RE: Timeless Content versus Timely Content - Or How Steemit Can Lock Itself Out Of Business In One Easy Step
I am not sure that it will cause steemit to fail, but it is a severe limit, and a strong disincentive for authors to provide good, lasting content. To be fair, they do have a good design reason for the limit, in that the entire block chain has to fit in memory for every miner and witness.
In the white-paper, the authors envisioned a reddit like system. If that were the case, the 30 day limit probably wouldn't be such a problem, but curators seem to be driving steemit away from that to something more like a blogging platform. If curators want to neutralize the limit, I guess they could deemphasize top-level posts and emphasize comments, to steer steemit back towards reddit, but that would probably attract a largely different user community from the one that's here now.
Design-wise, storing the entire content in the blockchain is not that difficult. They could keep in the blockchain just the references for the actual posts and a bit of meta-data (revision number and delta-modifications, sort of like a versioning system in which you store just the differences between various versions) and the actual files in a distributed filesystem. Even beyond the current design, platforms like NXT/Ardor could allow spin-offs in child blockchains. I don't see the technical implementation as a bottleneck.
The actual bottleneck might be initial vision, where founders envisioned something reddit-like. I've read the white paper and I don't remember the word "clone", but there were many references and probably reddit was a big inspiration. But as the community grows and the direction of Steemit becomes clearer, they may realize that they can't build a Reddit clone, because, you know, Reddit is already there :).
The tradeoff is between of "just another Reddit-clone", and the "first ever Steemit". That's what I wanted to say by "opportunity cost". They do have a big opportunity with this project.
Now that you mention it, I think I may have read somewhere about plans to integrate with IPFS. Not sure, though...
In the roadmap, perhaps?