When you create posts with images your images are not (in most cases) part of Steem blockchain and are stored remotely "somewhere out there". This brings centralized remote resources into decentralized system. What are the issues, risks and limitations of this approach and why we need to have a better solution for the future.
### Hold on
Everyone knows it. Possibly you've noticed this effect when you open this article. Even Steem friendly hosting [steemimg.com](http://steemimg.com) is not solving this issue. Every central hosting has very limited capacity and bandwidth to serve to all users in the world. If you still don't understand, you can try to attach some 4k image to your post.
### Survival
When you put images to some anonymous image provider, they often have limited lifetime there, like 3 or 6 months (often with some usage conditions, etc.). It means that after this period of time the images might not be accessible and your post will be damaged.
### Page not found
When you're referencing image from some news server or actually any kind of server, image address can be linked to some article. Such article can be deleted or renamed and images you're using done. Images can be also changed under certain link. That is something you wish to avoid.
### Censorship
Any content and not just images can be censored in time and unavailable because of bunch of so-called legal reasons. Mostly they don't pass some policy of the server in certain point in time or are reported by someone. That's another risk when you are using certain types of remote resources.
### Slow globalization
While you're pasting your images and see them on your Steemit page, you automatically expect that when it works for you, it will work also for others. Thing is that the images or other resources you're using (especially at commercial sites) might not be available in other countries because of license issues and might be blocked because your IP address belongs to "wrong" country.
### Great firewalls are not that great
Another case of similar restriction is where restriction comes from the other side. Certain countries don't accept certain services. Like in China, you'll not be able to see embedded youtube videos at Steemit or images from at least 3,000 websites. In Turkey and some other countries this might be the risk too.
### Other central storage risks
Whenever you're using a resource on centralized service you are at risk service is down, under maintenance or closed. Using such a services undermines strong sides of decentralized nature of Steem social platform.
# Possible solutions for Steem
All of these solutions below have a potential to provide desired functionality for hosting images in the future but some of them are not yet ready to provide good end-user experience or performance for this particular feature. Steemit can also implement its own solution but AFAIK there is none yet except the possibility of storing images directly on blockchain. But this is very limited by size and it's also not recommended.
* [MaidSafe](http://maidsafe.net/)
* [IPFS](https://ipfs.io/)
* [StorJ](https://storj.io/)
* Steem solution (not available at the moment)
# Discussion
What is the best approach you take to provide images and other remote content at Steemit with focus of minimizing all the risks and issues described above?
hiveblocks