In the beginning, each participant had her own copy of the blockchain, and this decentralization was put forward as an important feature of the system (in pract

In the beginning, each participant had her own copy of the blockchain, and this decentralization was put forward as an important feature of the system (in practice, we have moved away from that, but anyone can get a copy if they want.) If we were to simply replace each of today's copies of the blockchain 1-to-1 with a distinct distributed copy, then encryption would be fine, but it would not reduce the amount of storage needed globally. This proposal addresses one problem in reducing the the global storage required without creating the situation where, in principle, there might only be one copy of the blockchain, vulnerable to corruption and controlled by one entity, and with that situation not being detectable until too late. Looked at in this light, the use of distributed storage would appear, at least at first sight, to create another hierarchical relationship, this time between storage providers and ordinary users, analogous perhaps to the hierarchical relationship between miners and ordinary users. I don't know if this would create another 51% issue.