transmitting, by a caller, to a hyper-scale, peer-to-peer, de-duplicated storage system (HSAN) that includes multiple nodes, an ADD_DATA request to add an entry to a distributed ledger of the HSAN, the request comprising a user ID that identifies the caller, a hash of a data segment, and a storage location of the data segment at the caller;

performing, by the caller together with one or more of the nodes of the HSAN, a challenge-and-response process to verify that the caller has a copy of the data segment that was the subject of the entry;

receiving, by the caller, a unique piece of information including a salt;

re-encrypting and re-hashing, by the caller, the data segment with the salt to transform the data segment; and

providing, by the caller, the transformed data segment to the HSAN,

wherein successful conclusion of the challenge-and-response process enables the entry to be added to the distributed ledger of the HSAN so long as a replication factor X has not been met, and

wherein the replication factor X specifies a maximum number X of copies of the data segment that will be stored in the HSAN.