An idea about the problem of storage of Steem community content

The Steem community is organized from it's beginning around the idea of sharing and the theme of decentralization.

I see a problem with the current arrangement of hosting images outside of the Steem community in third party sites like Img Safe https://imgsafe.org/ or http://zippyshare.com/ and others. Since these sites are free I have to ask the question 'Why are they doing this? What's in it for them?'

I can only conclude that if we aren't being charged anything then We are the product.

At img safe I logged in and could not find a terms and conditions page. What I did find when I looked at page source in my browser was this line near the bottom:

(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga') Maybe we are being data mined by Google? Just saying... This may be the case with other storage sites as well.

Another concern is what happens to old posts from months back and what about the state of these posts in the distant future? Will the images in these posts be available for those posts then? We have no contol over what those sites do with the images once uploaded.

Maybe I don't know enough about the technology but even if they are available without limit do we want our personally created images on an external site?

How about integrating them into the Steem community with storage on the member's computers and getting paid to do it? Using the storage capacity of members hard disk space in a decentralized network, encrypted and always available it would be in line with the direction this community is working toward.

Storj Share https://storj.io/share.html has made a gui for their platform for blockchain cloud storage making it palatable for most of us who can't for a number of reasons deal with the technology of implementing it ourselves. They pay you for renting out drivespace to their network.

from their blog http://blog.storj.io/

"Today we are happy to announce we have reached a major milestone for Storj with 1 PB (1,000 TB) of data stored on our network! The total supply of available storage is around 3 PB, being supplied by ~4,700 farming clients. Even more impressive: most of this data has been uploaded since October 11th on the back of the v4.0 upgrade."

What if in our wallet section there was an option to delegate drive space to store images or whatever for the community. Is there a way to pay users in an integrated gui?

We already can interact with ethereum in the wallet, is that a viable solution? I am a newb when it comes to this stuff. Can images be uploaded through an interface inside of Steem and stored transparently in the blockchain?

I propose this to the developers.

All I know is that I would be more comfortable with my data encrypted in the Steem decentalized network which is then futureproofed.