Mildly Interesting

Spotify got its start by distributing its music files peer-to-peer as well.

Interesting! Thanks

Bram Cohen. He also created a crypto protocol called Chia, which is interesting. The idea was to create a green (ish) crypto that would leverage existing resources, in this case old storage drives. So it uses "proof of space" rather than "proof of work". The "plotter" (as opposed to computationally intensive GPU/CPU "mining") fills up your storage space with "plots", randomly generated data files ~100gb each. To earn crypto, it's basically a lottery against your plots. The network gives you a random hash, and if it matches one of your plot files, you get rewarded with a token. Very low power, keeps old storage out of landfill a while longer, and once those plots are initially made, they're good to go forever - they can "win" more than once, so the more energy-intensive process of plotting (though it's still nowhere near the consumption of proof-of-work, which is a disaster) has a natural upper limit of your total storage space.

The difficult bit is creating the plots, it takes hours to days to create one, depending on your write speed. I put my fastest storage on that, a specialised PCIe nvme SSD. I think I was able to bang out a plot every couple hours eventually, then I would offload it to a somewhat monstrous storage server with the maximum number of drives the motherboard would support. Others in the community created massive RAM drives. Very expensive, but super duper fast.

I plotted for a while, but cashed out when it stopped making sense economically. Eventually, the price per terabyte of storage + electricity eclipsed any significant gains. Did a lot of scavenging, haunting thrift shops, and trading up for higher storage capacity on eBay. Actually made a few grand of pure profit before the price settled down, and difficulty increased. That was the most fun I've ever had with crypto. Besides all the storage, cables and hubs, I built my "farm" solely from stuff I already had laying around. I even made a profit selling all the drives back, as this project singlehandedly pulled almost all the slack out of the used storage market. It kept a lot of equipment out of the landfill for much longer than usual, which is pretty neat.