HSLD

Exactly! The Space Monkey device is actually a 2-3TB disk with only 1TB allocated to the user. The excess local storage is allocated to support the "peer-to-peer cloud". It's advertised to scale on a one-to-one basis where each node has it's own CPU, dedicated hard drive, and broadband connection so it'll be very interesting to see how well it performs. For $10/month for 1TB it's a no brainer to store my 700+GB of family photos and videos.

tortue

So the biggest issues I see with this are going to be:

1: Broadband access speeds are asymmetric. Big down, small up. As a result, you'll always be constrained on your ability to replicate/shard across multiple other nodes.

2: Broadband access networks are horribly oversubscribed and congested at peak hours - making replication/sharding somewhat tedious vs. the cloud. In the typical big-data storage environment (S3, DropBox, BitCasa, etc), the replication happens within their datacenter where they have non-oversubscribed bandwidth between storage nodes.

3: All the broadband networks implemented P2P packet molesting technologies in the mid-2000s. Granted, most of them removed it as the appliances themselves are expensive, but some still have the technology out there and a resurgence in P2P (to where it beats out HTTP/Flash) could bring these back.

4: Bandwidth caps - that is going to limit your ability to replicate data offnet unless you are fine with paying for it.

Way back when someone tried to make a CDN out of P2P (RedSwoosh) and I think Akamai shut it down. XDN last year tried to do similar with broadband stuff but they basically shutdown.

I think the biggest problem here is people underestimating the reliability of pushing bits to other broadband subscribers all over the globe. It works for BitTorrent because its hot-content, many people are participating and the whole system is scrappy enough it just works. In this case, it's going to probably take a bit longer and nodes may come on/off the network at random times.

Also, lets say someone hosts child porn on this system, which replicates data to your own box (and your neighbors, etc). Are you cool with that? Granted its crypted, but still...