Somehow I don't think many people will be willing to store arbitrary data like this on their hard drives. It only takes one person to inject something illegal before the entire blockchain becomes incredibly dangerous to handle. There's not really much worthwhile in storing something in this expensive format over an http/ftp/gopher server server if it's not illegal in some way, which will probably lead to it being quickly unsavoury.<p>On the technology side, you'll get to the point where no solved blocks include any data because it's causing massive orphans for the miner. I can't see this ever working the way the author intends. That already happens in the bitcoin system where blocks are extremely well compacted, and still people don't want to include transactions against the risk of losing their income.
A blockchain isn't a particularly great data storage or retrieval mechanism. The core value of the blockchain with proof-of-work is achieving global consensus through majority hash voting. I don't see why data storage would benefit from this kind of structure.<p>For example, the basic premise of the blockchain is a backwards linked list. New transactions in the chain are collected into blocks which must be placed at the tail of the blockchain. Miners race to get their blocks on the tail. This is a great property if you're trying to prevent counterfeiting and provide protection against double-spends, but what does counterfeiting and double-spending have to do with data storage?<p>Blockchains are incredibly cool, but when you have a hammer...
What is the economics of the incentive system for data storage vs cost of storage?<p>For the miner who mines a block, he only needs to store the additional data in the block. But the commons of the miner network needs to store all data, so isn't there a tragedy of the commons? Perhaps the number of miners would continue to wind down until only a handful can actually service the network, reducing the security and usefulness of the system.<p>What incentivizes a miner to actually store the data anyways? Are there proper incentives to ensure that miners or whatnot actually continue to store all that data?<p>The right incentive system would allow users to pay for data downloaded. Not sure if that's in the spec or code.
I really want to like these storage-coin ideas, but it seems like the obvious advance needed is a conceptual way to distribute the blockchain so each individual computer doesn't have to hold all of the data, and (hand-in-hand) to eventually allow data to be removed from the chain. I don't understand how they can otherwise be sustainable long-term. It also seems like they could take some lessons from BitTorrent, where peers get credit for transferring data rather than computations.
>Data is stored in the blockchain forever and can be retrieved using a transaction hash as an identifier.<p>so, if someone stores any piece of copyright material the MPAA/RIAA would need to destroy whole ecosystem of the given coin? bamboo roots come to mind.
If you combine this with something similar to Namecoin, for dns, this might be an interesting distributed website hosting solution. Or, perhaps publishing scientific studies (documents and data) instead of using academic journals[1].<p>It might be horribly inefficient as a hosting solution, but i'm sure that can be optimized.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960989" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960989</a>
There's absolutely no reason to construct a new chain for this. You can do data storage in the block chain using Merkle trees whose roots are committed in the coinbase string or an OP_RETURN txout.
What makes it valuable as a currency? Are people expected to buy DTC to pay storage fees? I don't know that this will work from an economics standpoint.
bitcoin can already provide proof of existence in a similar way if that is the key advantage expressed, if they claim to be able to store an indefinite amount of future data instead, as could be inferred by a quick scanning of the text, I find it very hardly scalable at all, there could be useful files of any size passing through the voting system and the blockchain should be replicated by each client on the network in theory in order to safeguard the network from possible missing nodes
Maybe I just suck at this, but I've found that compiling the needed tools for various cryptocurrencies is kinda hellishly difficult. I've been trying to get this one going on OS X Mavericks for the past hour with little luck.<p>I'd really like to play with more of these, but the state of the documentation across the board for them (except Bitcoin) seems to be slim at best, non-existant and incorrect at worst.<p>Trying to figure it out and post my results to the Github issue tracker...