DTube is an effort to create a decentralized, censorship-free video platform. The platform uses the STEEM blockchain to decentralize the database containing pointers to videos, and the decentralized IPFS storage system to host the videos.
Because we want DTube to be truly decentralized, we cannot have a server running a database and use it to query things. Using a blockchain is a natural solution. STEEM has many advantages over other blockchains. It is fast (3 sec blocks). It is free, anyone can use it without having to deposit some form of currency, and transactions have no fees. Who would want to pay money to upload a video, comment a video, or even upvote? Nobody. As an added bonus, the STEEM blockchain already has a reward-earning mechanism.
Any video uploaded on DTube becomes a STEEM content, that can earn rewards for 7 days. DTube doesn’t use either the title or the body of a content to store information, therefore if you don’t want your video upload to appear in your feed, you can edit or delete it, the video would stay intact on DTube. While it would be possible to display nothing on other platforms like steemit.com or busy.org, I believe the current behavior to be fine and will help the platform growth and the users rewards.
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IPFS is a protocol that enables decentralized file storage. The principle behind it is called Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). The same principle also powers the BitTorrent network. Just like how cryptocurrency uses asymmetrical cryptography, DHT networks will hash contents in order to be able to identify a file. The hash becomes the identifier of a file, and it’s as easy as re-hashing a file and making sure the hashes match to ensure the file that was sent to us is the original.
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I have recently created the @dtube account. This account will be used to collect 25% of the DTube author rewards. 10% of these fees will be used to pay for long-term storage of the files on IPFS Store. The rate is $0.044 per GB per month. So, for example, let’s say you upload a 100MB video, that earns $10 rewards, then $0.25 will go to @nannal and ensure data redundancy for ~57 months. Once this time is passed, users will need to either pay themselves (crypto accepted of course) to keep the files being seeded, or seed it themselves directly on their own PC and connection.