Crowdsourced encrypted anonymous backup.

Right now I share GB of storage with a buddy of mine who also has a NAS. We use syncthing to server back and forth, and I think it works swimmingly. Not everyone has a buddy like that: crowd-source anonymous backup.

This could be implemented in several ways:

• small payments to people hosting your encrypted data. This would have to be truly anonymous, maybe a reason for a foray to Bitcoin?

• a whuffie reputation based system

  • participating in:

    • forums

    • discord

    • r/unraid

  • offering storage for anonymous data
    

• striped data across several anonymous servers in case one is unreachable

• I have many TB of extra space sitting in my server right now that could be chock-a-block full of who-knows-what.

• Monthly, daily, hourly, or some sort of priority based bandwidth limiting (plex friends usually between certain hours)

Concerns or problems:

Is there any chance in hell that some anonymous data becomes dangerous on my server?

Is the encrypted data illegal in some way? If it's encrypted, I should not be able to tell no matter what. If it is, am I responsible for physically having it?

On 5/30/2025 at 5:59 AM, rutherford said:

• I have many TB of extra space sitting in my server right now that could be chock-a-block full of who-knows-what.

Herein lies the problem. You as an individual likely don't have the warchest to fight legal problems that may come your way.

Storage is cheap—local or cloud. I'm all for decentralisation, but accepting anonymous file uploads is asking for problems. Where there's people, there's crime.

If someone uploads CSAM to you and anonymously tips off the authorities with the decryption key then you're quite likely toast, bud. It sounds like a viable alternative to SWATing someone—land them in legal hot water through data.

That and I'm not being funny, but even close friends and family—statistically speaking, the world is full of unpleasant things done by very average people, the chances of being related to one isn't impossible. I would think twice before even letting a friend use my Nextcloud instance for syncing photos from his phone versus encouraging him to set up his own server and instance so we can federate and maybe use zfs send, but even then, other than maybe immediate family members, I would be wholly reluctant, despite encryption.