Hi! CTO of Storj here. This article makes some reasonable points, and it makes some unreasonable ones.

First, on the reasonable: absolutely, privacy and security should be layered on top of whatever storage platform you use using your own encryption. No objection! That's the right approach. It is always better to bring your own encryption, and having it layered so your storage provider can't have access is great. I have much love for @cperciva's Tarsnap. It's awesome.

The downside with a product that punts encryption to the user is that users /typically don't do this/. In fact, users like to share things and serve content to others. Bringing your own encryption that the sharing infrastructure doesn't understand means it is much harder to actually use the product for sharing. This is why Storj includes hierarchical encryption for delegated sharing. It's not that embedding encryption into the framework is better encryption by any means, but it is a better default. Users are by default protected by their own keys that we don't have access to, which is a better default than the cloud. Should people use something else also? Sure! If it suits them.

On the unreasonable:

The author says:

> [I]t is very unlikely that a decentralized storage market can offer an alternative that can compete against centralized providers— AWS, Google, Azure— when measured on any of these [cost, speed, reliability] dimensions.

This is a testable assumption, and the author didn't test it (post is from December of 2019, we were in late beta then, working very well).

Storj is cheaper ($4/TB/mo, was $10/TB/mo in December of 2019), provides 11 9s of durability (no SLA offered until March 2020, but we had and still have never lost a single object out of billions), and is equivalent in speed to providers like Backblaze (and getting faster). It's also multiregion by default (obviously). This is a screaming deal on all dimensions. Try it out for yourself. Our metrics are delivering on all three dimensions.

This author is picking and choosing between architectures of Filecoin and Storj, which is fine, but each should be evaluated in isolation. Filecoin and Storj make very different design decisions with very different payoffs. The author argues Storj can't deliver on its promises with appeals to Filecoin's architecture.

Filecoin absolutely uses blockchains and proof of storage and whatever else. In fact, Filecoin does fall victim to requiring lots of resources (see https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/).

But this is just true of Filecoin, this isn't a problem with decentralized storage in general, and Storj is an excellent counter example. Storj does not require lots of resources (and in fact many of our node operators use Raspberry Pis). Storj is not a blockchain, uses statistical audits that are low-effort and low-CPU for storage node operators, and works great for idle capacity.

If you're interested in how we can achieve these things, you might take a look at an older blog post I wrote explaining (without naming) why Filecoin's architecture is fundamentally flawed: https://www.storj.io/blog/replication-is-bad-for-decentraliz...

Storj and Filecoin are both decentralized storage products, but they are really fundamentally very different, and their differences are worth understanding.