I'm not sure how this is a story. This startup has been around since at least 2014:

https://cointelegraph.com/tags/storj

$100k of funding after 3 years of development doesn't really seem newsworthy.

While we are excited we got the grant I kinda agree. Our stuff like the whitepaper (https://storj.io/storj.pdf) or KFS (http://blog.storj.io/post/150825969108/introducing-kfs-a-loc...), allowing you to scale LevelDB past 100GB, are way cooler and more relevant to Hacker News.

Until you can educate the public (and ISPs) on the importance of upload speeds, this will be crippled.

I constantly meet people who cannot understand why their upload of some video is taking forever when they have 30Mbps internet. Send them to speedtest.net or another bandwidth tester, and you find that their download speed may be 20+Mbps, but their up speed is 1Mbps or less.

And since saturating your upstream connection results in dramatic slowdowns and software pauses due to network waits, people will quickly blame Storj for ruining their internet.

Incidentally, the "How does it work?" video on the storj site does not tell how it works; it's just a typical zero-substance ad.

That never stopped Bittorrent.

You are speaking for others and making biased comments to attack a fairly mature technology of which you yourself claim to have no knowledge. Poking at it with the (rationalized) argument "your bandwidth will suck" is the epitome of a zero-substance comment.

How it works would be at the bottom of the page labeled whitepaper (https://storj.io/storj.pdf), or you could have clicked on the link labeled Github (https://github.com/Storj/) to look at the code.

Storj is a direct competitor to Amazon S3. We don't have to educate the public, just the developers that need to store data somewhere.

Yes, I did already scan the whitepaper. The point is that there is no real information in the video that they title "How does it work?"

And if they are in fact targeting developers, then the video makes even less sense as devs will be far less impressed than laypeople.

27-30sec show the upload process and security, 45-51 sec down the download process and speed. The middle of the video describes the encryption process.

I disagree that its devoid of how does it work, but sure I could see someone wanted more info in the video. What do you suggest needs to be included?

this is a very small funding. I like the project but this pays what, one dev for a year?

Potential for more more follow on funding. Certainly doesn't hurt.

Don't they only store 50 TB of data to Storj's 2,000 TB?

No, store as much as you want, only about $1/TB/month.

No information at all about the company or their product

That information is pretty easily available.

I'm just wondering If I rent my storage, will it cover cost of electricity and HW amortization on average? Or will I lose money?

They idea is to make use of unused storage capacity in existing machines, rather than standing up new ones just for Storj. The electrical cost should be minimal if your computer already stays on most of the time.

That said, I haven't seen hard numbers on the background compute load and associated marginal increase in power consumption. Shouldn't be anything close to the CPU-Hard task of Bitcoin mining though.

Thanks, I found this article which says that you can actually make a profit: http://blog.storj.io/post/110416906278/how-much-will-i-make-...

So if I hook up a 1tb harddrive to this network,how much can I earn?

other people disagree. If you don't want to hear about it, hide it.

It's a valid question. There have been lots of grants given out for Blockchain applications. I'm curious why this particular one is receiving attention from Hacker News. For example earlier this year DHS awarded 6 separate companies for Blockchain solutions[0], each of which were awarded $100,000. Some of them will probably move on to phase 2 and receive $800,000.

[0]:https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2016/06/07/d...

its Saturday, there isn't much else going on, it was 100k from a state agency, in Utah no less, i mean.. why not?

some people are into it.

The Utah part is definitely interesting. Plus, it's interesting to hear about non-"big VC" funding. A grant of this size for a small business could help stabilize payroll for several devs, e.g. it can have a decent multiplier effect.

why? let's complain!