Nerding on Crypto

A few of the blog posts that got lost in the great accidental purge talked about my interest in crypto currencies. Not JUST the financial side of it, but the technology behind it and the enabling markets behind that.

Yes, I bought Bitcoin at $50 years ago. That was lovely. I also bought Ethereum at $0.30 - that was lovely. Both long since sold. Beyond that complex market, I've been gravitating towards three very cool solutions that I want to talk about from a tech perspective. None of these are paid endorsements - I don't do those.

Storj.io

Pronounced "storage," this is a decentralized AWS S3 endpoint essentially. Instead of "mining" for coins, which wastes so much freaking energy, you contribute unused hard drive space and earn STORJ coins (ERC20 token). There's a good market for the tokens and is exchangable on most major exchanges.

What I like about Storj is that it is easy (been running it since V1 when it wasn't), everyone has empty storage laying around, and they are integrated into many things - which is their sweet spot:
1. As a Fastly CDN edge node as well as a log output endpoint
2. Directly into Filebase
3. Integration with Velero for Kubernetes backup
4. Some neat large dataset movers with several universities
5. Directly into FileZilla
6. And a bunch more

This democratization of endpoints, the fact that it is substantially cheaper than S3 itself but compatible with the endpoint APIs, and the fact that I can earn a few $ on the side is a neat benefit to the world. I've found a sweet spot of about 8TB shared nets me $30ish dollars a month give or take. It's not a lot, but it's fast, secure, decentralized, and, best of all - easy. You can get started storing stuff at https://tardigrade.io or hosting a node at https://storj.io

Next up in my crypto series is another system I've been following, working with since its inception - Blockstack! And as always (starting now haha), cuteness: