Without someone challenging the status quo, nothing would ever change. Which would be the ideal situation for the establishment, but the worse for progress.
Bitcoin and later, other cryptocurrencies are a prime example of technology-driven financial (r)evolution, which not only challenge the old status quo, but in some areas will likely soon replace it.
But even disruptive technologies need to reinvent themselves or be disrupted by newer iterations which find ways to overcome issues earlier ancestors had.
Ethereum is a great case of study. While being probably the most important pole for innovation in the cryptosphere since its inception, it is currently forced to undergo massive transformations at the protocol level and also to become more competitive regarding fees. And all that after only 6 years since its launch.
Blockchain technology advances so rapidly and from many directions, propelled by the open source nature of most projects. Even the granddaddy bitcoin, which is renowned for being conservative with changes, added a new layer via the Lightning Network nodes, in an attempt to speed up transactions.
In this space, a stagnant project will likely die, no matter how good it is at some point.
This is why I was very happy when I read the SPK Network light paper. What a huge project it turns out to be! By the way, did you know at some point 3Speak was criticized for marketing itself as a supporter of free speech? The reason critics invoked was that 3Speak was almost as centralized as the platforms it wanted to disrupt. Well, it's been some time since then, and here we have an awesome SPK Network, designed for decentralization, openness and interoperability. All great ideals in today's cryptosphere. And 3Speak as the first running app on the new SPK Network.
That led me think back at Hive. That's one of the blockchains where we have developments, that's for sure.
I was thinking about the following. Hive keeps on the blockchain text, as we know. Not the images. Those are kept on an image server (or more), but centralized.
Does it make sense a system like SPK Network has to keep our images in a decentralized way? IPFS + proof-of-access rewards. The more images you store on your node for images, the more rewards.
Would it hinder fetching performance tremendously compared to dedicated image servers with caching systems? Does that matter if we have lazy loading for post images? Should the quality of the connection be a factor? I haven't seen this considered as a factor for SPK Network, but maybe it was.
What do you think?
