I have a decently-sized homelab and I've been renting out unused disk space. I actually allocated 20TB of disk space (RAID 1) and have been renting the space out via the Storj network (https://www.storj.io).
If you haven't heard of it, Storj is essentially a distributed S3 that's been around for many years now, and the way it works is that various people run Storj nodes while the Storj company runs a proxy server that breaks files up into small encrypted chunks and stores them across N peers for redundancy.
In my case, I back up my family photos/videos/documents to a Synology NAS, and my NAS is backed up to Storj. So when I run a Storj node with part of my disk space, the payments they give me essentially cover my own backups. I'm not making a ton of money or anything, but it's enough to pay for my own backups and that's a great deal.
If you're looking to do what the OP is talking about in a simple way, this is by far the best way I've found to do it.
A lot of the article can be generalized to "don't run a business in your home". It sounds like in this case, Storj is the one running the business while you are a customer (paying with storage), so you are shielded from a lot of the risks mentioned in the article.
By the way, I can't find the exact plan you described on the storj.io site, but there is this page that mentions STORJ tokens, so now I am confused as to whether this is a cryptocurrency thing or not.
> A lot of the article can be generalized to "don't run a business in your home". It sounds like in this case, Storj is the one running the business while you are a customer (paying with storage), so you are shielded from a lot of the risks mentioned in the article.
If you make any income (even $1), you still have to report it on your taxes though. You might or might not be obligated to do all the other business-y stuff, but I dont think "paying with storage" gets you off the hook for taxes if you are also getting paid for storage.
It’s an option for payment. Detailed on the same link:
> Storj created the STORJ utility token as a medium of exchange on its decentralized cloud storage network. The STORJ utility token facilitates payments from people around the world for their use of the Storj network to store their data, and Storj uses it to pay our community of Storage Node Operators that rent their unused hard drive capacity and bandwidth to the network.
If you haven't heard of it, Storj is essentially a distributed S3 that's been around for many years now, and the way it works is that various people run Storj nodes while the Storj company runs a proxy server that breaks files up into small encrypted chunks and stores them across N peers for redundancy.
In my case, I back up my family photos/videos/documents to a Synology NAS, and my NAS is backed up to Storj. So when I run a Storj node with part of my disk space, the payments they give me essentially cover my own backups. I'm not making a ton of money or anything, but it's enough to pay for my own backups and that's a great deal.
If you're looking to do what the OP is talking about in a simple way, this is by far the best way I've found to do it.