Busting Five Common Myths about Decentralized Storage
Centralized cloud storage is data held in massive data centers run by a single organization that consumes large amounts of energy. Decentralized cloud storage encrypts data, breaks it up and distributes it for storage on drives that are run by different organizations in lots of different places, each with a different power supply and network connection, creating something much less wasteful. There are no data centers, no storage oligopolies and no vendor lock-in.
The good news is it is very real and very feasible today. Here is our take on the common misconceptions we hear every day about decentralized cloud storage and the facts to bust them.
Decentralized cloud storage sounds a bit like magic. The idea of bringing together lots of independent individuals who are not coordinated and finding a way to deliver a great outcome does sound a bit far-fetched. However, it’s not only possible, but exists today and is an actively used strategy. Thanks to advancements such as bandwidth quality and availability as well as peer-to-peer networking technology, the path toward viable decentralized storage was created.
Decentralization has been around since the beginning of the internet. The internet actually got its start as a decentralized system with Arpanet, a loose collection of universities and other institutions. Even today, when we get on our dreaded Zoom meetings, our data is behaving in a decentralized way. Our audio and video is broken up into lots of little bits, encrypted and distributed over routers that are run by thousands of companies all around the world. As a participant in that Zoom meeting, you aren’t thinking about where the routers are located or who runs them. It just works.
