A Video About Storj - A decentralised Cloud Storage Platform
AWS is Down
In case you haven't heard yet, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is down.
If you are trying to make a post and are having difficultly adding images this is the reason why.
Whilst all the text information for Steemit is held on the blockchain, images take up too much space to do this.
Like many other web companies Steemit currently uses AWS to store images.
Since so many websites use AWS a lot of websites are having similar issues.
The huge success of AWS represents a single point of failure which can bring down a large chunk of the web.
This highlights why we need decentralised storage in general.
Whether it is due to a DDOS attack, server outage, or malware attack we need more resilient systems everywhere.
Further I think blockchain technologies like Steemit which are built on a decentralised ethos should really be embracing this as soon as possible to highlight the advantages.
I know that it is only images that aren't working but to the average punter who has grown up on rich web content it may as well all be gone.
Solutions
Personally I am most familiar with Storj as I invested in their ICO a couple of years back. I have also encountered IPFS.
Storj attempts to decentralise storage by letting people rent out space on their own hard drives in exchange for Storj tokens. IPFS is slightly different.
Juan Benet has an explanation of how IPFS (Inter Planetary File System) would work in the following video:
From what I understand IPFS is a bit more ambitious as it tries to create an entire protocol level of decentralisation but please correct me if I am misunderstanding.
Anyway even without knowing the nitty gritty of it I think it is pretty obvious why we need these kinds of systems.
A huge chunk of our lives is currently stored in centralised servers. Their failure can in certain circumstances bring modern life to a halt and this will only become more problematic as more and more services move online.