Introduction

One of the few projects by Steemians for Steemians involving hardware. Sure, your laptop and (smart)phones are hardware as well and you probably use one of those (or both) to enjoy Steemit and all the other services connected to the Steem blockchain. This one is different!

The project I'm referring to is: SteemPi

In this post I like to make a suggestion for enhancement of SteemPi. To allow SteemPi not only to give the user special abilities to enjoy Steemit and other services on any screen around, but also turn it into a real money machine... well, a small money machine since it will not make you rich, but that said, it can be turned into a small money printer giving a continuous revenue stream every second of the day :)

In Short: What is SteemPi?

SteemPi allows you to enjoy Steemit on any screen without the need to use your laptop or smartphone. It was originally designed to connect to your television screen, but can be connected to any screen you may have around.

SteemPi is in essence a mini computer. A computer that uses much less power (something like 2 to 4 Watt per hour only) than your laptop but integrates in standard ways with large screens (eg through HDMI). Connect a (wireless) keyboard and a (wireless) mouse to the little box, and voila, you suddenly have a very powerful tool in your living-room or bedroom.

Since SteemPi is also very small, you can easily carry it around, take it with you when going on vacation, or visit friends. Whenever there is a screen around, you can hook up SteemPi and get to Steemit. But SteemPi can do more then just Steemit on any screen.

SteemPi & Decentralised Storage

Blockchain services are around offering distributed storage. These service offer storage of your data in the cloud, while hosting of your data is not in the hands of a centralised company, but distributed across the entire globe. This proposition makes use of the empty hard drive space we all have at home and other places we may have computers sitting around. Connecting a hard drive to or simply us a (micro)SD card with SteemPi, would allow the owner and user of SteemPi to participate in this new way of cloud storage of our data. And at the same time, the user can also earn some crypto coins and tokens by doing NOTHING at all.

The beauty of contribution to these distributed storage services is that this type of 'mining' does not have any requirement for fast, powerful and expensive CPUs/GPUs or specific and even more expensive mining hardware like ASICs. It simple requires a more or less always-on computer with hard drive or SD card.

And here is were SteemPi is perfect:

1. Cost to the hardware is low, less than 100 US Dollars including casing and all
2. Operating costs are very low due to very low energy consumption

How cool would it be when we can earn these costs back and even make profits with it by doing NOTHING at all? I don't see this is possible with closed systems like Apple TV!

One particular decentralised storage offerings around I like to bring forward here.

Storj + SteemPi = Money Printer

Like SteemPi, Storj (website here) uses 100% open source software, free to use, free to change it, if you will. And even more interesting, Storj is designed to work with small computer board like SteemPi is build upon, like a Raspberry Pi.

The tagline by Storj as you can see on their main page:

Blockchain-based, end-to-end encrypted, distributed object storage, where only you have access to your data

Sounds simple and Cool, right?

Some very useful links I provide here below. As a matter of fact, these links are not only to support the creator of SteemPi to bring Storj onboard, but are very useful to anybody who likes to build their own little money printer. All hardware is COTS (commercial of the shelf) and the software is free to download.

• Storj: main page [here]
• Storj: detailed building guide for Raspberry Pi computer boards [here]
• Storj: setting up the networking part of a Storj server here
• Reward Formula [here]
• Community Chat [here]

I was reading somewhere (sorry I forgot where it was) that someone was renting out about 50 or 100 GB of storage and took around 15 US Dollars worth of earnings in a month. Of course these earnings will fluctuate, not only based on the amount of storage actually rented, but also on the value of the Storj token, the token used to pay the rewards. Last week Storj climbed in value from a little below 1 US Dollar to around 1,7 US Dollar at the time of writing this post. BTW, Storj is a Ethereum based token.

Way Forward?

I appreciate any feedback and ideas you may have. I even offer you to bring comments and remarks to the creators of SteemPi.

I really love this little box, and I would really much like it when it can get even more value then it already has.

---

Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

---