Assets for Decentralized Projects (Day 371)

When BitClout first launched, as a "decentralized Twitter" (and way more), I was curious where do they store images. I was surprised to find out that the team actually uses imgur.com. As expected, imgur is not designed for this use case.

In the case of NFTs, most tokens contain metadata including images are stored on IPFS--a decentralized data storage service. I was expecting BitClout to integrate with IPFS, or Filecoin, or even use Akash.

Not sure where the proposed [images.bitclout.com] is hosted, it sounds like a centralized solution--most likely the images are stored on a centralized server, but allowing different node operators provide their own solution, it sounds kinda like a "decentralized solution).

According to the team, the cost of storing decentralized assets is way higher than centralized. But to store the data on a centralized server comes with the responsibility of censorship of illegal contents... If the team does host the images centralized, they may have to bear the responsibility of removing illegal contents (copyrighted, pornography, etc.) and have to deal with more compliance issues as any other centralized platforms, which is opposite to the ideology of blockchain being a uncensorable platform.

It'd be interesting to see what they eventually settle with on the image hosting solution.