RE: What I Think I Like About Respectonomy's Whitepaper
On this point from the whitepaper:
"Others tried to decentralize the data-storage aspect of publishing by attempting to store data on the blockchain such as Alexandria, or using distributed databases such as Akasha that uses IPFS, whereas some like Steem use both. In such systems users bear the burden of storing data for using the system since fee analysis shows that blockchains are not free databases."
I'd argue Steem is solving this problem elegantly via the "witness" role. Witnesses are paid a reward to bear the burden of storing copies of the blockchain (running full nodes). Regular users that go through a hosted frontend (like steemit.com) do not have to bear that burden since there are no transactional fees. Instead, only users that wish to run a full node must have the infrastructure to handle the growing size of the chain.
Thanks for the input @robrigo :)
Not an expert on hardware, so I'm just left thinking what if activities on Steemit surpasses Reddit, is it really that easy to support such a network? What i like about the solution above is that authors/endorsers are the only ones hosting the content. Not sure if that's actually a great idea, but when I think of spammers, if they want it existing in the network, they'd need to support their spammy contents by hosting it indefinitely. The same goes to content creators that are serious about their stuff. Maybe a halfway solution would help out with the bloat - but that's for some other time. Steem's blockchain size is still quite small atm :)