While at Coin Congress earlier this week we had a chance to meet with Shawn Wilkinson, the Founder and Owner of Storj, to chat about his new company that was recently started. Pronounced “storage”, Storj aims to be the first ever decentralized cloud storage platform for users to securely and safely backup their files. Even though Storj is still in early beta stages, so far it appears to be really promising. Anyhow, be sure to read the full interview below.

Hey there Shawn! Thanks for taking time to do an interview. Tell us a little bit about yourself (and maybe some of your technical background).

I’m a recently graduated (as of a few weeks) Computer Scientist from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. I’ve been developing and freelancing for the past 10 years, but for the most recent two, I’ve been exclusively focusing on cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin.

What got you started/interested with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies?

A college friend of mine started mining in mid 2012 (when you could actually mine with GPUs). I got curious, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to run my GPU while I was away from my computer. I bought a couple things with the Bitcoin I mined, and then stopped mining because it made my room too hot. Bitcoin started to gain some traction a month or two later, and I got back into it. While everyone was mining and trading, I was more curious about the backend. That led me down the rabbit hole, and I started making small contributions to Bitcoin Core, and many alternative cryptocurrencies such as Peercoin and Primecoin that I thought showed a lot of promise.

Tell us about Storj. What it is in a nutshell, and why you think it’s a huge game changer for cloud storage?

There are really two parts to Storj.

The first is providing a secure, cost effective, and fast cloud storage solution. For most cloud storage providers, you have to trust that it’s secure; with Storj, the file is encrypted before it even leaves your computer. Dropbox just takes Amazon S3, upcharges it 10 times and markets it as Dropbox premium. On an open system, data can be much cheaper. Storj also works on a P2P network which means you can access files just as fast as you can access torrents.

The second part is almost everyone on the internet has a hard drive with empty space. Instead of wasting it, you can sell it Storj. Someone will store their encrypted file chunks on your hard drive, and you will be paid for it.

We end up with a secure cloud powered by us, the users, not a company.

How did Storj come about? What got you started on the project?

I was working on a project to archive the Twitter Firehose, and it was producing GBs of data each day. I kept on filling up the little server, and had to download the data to my computer. It would end up costing me thousands of dollars to run and store it on a traditional cloud service. I noticed that it wouldn’t cost much if I just bought the drives myself. But I still wanted to access the files from anywhere, even if my computer was offline. Then I wondered if I could just trade for someone elses hard drive space. Any unused space could just be sold, and I could rake in thousands of dollars for a few cheap drives. Thus the idea for Storj was born.

How was the 2nd Annual North American Bitcoin Conference in Chicago?

It was a great conference. Vitalik Buterin, from Ethereum, gave me some great feedback on the Storj algorithm, and I finally got to meet Andreas Antonopoulos, one of Bitcoin’s most vocal evangelists. I also got to meet some of the team in person for the first time. The current Storj team is around 20 people, spread all over the world.

Most of the discussion at the conference was focused on New York’s proposed regulations on Bitcoin. Regulation remains a pretty hot button issue for the Bitcoin community.

Looking towards the future, how do you see Bitcoin evolving and what would you like to see?

Bitcoin itself is pretty solid. I think what we will see is more tools built with Bitcoin technology, like Storj, and more startups to make Bitcoin easier to use. Now that Apple has unbanned Bitcoin from its app store, I’d love to see more cool apps that integrate Bitcoin.

Where do you see Storj a year from now? What about 5 years?

I think the simple concept of users being able to sell their extra hard drive space will shake the cloud storage industry to its core. Instead of users asking how much free space they get, they will be asking how much they can earn for their free space. A year from now tons of users will be adopting this new model. Five years from now, I don’t see a single traditional cloud storage service existing.

What do you think is the future of Bitcoin or what do you think is the next big thing within the Bitcoin industry?

Bitcoin keeps growing every day. I think one day we will wonder why we even carried around green wads of paper in our pockets, when you could just have your money on your phone. Perhaps smart contracts.

How do you plan on addressing the concerns expressed about Storj?

Many people are quite curious about the technical specifics of Storj. Many projects like ours have nice technical whitepapers, but haven’t released single line of working code. We are working on a technical whitepaper, but our main priority will always be pushing code. You can take a look at our Github here. We even have a encrypted file sharing web app, called Metadisk, already running here on some of our prototype software.

Any last comments or thoughts? Thanks!

You can check out our website for more information. Our video summarizes everything pretty quickly. If you would like to support development and gain early access to our software, check out our crowdsale as well.

If you have any great idea for apps to build using Storj or would like to build one yourself, just visit us at Storjtalk. We are always looking for more volunteers and collaborators.