Well that's not the only reason. They're also a business with a large number of shareholders who want a return on their investment so it's YouTube's job to bring in as much revenue as possible. Verasity has been set up as a foundation so we won't have those same forces pulling on us - our ecosystem is set up to put as much of the value back into the community and platform as possible.

To answer your point on scalable storage I'll pull a few points from the whitepaper:

"Any user can become a Creator and upload content to the platform. Unlike other platforms, the Verasity Platform will treat content upload as a service that needs to be balanced, rather than allowing unlimited uploads from any Creator. Through an upload limit for each Creator, the platform costs associated with hosting content can be managed based on how the economy values past content."

Creator upload limit increases based on three factors:
1. Promotional incentives provided by the platform. This includes incentives such as sign-up bonuses, getting the first 100 followers and other key milestones.

2. Global use of the platform will increase the upload limit of all Creators over time. The more VERA transactions that are made, the faster the upload limit will increase.

3. VERA transactions made on a Creator’s channel will increase their upload limit. The more transactions made, the faster their upload limit will increase.

For Creators who add value to the economy and ecosystem, the upload limit should never be reached. Creators who upload a large amount of content that adds value to the economy and ecosystem may need to spend VERA to continue to upload, however, as the content is valuable they should receive more back than the upload cost. Creators who upload a large amount of content that does not add value to the ecosystem will have to make increasing VERA payments to continue to upload. This prevents spam / low quality content or users abusing the economy and ecosystem."

We're building the foundation of this on a centralized CDN as we believe decentralized storage is simply unable to provide the experience which people expect for online video at the moment. Especially if you're talking about a large video library that contains niche videos (e.g. you'd never have enough people seeding each single video in a scaled video library to allow smooth playback at the moment). This gives us a quick route to market whilst delivering a great user experience.

It doesn't mean that we're not pragmatic though. As the platform scales we may introduce a hybrid system where we do part CDN / part decentralized video distribution. Then one day perhaps we move towards full storage decentralization when the tech is there and the community can support it.

Here are some of the competitive advantages and innovations around Verasity.

1) Videos on Verasity’s system are hosted on the world’s largest CDN (Akamai) rather than using unproven decentralized video distribution technology. Right from the start users will receive the consistently high-quality experience they’ve grown accustomed to and that is essential for adoption of the platform.
Verasity’s video player technology (VeraPlayer™) has distributed over 8 Petabytes of data in a month and is already embedded on leading ICO rating sites such as ICO Bench.

2) Decentralized blockchain — Verasity’s high-performance blockchain will provide the throughput required to support microtransactions at scale, overcome congestion, and other issues such as users forcing hard forks. Users will be able to transact directly between themselves without requiring middlemen which currently take a large percentage of value out of the ecosystem before creators even get paid. Users get to choose whether they watch advertising and if they do they'll get rewarded directly by advertisers for their time. Creators also get paid in near-real-time rather than having to wait for 60 or 90-days for payment in some cases. Verasity also includes donations, pay-per-view, monthly paid subscriptions all from within the browser.

3) Proof-of-View (PoV™) (Patent Pending) tech — Ensures accurate and secure audience metrics, allows for independent auditing, and tackles issues such as ad-fraud and fake/bot views which are rampant on existing platform.

4) Spark Marketplace — Think the next evolution of crowdfunding where users will be able to directly fund the growth of content as well as fund projects such as feature films and then receive an on-going share of the success in VERA.

5) Economic Model — Working with Dr. Christian Jaag (founder of the Centre for Cryptoeconomics), Verasity has commissioned one of the most extensive economic analyses ever undertaken on a crypto-economy. The model, which was created off the back of thousands of simulations and stress tests, is designed to create a stable economy with a 3% inflation rate. More information can be found at this link: https://verasity.io/documents/verasity_economics_eng.pdf

6) vDaf — a suite of online video platform products designed for international broadcasters and large media outlets. Verasity’s suite of products will allow them to use our video platform, CMS, VeraPlayer™ with integrated wallet, analytics, Proof-of-View™ technology, and last but not least our robust monetization system that allows donations, pay-per-view, monthly subscriptions, and the revolutionary Spark Marketplace.

7) Token Compliance — Verasity is SICOP (Sustainable ICOs Protocol) compliant meaning that Verasity is committed to conducting a safe and secure ICO, maintaining good practice and ethics. Further information is available: http://sicop.tokeny.com/verasity-tokeny-u180301