The blockchain truth about steem and DTube

I often hear people touting about DTube and making statements about it without actually knowing about how it works underneath the marketing surface. Every now and then this leads to a discussion with uninformed people and I figured it would be helpful to write something down as education and for future reference. In the steem ecosystem people think everything is beautiful: everything is completely distributed, content is censor resistant, there's no cost and money comes for free, ... But how much of it is really on a blockchain, how much of the buzzwords are technologically correct and how much are they buzz?

What is DTube

From the DTube website in one sentence:

D.Tube is the first crypto-decentralized video platform, built on top of the STEEM Blockchain and the IPFS peer-to-peer network.

They make 4 main claims: crypto incentive, resistant to censorship, a fair platform, ads free. That all sounds really nice. And on top of that our videos are on top of a blockchain, how cool is that? On steem we think we know about these four claims, but do we really?

Only text on the blockchain

DTube is an interface on the steem blockchain. There are many flavors of interfaces, some more general and others more specialized, some really popular ones, some lesser known. Steemit.com is obviously the best known general interface, busy.org is another one. Specialized ones include DTube, chainBB, dMania, utopian, ... No matter how they work underneath they all use the same steem blockchain.

A blockain is an open distributed ledger. This requires sufficient trustworthy nodes to store this data and make it available. Storage, computation power and network bandwith are not free. Someone has to pay for it and various blockchain concepts have varying ways to compensate the nodes to keep doing what they do. To keep cost, and consequences under control and to keep the steem blockchain distributed it only allows to store text of limited length. This is over simplifying the technology but for the purpose of this article that's ok.

Other content is centralized

So where are the pictures I post stored? The simple answer is not on the blockchain. All that is stored is a link to the picture. A link points to some destination. When you use steemit.com and upload a picture steemit.com, the company, stores that picture on their image hosting services and the same goes for a lot of the other interfaces. As a result most images are stored in a central location. If steemit.com goes out of business and the image hosting stops we're left with a blockchain full of links to nowhere. The blockchain will survive, the text will survive but the images might be gone forever. You could use links to other locations but basically the same logic applies, and remember there's no way to change the links after 7 days, at least not today.

Not censorship resistant

Everything can be posted on the steem blockchain and nobody can do a thing about it. The simple proof? Just look at the amount of plagiarism and the fact that no content is censored. That's what they try to make you believe, but make no mistake. One also needs to keep in mind that the blockchain itself is censorship resistant but the interfaces are not. They can choose to show whatever (blockchain) content they want. It's up to us to trust them they do not censor.

The real proof? Steemit.com does not show everything that is on the blockchain. @ned has mentioned several times that steemit.com receives DMCA notics daily and as a company have no other way than to comply. The truth is there is more illegal content that there are DMCA notices giving the impression there is no censorship giving a false impression. Combine that with some marketing and you end up with a 'censorship resistant' feeling.

To keep the discussion simple I don't even mention the legal implications of the nodes storing the blockchain full of plagiarized text.

IPFS

IPFS is the underlying mechanism DTube uses to store the videos. IPFS or InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and network designed to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system. It's basically an encrypted peer to peer network. This is of course not enough to store 'blockchain' videos, what if no-one want's to store your video? Again, nothing comes for free, where's the incentive? Paid systems have been built on top of IPFS basically being an encrypted, somewhat distributed, cloud storage. The advantage is no big brother can easily check your files.

DTube has been open about this from the very beginning. This is an excerpt from the introductory post:

I recently created the @dtube account. This account is used to collect 25% of the DTube author rewards. 10% of these costs are used for long-term storage of the files on the IPFS Store. The rate is $ 0.044 per GB per month. So, let's say, for example, that you upload a 100MB video that receives $ 10 rewards, then $ 0.25 goes to @nannal and provides data redundancy for ~ 57 months. Once this time has passed, users have to pay for themselves (crypto is of course accepted) to have the files sown or to sow them directly on their PC and connection.

Again the same logic applies as for the images. The blockchain might live on but the videos might one day no longer exist, they are not really stored 'on' the blockchain and they can be easily censored. What happens if one day the monthly fees are no longer payed and what are the changes of that happening? What are the changes of youtube disappearing versus DTube no longer paying fees?

Transparency

Please understand that I do not wish to bash on DTube or steemit. They are wonderful initiatives that shows how things can be done differently from the big conglomerates. In my eyes they are a first step and technology will grow to make things systems like these even better. The reason I wrote this article is because the steem community is making false claims, especially about DTube and this is doing unjust to a project that is very transparent on how it works. We've seen a lot of other systems built on top of the steem blockchain that could take a lot of lessons from DTube.

Images credit: pixabay.com, quickmeme.com