What you'll learn 👉
Introduction
Storj was founded by Shawn Wilkinson (CTO and CEO), Tome Boshevski (Chief Design Officer), James Prestwich (COO and CFO) and John Quinn (Chief Development Officer).
It began as a platform to enable crowdsourced P2P data storage. By decentralizing data storage, Storj’s team aimed to build a service similar to the existing one, but faster, cheaper and safer.
For a cloud storage provider, it is rather untypical to use a token system. So why did Storj do that?
They chose the token sales model because of the ability to support dAPPs and open source development teams.
Storj token sales enable the company to accelerate product development while promoting developer work and network growth.
In short, Storj uses the token system as a kind of crowdfunding. However, it is said to be more than just a source of funding. In the future, tokens will also play a decisive role in how users interact with Storj.
Storj moved from the Bitcoin blockchain to the Ethereum ERC20 standard with its cryptocurrency to reduce transaction fees for the community while increasing functionality and ease of use.
The Storj Coin in figures – as of December 2017
On July 18, 2017, the sale of Storj Coin began. The company’s market capitalization is $92,385,606 USD with a daily trading volume of $9,779,090 USD.
Currently, there are 98,446,613 STORJ of a total of 424,999,998 coins in circulation.
How does the Storj storage system work?
The company does not operate a single data centre itself. Storj is a peer-to-peer network consisting of farmers and tenants.
The farmers are users who rent the free disk space on their hard drive and bandwidth. The tenants obtain these from the farmers and pay for their use.
A farmer only receives a small encrypted fragment of a file or document. He can’t decrypt the fragment without the correct encryption keys.
Unlike some public blockchain models, there is no consensus method in Storj.
The consensus mechanism would, in this case, create too much effort, which in turn would reduce the efficiency of the system.
Every hour Storj completes an audit and sends a cryptocurrency request to the corresponding Farmer nodes.
If the farmer has changed or deleted the encrypted fragment, he cannot answer the request. If the farmer can respond to the request, it means that he owns a fragment of the file and receives a micropayment for storage and provision.
This is not mining in the traditional sense. Farmers are paid for the provision of their unused resources to the network via the App DriveMiner.
What are the advantages of Storj?
The Storj team aims to create a service ten times faster and 50 percent cheaper than traditional cloud storage solutions.
This is achieved by using parallel downloads. Instead of getting the entire file through a single download, Storj takes a BitTorrent like an approach.
Fragments of the file are referenced by different nodes all at once. The file is then reassembled by the user in parallel to the download.
By distributing and hiding fragments and using encryption keys in the complex network, Storj makes it more difficult for hackers to access the data.
This means that you cannot identify attack areas and vectors.
Not only do hackers have to hack the encryption key to decrypt the file, but they also have to find out where these fragments of files are located on the thousands of nodes in the network.
This makes hacker attacks almost impossible.
You can’t buy it directly for fiat on any exchange. You can choose the best service to buy bitcoins for your region and buy BTC there, then trade it for STORJ on exchanges. Learn here how you can instantly convert altcoins to bitcoin and vice versa.
Our recommendation is always check if Coinbase is available for your country and buy there – as it is by far the safest and best regulated bitcoin exchange. Coinbase is not a scam and legit place to buy BTC.
If Coinbase doesn’t support your country, use Cex.io – read if Cex.io is good exchange here. Coinmama is another legit and safe place to buy Bitcoins – click here to visit Coinmama.
If your country is not available on Coinbase – check for exchanges that are top Coinbase alternatives (such as Cexio and Indacoin – see here Indacoin exchange review) and buy BTC on one of those exchanges. You can always exchange your coins on Changelly (see if Changelly is good and secure), instantly and directly to BTC.
Best and safest option to store your coins is to download an official coin wallet and store it on a hardware wallet – our recommendation is just go and buy Ledger Nano S, it is the safest option.You can read our article on Ledger Nano wallet or check out other top hardware wallets here.
