Yes thank you very much. This is exactly the kind of mechanism I was thinking about. So basically youâll need a really small« backup » in order to challenge your storage provider, and you could even imagine a penalty system (Lightning inspired) if the provider fails to provide the proof after you paid him.
So this leads to my second question: do such systems already exist, or are they discussed ? And could nostr/Lightning lead to it ?
Definitely possible to do.
For example, the storage provider could listen on Nostr for "proof of storage" requests.
The client (who originally sent the file) could send a challenge every 24h using the scheme above. When answering the challenge, the provider can also sent a BOLT11 invoice, covering the cost for the next 24h. If the client pays it, the provider keep storing it. If the client fails to pay, the provider can delete the file after some grace period.
In a sense, the client is "paying by the day".
Yep the client could choose many providers to replicate the data, and if one storage provider fail, the protocol automatically choose another to reach the desired goal of replication.
Thus any pleb could find usage for the unused disk space of their always on computers like raspberry Pi etc...
The only obvious flaw that I see here is that it would be difficult to be sure that your replicated data are effectively stored by distinct people, particularly if some big institutional actors enter the market
I would guess that providers who themselves use third-parties for their storage would be priced out. Providers who use their own storage would be able to charge less.
Right. I think also thereâs a BitTorrent tie-in here. Pay-to-seed. This would accelerate re-downloading the content later since your BitTorrent client can concurrently pull from all seeders.
In fact, BitTorrent already has mechanisms for pulling ranges of bytes and checking them. Iâm not sure exactly how it works, but it may be a good platform to build on.
