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RE: Can Steemit Survive Burning $65 Million USD in Author and Curator Rewards Every Year?
I fail to see how "Witnesses power the blockchain". From my gathering most witnesses are a net drain on it, especially with most of them running some form of bot and making bank due to that.
Or is this due to your other comment in regards to the common misconception that witnesses were the ones running the IPFS nodes and not just the average everyday joe blow with no power at all?
(I run an IPFS node and I'm a plankton)
Yes, it's due to my misconception. I thought they had a similar task as the Bitcoin miners. I had that misconception, because of the following sentence in the Steemit FAQ:
Steemit, vests, Steam Power and Steem Dollars are all powered by witnesses and are all part of the Steemit blockchain. IPFS is a decentralized network of nodes that anyone can spin up. IPFS is a blockchain and is a blockchain within a blockchain when taken into account of Steemit.
What's going on is that Steemit offloads it's data onto IPFS, which is in part of what keeps steemit so fast, even involving it's cryptocurrency. Offload data onto another expanding system that expands faster than Steemit itself can and receive it's hash data to reference in the IPFS system to call back to.
The witnesses do manage the "blockchain" just the Steemit Blockchain. They don't manage the IPFS system at all unless they volunteer to run an IPFS node, but again, that's shared by hundreds of thousands of websites and pages ;)
Thank you for the explanation. I had no clue about the inner workings of the underlying system. Now, I see and it makes sense. It's sad that the IFPS system doesn't get as much press as the witnesses do.
I'd argue most people have seen IPFS but just didn't realize what it was. If you want to spread awareness about IPFS, you're welcome to blog about your two cents on the subject. =3 Maybe encourage others to also spin up their own nodes.
Could you go into more detail about how this process works or see if I'm on the right track, please?
Are full Steemit posts the "data" being offloaded onto IPFS and then Steemit references the content's hash when calculating the rewards pool on their blockchain? I've never seen IPFS mentioned in any of Steemit's papers but find this very interesting.
Just to go a little deeper regarding the Inception of a blockchain withing a blockchain - do you see any value integrating a blockchain like Po.et? For example, someone publishes content on Steemit, IPFS generates a hash value and stores the content, the hash value is stored on the Steemit blockchain so the author receives their payout, and the hash value is also stored on the Po.et blockchain to record metadate and ownership information. Would there be any value in this, or that type of informtion already contained in the existing Steemit and IPFS model?
How this functions by and large is that large content (namely videos and images) are sent to IPFS, text data can also be sent and stored in IPFS as well. So the content gets sent to IPFS and IPFS gives Steemit a hash to reference. I'm not entirely sure about all of the backend of Steemit and what all is offloaded to be frank.
So when you go to a blog post or comment (with images), that content has a hash inside it that reads from the IPFS network and displays that content seamlessly for you in your browser.
I can't vouch if Steemit directly uses IPFS itself, however Steemit does benefit largely from the IPFS network in regards to the likes of dtube and dsound for sake of example.
Referencing po.et wouldn't be much benefit in and of itself here as Steemit could just replicate the same thing on their end with little extra to sacrifice towards it. It would be better to add canonical linkage for those of us who post offsite from WordPress for example.
So in short, it's basically referencing a series of hashes to provide you the content that you consume, namely the larger content.
So Steemit is a cross-platform client for the IPFS protocol similar to what qBittorrent is to the BitTorrent protocol?
It looks like Steemit already has canonical tags for posts. I've only just learned of them 44 minutes ago so I could be wrong but in essence isn't Po.et just a canonical tag put on a blockchain?
From what I'm able to tell, yes, especially the sites that provide uploads for big content like videos (dtube).
Yes and no, po.et also allows for licencing per post to allow for reuse, otherwise the default on Steemit is that all content is copyrighted by their respective authors with distribution rights reserved unless stated otherwise explicitly on the posts in question or on their profile.