I have a hammer hanging above the hard drive on a string, and every time I want to access it, I have to convince an AI it’s really me. If doubt level rises above 20%, the hammer drops.

Can you encode them as base64 URL?

Encryption

Troublesome; can’t be automated.

Well, the internet runs on encryption. If the algorithm behind HTTPS is cracked, no conventional data storage service is safe. Overall I’m quite confident modern post-quantum encryption is quite secure for the task.

As for the legal staff, well, PeerTube works the same by sending arbitrary content through your device and no one got in trouble.

That was one way I was thinking to handle this. As I don’t have friends, I had to think of some other ones.

One way to confirm participation is to require participants to regularly calculate and send to other hosts hashes of stored chunks + random strings that were generated by the chunk owner in advance and were unknown to the peer before a given point in time. They would confirm to the network they still have the file daily, if they won’t verify it for 14 days other peers would be liberated from an obligation to store files they uploaded.