So I am so upset lately that people are considering things that have connections to crypto as immediately bad or a scam. However, I don’t want to say I don’t completely understand why everyone and their brother has been taking advantage of the lack of regulation around it, thus allowing so many scams to exist. That said, it just upsets me that I have just seen this mindset of putting everything inside the “it must be a scam,” which bothers me.

It bothers me so much because seeing this just “Crypto Bad” means it has been killing and hurting a lot of really cool projects that I have been following that don’t fall under the “scam” section. It is hard to say this because I understand it is hard for your average consumer to tell the difference between scams and legitimate businesses. I have been trying to give some of these companies another real shot at giving them my business. That said, I do my research and dig into the stuff first.

Crypto Tech I Am Using

Storj

So, the first company that I started out researching for a while and then started using on my own because I wanted to give it a real shot first. This company is Storj, and it has been a great experience so far as an S3-compatible storage provider with some fantastic tech behind how it handles the data. It reminds me similarly of older projects I know from, like LaCie years ago with their Wuala service, where they gave people storage for donating storage; however, that didn’t work out, and I am pretty sure it was mainly because they allowed ANYONE without much understanding into the network, your client would turn into a server if you enabled it. Storj has several extra precautions in place, and they have lock-ups for earnings and require graceful exits (giving other nodes time to sync up the data you are dropping), giving extra attention.

The other big thing I have enjoyed with Storj is the static site hosting and built-in CDN ability since your data is copied to several nodes globally. This allows me to host things like this site on Storj rather than Cloudflare Pages. I have also switched my personal file dumping ground for quick shares from Backblaze B2 -> Bunny CDN to serve assets to this workflow. This has been great for me thus far. I understand data resiliency, meaning I do daily bucket syncs to Backblaze B2 and my on-site NAS. Not that I don’t trust Storj; it is I don’t trust any one storage location with any of my data. Remember the 3-2-1 backup strategy that everyone should follow.

Bitcoin Lighting (Stats)

I have been playing with the Bitcoin Lighting network, and it has been really fast, and many small content creators who don’t trust all the many alt-coins(for many good reasons) have started using BTC to earn money during this latest advertising drought. This has become such a big thing for independent content creators it has made it into several specs like the Nostr NIPs and Podcast 2.0 Standard. Both allow me to contribute money to my favorite content creators without a middleman taking a cut like Patreon or Payment Processors, who will often cut off some of the more adult content creators.

I am not saying this is for everyone. However, it does allow people to have another way to use a long-standing operating token BTC, where people can send small amounts to their content creators they enjoy based on their listening using modern Podcast Apps that, if the podcast has configured to accept stats it will send so many based on your settings to the podcasts you listen to.

Conclusion

I just wanted to vent a little that I hate how I get jumped on for someone who doesn’t just hate all crypto. I wouldn’t say I like a lot of it; I am not saying I don’t… and I get it. There have been tons of scams. I just felt like sharing a couple of projects I leverage and enjoy using that are Crypto based and that there are some fantastic projects out there, that are not just out to scam you.