The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) operates on words that are 256 bits, or 32 bytes, in size. Each 256-bit word of data costs 20,000 gas units to store, equating to 640,000 gas units per kilobyte. At the time of writing, the gas price is around 4.5 Gwei (0.0000000045 ETH), making a kilobyte of data cost 0.00288 ETH.
Scaling this up gives a cost of 2,880 ETH per GB of data, with the current price of $220 per ETH giving each GB a price tag of $621,000. This is an extremely high cost as compared to conventional centralized cloud storage, where the costs per GB are usually in the region of cents.
If we can't store large amounts of data in the blockchain itself, then the logical alternative would be to store it in a centralized storage layer, while making it available to the data layer located on a blockchain. An example of this would be a DApp that uses the blockchain...
