Airbnb for Computer Storage on the Way Thanks to Blockchain

Lucas Hendren, CTO of SimplyVital Health, sheds light upon the most promising cryptocurrencies to watch in July:

“Tezos could theoretically have all the abilities of Ethereum—but in addition, it’s switching straight to proof-of-stake ,” said Hendren.

“The idea behind proof-of-stake is that it’s much less energy and time intensive, which would lead to faster transactions at a lower cost.”

By launching the system with a proof-of-stake model from the onset, Tezos could sidestep some of the growing pains that have faced Ethereum. Furthermore, the governance system Tezos has built into its system gives it the capability to grow over time.

“If you’ve been following Bitcoin and Ethereum, a big problem they’ve been having is how they go about upgrading. As to the “Tezos vs Ethereum” argument, Hendren expressed confidence in both, citing Tezos’s upgrade-ability as a cause for genuine excitement.

“Long-term it very well might be a competitor with Ethereum, but at the moment the space is so large and empty that there’s room for both of them to grow,” said Hendren.

“The main reason to be excited about it is that they’ve potentially solved the problem of upgrading that many of the other blockchain networks have had.” Golem purports to be the “new way the Internet will work,” and when you start to look under the hood, you realize how and why they can make such a bold claim.

“The whole idea behind GNT is it allows you to sell your processing power,” said Hendren. So you end up with this massive distributed computing network; it basically turns into the world’s largest supercomputer in a decentralized format.

GNT has already ICOed, but will entering its Alpha in very short time (very likely this month)—and that Alpha is aiming to make high-intensity computing tasks like animation and CGI rendering much easier and cheaper.

On the flipside of the computing equation, MaidSafe offers users the chance to sell their computer’s storage on the network. The idea here is that there’s tons of storage going to waste right now, and MaidSafe lets users “sell” this storage the same way one might rent out their apartment on Airbnb.

“If you have a laptop, you can sell your storage space on this network,” said Hendren. “This is a simplified version, but: I have a laptop in my room I’m not using at the moment—I could load my computer up to this network and store data for other people for money.”

“One big reason to watch it is that they’re releasing their Alpha on August 12,” said Hendren. By letting users store encrypted data in a distributed format, MaidSafe effectively offers user privacy and autonomy in a way no current cloud storage solution does.