[Xcelerate]

I've been wanting to use this in combination with Rabin's Information Dispersal algorithm to create an autonomous distributed file storage system. You would have redundancy, but redundancy in a way that you only require k of n "pieces" to recover your original file (or data object). This is pretty cool, because you don't need to have 10 copies of a 1 GB file (10 GB total) spread about the web in order to achieve a high probability of being able to recover your data.

[dlgeek]

When you encode information with Shamir Secret Sharing, each share is actually bigger than the original secret. The computation requirements also don't scale very well. What you want is called Erasure Coding. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasure_code)

[heinrich5991]

>each share is actually bigger than the original secret

This is not true according to the Wikipedia article: Shamir's secret sharing is minimal, i.e. the size of each piece does not exceed the size of the original data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shamir%27s_Secret....