When it comes to decentralized storage, the first things that come to mind are usually a few old questions: How much can it store? How much does it cost? Is it worth using? These are all tangible pain points, but if you actually implement this system in a real project, you'll find that these are not the most critical issues at all.

The most critical issue is trust.

In Web3, trust is often simplified into two or three sentences: Is the contract written securely? Are the rules clear and transparent? Can it be tampered with? It sounds straightforward. But once the application becomes complex, you'll realize that trust is far from that simple. Users never believe in a line of code alone; they believe in the entire system. As long as there is any part of the system that is opaque, unstable, or unverifiable, trust begins to falter.

How many projects today handle data in a way that is inherently untrustworthy? Images, text, models, logs are all stored off-chain, managed by a third-party service provider. It may seem fine most of the time, but just one data loss or inexplicable rollback can instantly shatter users' trust in the system. The key point is, these issues cannot be fixed by on-chain mechanisms because they happen entirely off-chain.

This is also why I believe the value of certain decentralized storage solutions is seriously underestimated. They are not simply about dispersing your data across different locations; they aim to bring data back into a verifiable, recoverable, and long-term trustworthy framework. The focus is not on capacity or cost, but on making data trustworthy again.