How often are blocks/writes written? Who pays for all that data storage? How "decentralized" would it really be, considering the incredibly onerous requirements to run a validator at the target scale?
Incentive alignment is key. We known since Bittorrent tit-for-tat that creating a micro-economy is a hard problem. I hope they get some sort of token and micro-economy going, but this is a known hard problem.
1. Will this scale? Blockchains vary from the order of ~10^0 tps (PoW) to ~10^4 tps (PoS). https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2019-06-23-what-is-t...
Wikipedia sees 50K HTTP requests/second and 80K SQL queries/second. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/data-center-provi...
But it is also read-heavy. Let's say if 10% of the workload includes writes (probably too conservative), we barely squeak by... I'm willing to guess the number is way lower than that. They saw 10M page edits for the entire month of Dec 2018. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm
My guess is, this might be doable :-D
2. Who runs this? and who pays? Great question. The blog completely skips the question about incentives which in my opinion will vary depending on the app. For creating an censorship-resistant Wikipedia, it'll be different than a communications app. Some apps might be better off permissioned (e.g. enterprise settings)
Wikipedia is 43GB of text and 23TB of rich media (images and video). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
If we limit ourselves to just Wikipedia text, it might be reasonable to do this permissionless!
Hoping to write a blog post about that soon after we get more built to show.