RE: Steembit: a decentralized storage marketplace for Steemland
Actually one of the main advantages in terms of efficiency over other existing competitors is precisely the "centralized" aspect.
Trust is hugely expensive and powerful - to replace trust fully you need the 10 Twh which Bitcoin and Ethereum spend in PoW. Filecoin and (I think) BitTorrent are also attempting to be more or less "trustless". I predict that the price they'll have to pay in efficiency will weigh them down seriously.
Steembit positions itself as an utility of Steemland - a bit like the road network or the electricity network in a country - trust should be provided by something unique to Steem: the community, the spirit of belonging to a community members care about. My assumption is that if it works, it will practically give wings to the whole Steem eco-system (more trust grows on trust)
I'm not fully aware of all of the technical details of Bit Torrent, but I've never once heard of anyone complaining of receiving the wrong files using Bit Torrent.
That was not a risk I had in mind. I was thinking more in terms of latency and throughput
I see, ok. I haven't seen it in operation yet, but the whitepaper from Bit Torrent for their new token describes them solving any speed issues by tokenising the seeding process.