datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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This is probably a result of that dumb crypto currency that uses proof of storage and people were just using Dropbox for it
But I wonder: doesn't it need to be accessible to be read locally? If I mine like 1 petabytes of stuff, then I can upload somewhere else and forget about it?
Otherwise they could mine on a disk, then wipe, start again.
IMHO they found a scapegoat, everyone (me included) loves to blame crypto bros for anything bad, but I don't see how here can happen
Emulate a block device and reference it to the cloud api, unless im missing something.
Yes but it should be needed to read it constantly, otherwise it would download petabytes of stuff
And that mined file would be accessed slowly
That's... Not how that works?... You just need to show you have physical hard drive space on your computer. Dropbox doesn't magically give you extra storage...
There was an API floating around ages ago that let you mount a Gmail instance as a virtual hard drive and use it like block device. Dropbox does have an API for file access, so it's entirely possible to write a miner that talks to Dropbox and not your local drive.