Decentralized storage markets - incentivizing free storage

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A great wave of empowerment is coming with every development of blockchain technology, one to look at today is a concept coined from the inevitable storage demand that is poised to increase incredibly in coming years. Personally, I see a lot of things gaining massive value in coming years provided blockchain technology, cryptocurrency and its associated products gets largely integrated with our daily operations. This includes financial services and operations, investment assets, real estate, social media, and as today's topic begs, individual storages sold on the virtual markets.

As many of us are aware, mining is a huge part of blockchain technology, the reality of mining is that it demands access to a lot of storage to be a good part of the network. For the integrity of blockchains, miners or node operators always have to have a copy of the distributed ledger. While in most cases, having a full copy of the network is never needed, it is however a measure of security for a larger number of people to have access to such a large amount of data so as to prevent attacks on the network by malicious players.

That said, this makes "storage" an important piece of the ecosystem, an asset if you may, so while cloud services like Google, Alibaba and Amazon Web Services are dipping toes in the crypto sector of late due to this, what if you as an individual could tap into the economic demand to make some profit?

Decentralized storage lending marketplace

Miners are incentivized to produce blocks and verify transactions, to do this, they are required to run nodes which is basically running a specific network software. These nodes need access to storage to keep all data processed for future references, where on the Bitcoin network the data stuck up these storages will be used to create a merkle tree that connects news blocks to the previous ones, effectively creating a blockchain.

The nature of these activities requires miners to have a good amount of storage space to leverage. Now, what if instead of utilizing a single centralized company as Google and AWS, a decentralized storage marketplace could be built for miners to rent storage space from the general public for an inevitably lower bid to AWS, Alibaba and Google.

The importance of this is creating some sort of balance on the network whereas instead of having a very centralized cloud usage network, we have a widely distributed network where storage is being leveraged or rented from a decentralized community.

The benefits to miners is getting a lower price for storage and the benefits to lenders is having some incentivization for storage space that would have normally been left idle.

Will it be really profitable?

Well, this is a question only the experiments of such service would answer. Given that miners have to still turn a profit just as lenders have to, it would greatly depend on the economy of the network miners are renting storage to run nodes for.

Meaning that, so long as the network isn't energy intensive and the payment assets are significantly appreciative, it would be a lucrative initiative that would boost security, public incentivization and involvement in blockchain building.

Thank you and please leave a comment, your thoughts matter to me

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5 comments
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SpkNetwork is doing some interesting work with this.

Decentralized storage is going to be important. The incentive system will be an interesting experiment.

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Interesting, this is new to me, I'd say I'm yet to fully grasp what's being developed on Speak network, will have to give it more reading.

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This sounds interesting, just came here from threads. ;)
As you asked what you could do to improve your posts, I had to come here to be able to answer. But now I got sidetracked by the idea. SPK network is what comes to my mind...
Great job on the post.

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(Edited)

Thanks for coming all the way.

I began thinking about storage having had a conversation with a Hive user where he claimed blockchain was inefficient because it requires a lot of storage, something like that.

I immediately wondered how Google effectively manages this, considering that blockchain as an ecosystem with such a limited user base is quite close in valuation to Alphabet.

Screenshot_20230123_101352_Brave.jpg

This is exactly how many GB/TB Google offers for free to its over 1.5 billion Gmail users as at 2019 data by Google.

To me it seems like blockchain would do just fine, I mean, although the incentives may not cover all the costs now, but we should also consider that we have a very small userbase currently, so with more, we should have a healthier economy where the incentives covers it all.

Then again, I thought about one way more people could dive in to contribute to the integrity of blockchain networks and here's where the delegation of free storage came in, thanks again.

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