To safeguard your privacy, you must avoid using third-party services. One solution is self-hosting. But self-hosting can’t work on a large scale.

Of course, it works for a tiny fraction of users, for the elite. For those who understand the issues, have the technical skills and the time to do the job.

There are technical considerations: in order to self-host well, in addition to the installation and maintenance of a server (which some solutions try to simplify), it is necessary to ensure the service continuity, i.e. the continuity of connectivity and power supply. It is also necessary to ensure the recovery of service in case of disaster, i.e. to set up a rigorous continuous replication policy, or at least a periodic backup. And then, because any service is prone to various attacks, it is necessary to carry out a 24/7 monitoring in order to detect intrusions and data theft as early as possible.

The Internet was designed to cross geographical borders. As such, all the means implemented to reproduce these borders on the Internet are unnatural and will prove useless at best, and counter-productive at worst. The Internet is not a space without laws, but we must understand that its laws are not related to those of the geographical space.

The real question of data is not where it is stored, but who has access to it. This distinction is specific to digital and it is fundamental. In the “real world”, anyone who stores an object has access to it. In the “digital world”, one can store data, but be unable to access it, because it is encrypted and one does not hold the key.

5. The cost of storage

Users therefore pay to store their data in the BlockChain. And then, this data is maintained for eternity. Does that make any sense? This means that miners have to bear the cost of this storage indefinitely. In fact they rely on later users to finance them permanently. And as the BlockChain lengthens, they have to store ever more. Depending on upcoming users to ensure the future of storage has some points in common with a Ponzi scheme. If users move away from a given BlockChain, miners stop maintaining it, and the stored data is lost.

3. The waste of data duplication

Each miner maintains a complete copy of the BlockChain.

If, for example, the BitCoin BlockChain is 1 terabyte (10^12), and there are 100,000 miners, that makes 100 petabytes (10^17). It’s terribly inefficient. I repeat: it is terribly inefficient, terribly inefficient and terribly inefficient. And I only repeated it three times. Adding minors does not increase the capacity of the BlockChain. In reality, a BlockChain would work just as well with a single miner. The remaining 99,999 are technically redundant. We are talking about trust, of course, but a hundred independent miners would be more than enough to guarantee it.

When I talk about decentralized data storage, my audience inevitably thinks of the BlockChain, and that’s why I want to talk about it here.

The BlockChain is a technology that allows a register to be stored in a decentralised manner and which is very difficult to tamper with. These characteristics are interesting when one seeks to do without a trusted third party for securing records.

In particular, it becomes possible to keep accounts on which a whole monetary system can be built: each entry debits one account and credits another. Cryptomonnaies were the first applications of the BlockChain.

Yuval Noah Harari explains very well why data is an issue of power, and therefore why avoid their concentration is essential to safeguarding democracy. This is obviously very well aligned with the idea of PeerStorage in its political dimension.

The rest is taken from the TED website (I only translated for the French version).

Video on TED website

Introduction

In a profound talk about technology and power, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari explains the important difference between fascism and nationalism – and what the consolidation of our data means for the future of democracy.

PeerStorage was created to give users control over their personal data. In addition to the issues discussed in the website pages, there is another one: Artificial Intelligence.

An AI operates (takes decisions, or issues recommendations) in the interest of its owner (at this stage it is interesting to note that one can talk about the owner for an AI, but this is another debate). If the AI belongs to the user, it will act in the user’s interest. If it belongs to a company or community, it will act for these.

Is it important, is it reasonable, that all the data produced be kept for all eternity?

This is what most users expect from a service where they deposit their data, but the question deserves to be asked in a sustainable development context. Because this conservation has a cost over time that must be well covered in one way or another. To rely on infinite resources, or worse, to rely on future generations, is to make the same mistake as the pioneers of coal and oil.