What kind of fault tolerance are we talking about with hosts? Will data be striped to many or will I be hosed if the image or images happens to be on a drive of a client that bites the dust?
I know a thing or two about Sia. In fact I think it could be used to bolster the Steem economy and the devs have a track record for continued innovation as they just released wallet 1.4.0 with many updates to show for it.
Video streaming capability is coming soon and in the words of Taek42 about what he is most excited about in the roadmap (Reddit user of David Vorick, creator of SC)
For the immediate roadmap, I'm most excited about seed based file recovery. For the 1 year roadmap, I'm most excited about the web content streaming that we are now working on. In the near future, websites will be able to stream heavy content such as images and videos to their users directly from Sia, which will save them a lot on bandwidth.
The way SiaCoin works is it distributes the data to multiple hosts (up to 21 AFAIK) and up to 7 can fail with the data being recoverable. It's like a RAID on the blockchain which is kind of cool.
I would love for you to expound on any technical aspects that would ensure my stupid memes remain safe. I can't suffer to lose not one PEPE. I have also contacted them previously about a possible solution for storage for markdown style blogs but the video storage would be an added bonus.
I'll have to do more research into Steembit and compare.
Full disclaimer: I operate a host of the SiaCoin network.
Update: Reading this again and wanted to confirm this is just an idea you had or is there a product behind it? Want more meat to this bone so I can chew on it.
Is there any code or are we reinventing the wheel here?
This is, at this moment, just an idea, there is a small amount of manpower behind it but it's on backburner - as I said, our "back of the envelope calculation" tend to indicate that it is not profitable. The only way to "balance the equation" is to bring in a "social benefit" - the benefit it will bring to the whole Steem community.
I actually thought further in detail - yes, I think the data should be striped, as you say, a kind of "virtual RAID" is what I had in mind. Then I envisage different quality tiers - from the lowest (for the really old pictures from long abandoned blogs) to the highest (for ... I don't know what yet, it will depend on the quality of the implementation). At the lowest quality the data would be only copied 3 or four times but the customer of the service would be able to pay more and indicate that it needs a higher assurance for his/her PEPE meme
Anyway, the reason I published is to attract people like you who are interested in contributing (even if only by challenging the design, if not with actual code or testing or something else)
So, looking forward to collaborating on this (when my team has a bit more time and we can launch this in collaboration with utopian probably)