gmaxwell posted this a few years ago:


What became of the project?


It doesn't look like he ever released any code. I think StorJ was more a concept than anything else. The whole autonomous self-replication thing is probably a long ways off, but it's a neat idea.


I wrote a version of this here: https://github.com/hughht5/fhba

It does not have any autonomous self replicating features, but you can upload files and pay a fee to keep them online.

WARNING - currently no TX fees are paid so money paid to it will likely be lost.

  • TX fees are now sorted. Give it a try if you like. (testnet still advised). – Hugh M Halford-Thompson Mar 15 '14 at 16:40

StorJ itself was not advanced beyond the concept stage. There has been some attempts are implementing it (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=305476.0) but I'm not aware of anything concrete as of Jan 2014.

That said, people like Mike Hearm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4PAMFPo5Y) and Jeff Garzik (http://garzikrants.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/storj-and-bitcoin-autonomous-agents.html) have kept the discussion going.

Agents are now part of the official bitcoin wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents

As to why StorJ never saw the light of day, I think the practical implications of implementing an autonomous AI require technological developments going far beyond a distributed ledger and payment system.

For example, the online storage space is highly competitive, and services like Mega provide 'sufficiently good' service for 0 dollar. An AI could indeed be autonomous enough to efficiently lower its costs of operation assuming sufficiently developed 3rd party APIs, but for it to change its business model to freemium without human intervention is too much of a stretch as of 2014.

All is not lost. The recent concept of DAC seem to have taken the relay. See https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=f976bd25b056584eaab72a0f973d3a5f&board=9.0 for a list of what people are currently conceptualising.


The closest I've seen to an implementation of this is the crypto-currency Datacoin, where you pay for permanent data storage in datacoins. Once the payment's done and your data (in 4KB chunks) is committed to the blockchain, it'll be there for as long as the crypto-coin lasts.

Now then, except for perhaps religious texts or great masterpieces of world's literature I don't see much of a need in the world for permanent storage of anything.

StorJ was a very interesting idea, if a bit too ambitious. Probably a new crypto-coin should take its idea of temporary data storage and implement it over Datacoin's already existing framework, it'd be an order of magnitude more useful.

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