[tyingq]

It would be interesting if it were possible to hijack the infrastructure of the existing cloud players to do something similar. Like using encrypted blobs on Google drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc, as the backing store. In some way that provides redundancy, safe peer-to-peer key exchange, opacity (your account is storing not just your encrypted blobs) etc.

Foisting off the infrastructure funding on the opposition has a sort of poetic justice to it.

[nickpsecurity]

Google "parasitic storage." That's what CompSci called such schemes when I last saw them. They might even have done "parasitic computing" or something like that by now.

[tyingq]

Interesting. I could see using something like the blockchain as proof of which domains/urls are the current central authority to get the rest of the info from. Such that the base reference isn't easily shut down. It's whack-a-mole to try and kill the head, no need for complex decentralization.

Would be kind of fun to watch the giants trying to shut it down. Given some level of popularity, it might become too difficult​ for them to do. Users donate newly minted Google/Microsoft accounts as old ones get shut down. With some sort of karma reward for doing that.

[jude-]

You might want to take a look at Blockstack (https://blockstack.org/). It does exactly this on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. You resolve a globally-unique name to a DNS zone file, which has URI resource records to off-chain data on one or more external storage systems.

Disclaimer: I'm one of its creators.

[tyingq]

Only on HN. I describe an unusual idea in fairly vague terms, and it turns out it exists. And one of the creators clues me in.

Thank you, and I will check it out.