Are videoclips, pictures, etc also forever on the blockchain?
At the rate at which censoring is taking place on a global scale, you start to see many freedom fighter, freethinker or whistleblower turn to decentralized blogging and vlogging. What I was curious about is what happens to the multi media aspect in the process. Is it being stored on the blockchain?
Yes, I do think about serious shit too.
Media content such as pictures, videos etc. are typically not stored directly on a blockchain. The reason behind this is that these take up huge amount of space, so the blockchain would grow insanely large very fast. Just imagine if someone uploaded a 5MB picture to the Bitcoin blockchain: now everyone would have to download these 5MB of data before getting the latest transaction data. Now do this times 10,000 pictures, and you will quickly realize how problematic it would be.
It is a bit more possible with a PoS blockchain like Steem, where only a certain amount of people actually downloads the entire blockchain. It would be very easy to clog it up still though, if people upload photos/videos more quickly than the block producers can download them.
In other words, blockchains are not really good for storing content that requires a lot of data. I hope we will find a solution to keeping data such as pictures and videos on a blockchain in the future, but that would probably take a lot of innovation still.
As of right now, when you upload a photo to Steemit.com or busy.org (or any other app), this gets hosted on a regular web server. I think Steemit and Busy.org are using Amazon Cloud Servers, but I'm not 100 % sure. So these apps will have the ability to delete your photos from their server if they wish. So right now there's no difference in uploading a photo to Steepshot compared to Instagram, it's only that a link to the photo is permanently stored on the Steem blockchain in the case of Steepshot.
Thank you for explaining this. Really appreciated!
Although the simplest solution for the immutability of data to store everything on the blockchain. It includes images and other files and it is possible to do it too. It is interesting to note that it is not done on practice though. Storing too much data will encumber the blockchain to the point that it will slow down to a standstill and exceed the limits of the hard drive itself.
Although blockchains like BigchainDB have overcome this problem but they have sacrificed their byzantine fault tolerance. This means that the blockchain has weak security and thus is not as secure are your regular blockchain database.
The solution to our problem lies in using protocols like IPFS that allows peer to peer file transfer without burdening the blockchain in the process. If the the file storage can be sufficiently decentralized than it can bring the presence of large files like images and videos on internet to near immutability.
Thanks for you time Hashcash! Shouldn't we use more IPFS protocols? To ensure that certain informative video material is not lost.
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