Have you ever wondered where Steemit stores all the images?

If you know a little about blockchain, you would know that it is expensive to move data around. In the case of Bitcoin, you have to pay miners a fee. Similarly on Ethereum blockchain, you have to pay a fee known as gas. And any extra data added to the blockchain obviously increases its size. For example, at the moment, the size of the Bitcoin blockchain is a little above 150 GB. Now, you can imagine how much the size of a blockchain would be if it also started accommodating images.

So where does Steemit store images then?

To find this answer, I typed the following in google, "where does steemit store images", and got the link of this post, where Hive account@dantheman, who is actually Dan Larimer (the creator of Bitshares, co-founder of Steemit and now CTO of EOS), answered himself the following.

Images will be stored on IPFS, text will be stored on the blockchain.
In the future it is also possible to store text on IPFS.

image source

Now what is IPFS? It is basically a distributed web, which allows to store media in a distributed fashion, just like BitTorrent. Steemit based apps like Dtube also use IPFS to store media files.

So who pays for the hosting of the images?

To be honest, I have no idea, how the cost of image hosting on IPFS is paid for on Steemit. Maybe some Steemit guru can answer that here. In the case of Dtube, its creator Hive account@heimindanger mentions in this post that for paying the cost of hosting the media files on IPFS, he created an account by the name of Hive account@dtube, which collects 25% of the author rewards.