Repair Miners

Repair miners is a term used in some decentralised storage network designs for participants who keep stored data available by rebuilding it when other storage providers disappear. In these networks a file is usually split into pieces and spread across many independent machines, often using erasure coding so that the file can be rebuilt from only some of the pieces. When enough providers go offline, the remaining pieces must be fetched, the missing ones regenerated and new copies placed elsewhere before the file becomes unrecoverable. A repair miner would carry out that work in return for a reward. The idea appears in discussions of networks such as Filecoin, where storage providers must prove they hold data through methods such as proof of replication, but the exact role and its implementation differ between projects and some designs describe it only as a planned feature. Also see miners.