Comment by gosub100

I was hopeful a few years ago when I heard of chia coin, that it would allow distributed internet storage for a price.

Users upload their encrypted data to miners, along with a negotiated fee for a duration of storage, say 90d. They take specific hashes of the complete data, and some randomized sub hashes, of internal chunks. Periodically an agent requests these chunks, hashes and rewards a fraction of the payment of the hash is correct.

That's a basic sketch, more details would have to be settled. But "miners" would be free to delete data if payment was no longer available on a chain. Or additionally, they could be paid by downloaders instead of uploaders for hoarding more obscure chunks that aren't widely available.