Decentralized Video:

http://snart.cc/teststorj/demo.html

Decentralized Images:

http://salty-escarpment-7445.herokuapp.com,

http://bitcoin.info.ro/test/storj-img/

Decentralized Audio:

http://cloudnineco.com/storjapps/music/

PDF / Txt Demo

http://pryds.eu/publicdomain/

If you would like to test your skills in developing an app that will be Powered by Storj, there is a publicly available API and reward bounty of 10,000 Storjcoins X on their forum:storjtalk.org. Check outwww.storj.io for more details.