I was wondering if there is or ever will be a way to implement decentralized storage using Tezos on a dapp. If it is not possible currently would it be possible to add support for such a feature in the future? What are your thoughts?
I believe it is already being worked on and is called IPFS.
IPFS has no incentive mechanism, you need to pin data yourself. Besides Filecoin (on IPFS, seems kinda bad), there’s lots of other interesting projects: Sia, Internxt, SAFE etc.
So lets say there is a separate fee structure for dapps that implement IPFS such that the people who pay gas fees to use the service pay more to offset the cost of those hosting the data. For example, imagine there is something like Spotify built on tezos implementing this hypothetical IPFS. It could allow the artists to upload their music on a platform that ensures no single entity owns the song but could allow others to listen to it. The people who use the service would pay either per song play or per month using Tezos (allowing a set amount of listens per month based upon how crowded the dapp usage is or how expensive the fees are). That fee they would pay would hypothetically be enough to cover the cost of hosting and paying the artist a fee for their work.
Implementing a model like this while allowing the dapp developer to tweak certain fee values could incentivize both artists to join and people to host. I believe it could definitely be possible considering there is less cost overhead compared to a company like Spotify.
I am just throwing some ideas out there… It may be stupid or it may be smart but I don’t know until someone with more knowledge replies.
