Welcome to the exciting world of cloud scams and cults!

I'm starting this page in May 2020 primarily because I keep finding these things and keep forgetting about them.

• Akash - especially Akash Supermini p2p cloud on an arm based appliance with a bunch of ai/ml type of resources, earn a return on your idle cycles. Crypto is involved. \
  • At this point I'm unclear as to what this thing does\
  • Like I legitimately can't tell if this is a p2p cloud appliance where you run VMs and compute workloads for people or if it's meant to be a personal supercomputer in the “run your own SAS jobs” sense.
  • Twitter Thread with Takes
  • 2020-12-13 Akash SuperMini has been delayed again, to Q3 2021.
  • 2021-11-01: Sounds like an Incredible Journey: https://akash.network/blog/supermini-update (published 2021-10-05)
• Storj - sell blocks on your local disk using a super complicated crypto mechanism. Sia is another thing like this.
• The Helm - Personal email appliance. PHysical appliance at your house + an AWS VM. Qualifies for mostly being vaporware at this time. There are real photos of the device, for example in this arstechnica review but it seems like it has yet to ship to any real consumers.
• CloudPlan - offers compensation to personal users for access to a machine using a desktop app. One instance per IP, minimum bandwidth requirement above what is typically available in US homes. (This might not be what I'm thinking of, might be a bittorrent sync or resilio sync competitor, and as such not entirely speaking a scam, still looking.)
• Cubbit - p2p storage appliance. You get a portion of the storage on device, and store other people's data plus data capacity sold to business.
• https://mashable.com/2013/04/26/space-monkey-peer-to-peer-cloud-storage/
• pogoplug - not sure if this counts as a scam but it does perhaps count as a failed promise or one of these that ended up dying.
• Connected Data - Data Transporter. (PCWorld) A device from ~2012-2013 that was targeted at families and friend-groups who were going, presumptively, to buy a handful of the little things that would p2p sync between one-another. They did exist, but are being incredible journeyed as of 2021. https://helper.nexsansupport.com/tfb_support

2020-09-10 This isn't a P2P device, but an extremely honorable mention goes to Wester Digital for the Ibi/MyCloud device rental program. More information from WD is here: https://shop.westerndigital.com/promotions/monthly-subscription-plan

The short version is that for a monthly fee, you get an ibi or a mycloud, and while you are subscribed and otherwise in good standing, they will do warranty replacements of the device.

However, it appears that you must return or buy the device at the end of your agreement, no matter how long you've had it. They run a credit check upon subscription and may require a deposit, and you are bound to a relatively strict and punitive terms of service. If you have content that is against the ToS, they reserve the right to delete it and presumably wipe the device and cancel your account, and then have you ship it back to them or buy it.

The normal retail versions of these accounts have 2-year warranties, have an Internet connection service, and you break even after about 18 months. In addition, I don't see anything on here about data recovery services or about fault tolerance in any sense at all. To make this worse, only the 1-disk versions of these are available, and there's no mention of a data recovery service, something they don't typically do on low end products like these, so if you need to use the warranty, you are out of luck in terms of your data.