What will happen to the data in the blockchains many years from now?
This is something I have been thinking about lately. Will the blockchain data be preserved forever, or is it likely that at some point, there will be a hard fork that will allow some of the old data to be discarded?
As far as I know, the idea of a blockchain is inherently based on the preservation of all the blocks to ensure the integrity of the new blocks and the blockchain as a whole. But I don’t think it will be impossible to discard some of the data in the future.
Another aspect of this question, especially in relation to the steem blockchain, is the fate of the images that are not actually saved in the blockchain. I don’t know for sure, but I guess that Steemit uses a technology like IPFS for storing the images (correct me if I am wrong). Anyway, are the images saved in a centralized system, or do they use a decentralized platform? Is it possible that some images may become inaccessible in the future?
Dear sir @ghasemkiani I am agree with you? Blockchain given data and images should be saved because these are very important. Thanks for sharing the valuable thought.
Very important topic
Yes comes to fat
The data that is being put in STEPM will be saved as images
I agree with you
非常好的思考
Hi @ghasemkiani, I believed the metadata stored in the blockchain will be forever and ever, so we better think twice before pressing the send button.
I totally agree with you in that aspect.
Thanks @fenequedvm, Have a Nice Day and Happy Weekend!
Yeah..this are questions people are meant to ask often..
I feel we should be able to access images in future for future reference
The data is what will give the blockchain most of its value is the future.
That is a very important point. The preservation of data is what give a block chain value.
good writing.
i like it. thanks for sharing
I've been wondering about this myself.
This is a good observation. I wish every data will store in a safe place for future purposes.
Ghasem, the uploaded Steemit images are currently stored at Amazon Web Services, no IPFS involved at all, currently! ;-) Whether any of the data on the steem blockchain will remain in the future, simply depends on the witness nodes hosting the Steem blockchain. A blockchain is not something "magical" that's always there: there are 3 forms of internet storage infrastructure possible:
-a- centralized, like a normal client-server infrastructure where 1 centrally hosted server serves multiple clients;
-b- decentralized, currently like Steem, where anybody could, but only a few people do so, here called "witnesses" host a server node, forming consensus via an algo (POW, POS, POB, "gossip protocol", etc) about the validity of blockchain data
-c- distributed, where any computer can be a client or a server: like IPFS.
I suspect, in the near future, that Steem will be ported to run on EOS, which uses IPFS, and then, we can say there is a distributed infrastructure hosting the Steem blockchain. But in any case, it could happen, that zero nodes host the blockchain, and then of course both the service and the data is "lost", as is the case with a central hosting infra where the host server node is offline (permanently).
Thank you. Very informative answer. But my question was somehow different. What I asked was that is it possible that in a future hardfork it will be decided to discard some of the old data in the blockchain?
The nature of blockchain hashing is - in simple terms - that each block gets signed with the previous block-hash. In essence that means to sign block N only block N-1 is directly needed, but N-1 blocks [N(0)..(N-1)] are still needed to form consensus ("for a re-check" of hash validity).
There are always situations possible, although rare, perhaps, in which all blocks need to be iterated over to gather data. For UA for example, to do it right, I have to go over all blocks and check for follower (follow / unfollow) mutations to eventuelly come to the conclusion that you currently follow who you follow. I need all blocks / data for that.
For daily news feed browsing, old data is hardly needed of course.
So possible... maybe. Probable... hardly.