26 ms·

HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

510 points by Hakeemmidan 5y ago

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anaphor 5y ago
Named-data networking is literally what this is describing, except NDN works as a replacement for TCP, not HTTP. In the long term I'd rather have it work at a lower level and not have to think about it much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg
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- yoursunny 5y ago
  NDN can work as a replacement for IP too, running directly over Ethernet or other link layer technology.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Well IPFS, or else something like it, need to establish the network/utility, and then we can increasingly optimize it with dedicated stuff at lower layers. I don't think going straight to the hard parts is going to work without much more government policy to push through the investment -- seems strictly harder than going the 0-cost overlay-network only approach, because clearly we are demand-constrained not efficiency-constrained. I was tipped off to https://twitter.com/_John_Handel/status/1443925299394134016 https://twitter.com/_John_Handel/status/1443925299394134016 which I honestly think might be the approach to think about how networks in a broader sense than regular telecommunications are bootstrapped.
- xccx 5y ago
  NDN is the way p2p no huge IP infrastructure between nodes interest packets at narrow waist (like human attention, scarce) sign all packets, more secure, easier to trust|not hash for pointers, no surprises in containers crypto apply more cryptography, less web3 baloney broadcast radio native, no emulation of copper wire data, closer to where you want, find faster, keep content you want w/out intermediation, need to find "where" within IP/udp/tcp addresses https://youtu.be/P-GN-pYfRoo?t=1825 https://youtu.be/P-GN-pYfRoo?t=1825 node to node https://youtu.be/yLGzGK4c-ws?t=4817 https://youtu.be/yLGzGK4c-ws?t=4817 more application, less security hassle http://youtu.be/uvnP-_R-RYA?t=3018 http://youtu.be/uvnP-_R-RYA?t=3018 hash name the data https://youtu.be/gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 https://youtu.be/gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 data integrity w/out need to trust foreign server
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Ericson2314 5y ago
I like to explain it by comparing Amazon warehouses to the post office. Post office send black-box data point to to point. Amazon gets you thinggy matching SKU from arbitrary location.
- adrianmonk 5y ago
  I guess it would be hard to do chess-by-mail via Amazon warehouses/shipping. And I can't order a bank statement from Amazon.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Of course. One does not replace the other. It's most like I think we should nationalize the Amazon warehouse system and put under the post office. Perhaps both are valid interpretations of the US constitution's postal clause, "To establish Post Offices and post Roads" even!
- yholio 5y ago
  And therein lies the problem with content addressable networks: they make no sense in the economic world of the internet, where data transport and storage is not free, they make sense in a world owned by a single corporation.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Huh? The same efficiency gains should apply to both applications of content based routing. I do think there is a natural monopoly, but that is just and argument for nationalizing things. (And agreements like there being one IP protocol or whatever.)
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  Some might argue they fail to do the "thingy matching SKU" effectively these days.
TeeMassive 5y ago
Ok cool, I love decentralized content distribution frameworks too. But what do I have to install to use it? As with most of these attempts to decentralization, it fails because of the mostly absent effort spent on ease of use.
- TheOtherWW 5y ago
  Layer 2 solutions that focus on ease-of-use and other properties to make these technologies become more mainstream are starting to emerge. One such solution is Filebase, which offers an S3 compatible abstraction layer to Sia, Storj and other decentralized networks. You can use any S3 compatible tool right out of the box, or simply drag and drop. [1] https://filebase.com https://filebase.com
- grumbel 5y ago
  Command line client can be found over at: * https://docs.ipfs.io/install/command-line/#official-distributions https://docs.ipfs.io/install/command-line/#official-distribu... Single pre-compiled binary, no dependencies. Starting it is just a matter of: ipfs daemon WebUI will show up at: * http://127.0.0.1:5001/webui http://127.0.0.1:5001/webui Another useful command on Linux: ipfs mount This make IPFS available as fuse filesystem in the directory /ipfs/, so you can directly access IPFS content without manually downloading it.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    You are missing the point. Less than 5% of people are what most people would describe as coders and from my experience, I would say less than a third of those are not afraid of using a terminal. Why do you think people still pay for IDEs and fancy git clients with a UI? And of that, only a tiny fraction would have heard of decentralized social media / websites. If these kind of projects want any global attention then they should be as easy to install as most applications on Android or Apple. Bitcoin began becoming popular when easy to use wallet applications and currency exchange began being mainstream. Same for BitTorrent, Signal and IRC.
    - 5y ago
CharlesW 5y ago
The author claims that IPFS enables a "permanent web" and eliminates 404-like experiences. How does IPFS guarantee that all published content will be available forever? (In my beginner-level knowledge of IPFS, this is the first I've heard that claim. It seems absurd.)
- leesalminen 5y ago
  I wonder if it could make running a service like archive.org easier. Or if it could allow for a distributed archive.org service where nerds worldwide can contribute x GB storage to the cause?
  - Sargos 5y ago
    This is one of the biggest stated use cases of IPFS as it effectively replaces archive.org with a better version that is more distributed, has better uptime, and more importantly has a much larger and nearly complete and pristine version of the entire internet for conceivably as long as the internet itself exists.
    - acdha 5y ago
      It does only the first of those things: using content hashes means that anyone can populate an archive which is easily discovered. For the rest, hosting takes money. People will not archive the entire internet for free and IPFS is not a magic wand which eliminates the need to have people like the skilled IA team. It could make their jobs easier but that’s far from “nearly complete” and no more or less pristine.
      - naasking 5y ago
        It gives you the tools to build an archive.org equivalent using volunteer storage though, rather Than asking for monetary donations. All you need is a database of known content hashes and a database of volunteers and you randomly distribute content among volunteers and periodically ensure a minimum number of clients are replicating each known hash.
dpweb 5y ago
I like the concept of immutable content, but HTTP eliminated top down control of information? Well, we’re all dependent on the Internet which can be shut down at any time by any government, and normally almost completely dependent on FAANG companies. I applaud the freedom activist spirit but the only exciting technologies in this regard must be P2P and not Internet carried.
Zababa 5y ago
So IPFS is basically some kind of automatic behind-the-scene torrenting? I see how that solves the "dead server" problem, but how does that solves the "content longevity" problem?
- xwdv 5y ago
  Incentives must be created for storing content. Imagine if each request was really more like a bounty where the requester would pay the host when the file is delivered.
  - sergiotapia 5y ago
    This is what I'm saying. If there's a financial incentive to store popular content, or a higher incentive to host "at-risk" content this would work out, no? I have no idea how hard this would be to implement. I'm new to ipfs and crypto.
    - xwdv 5y ago
      The way it works is by using a smart contract so that content and payment can be exchanged simultaneously and payment is only delivered when the hash of the file matches what is expected.
  - j_mo 5y ago
    I think "you host mine, I'll host yours" works better here than a financial incentive. If you can specify "I've got 1gb spare to replicate other people's assets, as long as each of them replicates mine in return" then your incentive to replicate other people's sites is more redundancy and bandwidth for your own. If you also prioritise files that have the least replicas across the entire network, and allow servers to re-distribute the content they are replicating, it would surely become quite hard for a file to be lost forever. This makes more sense to me than having each site pay for their own data to be replicated, because those who don't pay don't get their content replicated, which results in missing content when the server eventually disappears. That is just as bad as HTTP.
syngrog66 5y ago
I love the idea of IPFS but the last 2 times I tried using it, it simply didnt work. There was no "there" there. The simplest use cases like "I want file X from the ether, make it happen" like you could do with torrents -- nothing ever happened. I read the docs and tutorials but no luck. Felt like docs were missing some special incantation or setup step, or precondition. Or the CLI wasnt giving me feedback on some blocking error, and it was failing silently. Dunno. Gave up. Hope to revisit some day. Because in theory it would be useful tech to have in my toolbox.
unnouinceput 5y ago
So, they reinvented torrents? Or old timers, do you remember the peer-to-peer connection from 90's called DC++ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B)? Like this IPFS, you'd connect to a hub (IPFS calls this a node) and get what people were sharing. This IPFS only takes that step a little further with hashing and distributing. Also, if this gets implemented widely, hash collision is going to be wild
- abecedarius 5y ago
  BitTorrent was invented to cut down the scope of an earlier IPFS-ish system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_(peer-to-peer_network)#Evil_Geniuses_for_a_Better_Tomorrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_(peer-to-peer_network)#Ev... It's reasonable to try again at the bigger goals now that there's more infrastructure / theoretical progress / audience.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    I see this kind of claim posted a lot, but what does IPFS actually do that torrents do not? What is a new use case which has been enabled?
    - linuxandrew 5y ago
      In terms of the protocol IPNS, DNSLink and PubSub come to mind. You can publish things that change over time. IPFS also does some deduplication against the data when you publish things. In terms of the software, browser integration, which there isn't a whole lot around for BitTorrent AFAIK.
jmull 5y ago
I wonder how people are incentivized to host content well? Whether HTTP or IPFS, you want content: (1) hosted/stored redundantly enough for availability but not over-hosted/stored because that raises costs. (2) hosted “near” to requesters to make efficient use of the network, which limits costs and increases speed. (Near in terms of the network infrastructure.) With HTTP I understand how this works (the content publisher figures out a hosting solution balancing what they are willing/able to pay and what kind of availability and speed they want/need). Not sure with IPFS though. If people are choosing what to host, wouldn’t the hosting be uneven, with some content under-hosted (or not hosted at all) and some popular content greatly over-hosted? …leading to an inefficient system? Under—hosted content would be slow to retrieve or simply unavailable. Over-hosted content is wasting resources, making the system more costly than it needs to be (somebody is paying for the storage and servers to make that storage available). I realize this a alpha/experimental, but without a strong answer to this, I don’t see how the system can work at scale.
doliveira 5y ago
On a side note, do you all know about some research or PoC in the direction of a globally distributed knowledge graph or something of sorts? Or at least a more technical name I could google. I think it's so bad that so much of the Internet information is siloed in walled gardens and that pages have to be dynamically generated and routed across the globe every single time... Imagine how it's gonna be when we get to Mars, for instance. Storing this knowledge graph in IPFS files seems like a logical step to me (as an absolute layman, though)
- breck 5y ago
  The Internet in a Box project is an interesting angle: https://internet-in-a-box.org/ https://internet-in-a-box.org/
- noman-land 5y ago
  There's a project at MIT that seems to be precisely this. Underlay. https://underlay.mit.edu/ https://underlay.mit.edu/
dreyfan 5y ago
I'll just point to the millions of torrent files today that will remain unseeded forever. Durability with P2P only works as a complement to centralization.
- ugjka 5y ago
  I think streaming is killing torrents and the fact that you need a VPN in many countries to avoid getting fined
  - ativzzz 5y ago
    I agree with this, I haven't torrented anything in a very long time as most of things I want are streamable somewhere (and I don't care about file ownership), or set up for direct download on some forum somewhere.
    - Tom4hawk 5y ago
      There are other problems. I personally encountered this issue with Netflix: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/community-netflix-and-hulu-remove-advanced-dungeons-and-dragons-episode/ https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/community-netflix-and-hulu-remo...
  - afiori 5y ago
    torrents needs to be available over a browser interface to hide in the usual https traffic
    - ajvs 5y ago
      See WebTorrent for this
adfrhgeaq5hy 5y ago
IPFS needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance? Right now it does none of those things well. The client chews through CPU and memory when seemingly doing nothing. If I try to download content, it is far slower than BitTorrent unless I go through a centralized gateway. If I add content it takes ages to propagate, making it utterly unsuitable as a replacement for a web server. There is no system to keep content alive so links will still die. The name system is byzantine and I don't think anyone uses it. Unfortunately, they are now unable to pivot because they did that asinine ICO. The right thing to do is to give up on the FileCoin nonsense and build a system that solves a problem better than anything else, but that is no longer allowed because they already sold something else to their "investors"
- skyde 5y ago
  what did they sold to investor? The idea that people will pay for hosting using filecoin?
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I think that the question of what user-facing purpose(s) a technology can be put to is somehow qualitatively different than what backend roles it might play. I could be wrong.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    It's been 6 years now and IPFS is still stuck with the same problems it had at the start with no real pathway to being useful. Most technology does something useful early on. I don't know the timeline for the web but I don't imagine it involved 6 years of marketing and selling to investors while not serving any purpose well.
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d--b 5y ago
> it efficiently (20 hops for a network of 10,000,000) finds the nodes that have the data using a Distributed Hash Table See this is the part I always doubted. I haven’t done the math, but does it really scale up to the size of the internet?
hikerclimber1 5y ago
Everything is subjective. Especially laws.
supperburg 5y ago
Just create an easy way to host stuff. Support a cultural shift toward dithered images and a universal text format. Make hiring a host cheap and easy and make hosting locally easy. Small sizes makes backing up easier and cheaper. Create a service where people can store a shard of the backup of the new internet and in return have their content added to the collective backup. I really think it’s about a cultural shift more than anything. Because without a collective realization that bandwidth and file sizes need to be reigned in, the content on the internet will just live at the perpetually ascending ceiling of what the internet can handle. And in that situation there will never be a way to make the internet a robust, equitable and interesting place.
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  > file sizes need to be reigned in Tell that to all of the content creators, corporate or not.
mwfunk 5y ago
You don't search for locations with HTTP, any more than a shipping company searches for addresses to deliver to. The problem with bad metaphors is it derails discussion, which I am arguably doing with this comment.
goodmachine 5y ago
Peergos is an interesting human-friendly project built on top of IPFS. Works great so far. Of interest: they provide a trustless way to store your data encrypted data on centralised boxes (S3, Backblaze) if you want. https://peergos.org/ https://peergos.org/
mayli 5y ago
ironically, few links on this 2015 post are dead, and most of them being ipfs releated. https://ipfs.io/ipns/QmTodvhq9CUS9hH8rirt4YmihxJKZ5tYez8PtDmpWrVMKP https://ipfs.io/ipns/QmTodvhq9CUS9hH8rirt4YmihxJKZ5tYez8PtDm... https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.git.sexy/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.git.sexy/
- remram 5y ago
  > It's time for ... (2015) The title shows clearly that they were wrong.
Flocular 5y ago
It sounds like freenet to me. How will this allow for governments to censor CSAM?
ptaq 5y ago
Economy of scale is hard to combat with a technically decentralized protocol. Let's assume all goes well and in 2-5-20 years IPFS is the web. A random Joe has an IPFS server in his basement, because it's profitable or at least convenient for him. Most of the traffic never reaches AWS or CouldFlare. What do they do about it? They pretend to be random Joes and mirror the same setup. Obviously Amazon will manage their servers more efficiently than an army of Joes, so the nothing really changes: we end up with a decentralized protocol where 90% of traffic just happens to end up on AWS servers anyway.
- PLDiscordian 5y ago
  At least in your universe, if AWS goes down, some things still work.
jimpick 5y ago
People hating on IPFS DHT performance probably aren’t using the experimental accelerated DHT client. https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/experimental-features.md#accelerated-dht-client https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/experimenta...
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Probably because it’s experimental and is not mainstream yet.
_8j50 5y ago
How do you manage access control with IPFS? Just because someone knows a hash does not mean they are allowed to access the content. EDIT: It seems [1] they want you to encrypt content and do access control outside of ipfs. Imagine ext4 telling you to do acl's on your own. To me, it is a little more than bittorrent without acls and at-rest confidentiality built-in. [1] https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/376 https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/376
v_london 5y ago
Pretty interesting. A lot of people here are focusing on permanence, but for me the main difference on addressing by content vs by host name is the loss of authorship it opens up for the web. Since a research paper of essay is referred to by its hash, the owner effectively gives away all control of the work when it's first published. There will be no editing, no taking down unwanted work, and no real way to build an interactive website that allows dynamic linking to other materials by the author. It's interesting how the same people promoting the "creator economy" also tend to promote the cryptocurrency space and IPFS without an ounce of self-awareness. IPFS sounds awful for creators of all kinds in the same way as BitTorrent was awful for artists. I can definitely see a use case for IPFS as a file storage for trustless systems such as smart contracts, which are designed as immutable, trustless systems.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  IPFS claims to solve this with their name service IPNS which can update to point to a new hash with a revised file. Where the original hash can be cached and used but users can refer to the NS version and get the latest version. But last I saw, the name on IPNS had to be frequently pushed by the original server or it would go away.
  - davidgerard 5y ago
    IPNS doesn't work. Whenever you press them on this point, they'll admit it doesn't work. But IPFS has the crypto problem of conflating the stuff that works now with the stuff that's hypothetical in its marketing, and not admitting that the latter is janky nonsense that doesn't bloody work.
    - PLDiscordian 5y ago
      Sorry, I don't know when you last tried out IPFS, but IPNS does in fact work: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns/ https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns/ Again, I'm not sure when it wasn't working, or when it began working (it's always worked since I've been around), but IPNS has made huge strides, I use it every day. Even https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io is using IPNS, it's very popular.
NewEntryHN 5y ago
HTTP is an application protocol and most of this article doesn't make any sense.
jayd16 5y ago
Does IPFS have an append only primitive? Something like the signed owner can add to an existing document? Is that built in or something you'd have to handle in the application layer?
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555 - Sept 2015 (235 comments)
democracy 5y ago
Oh it's one of the "cryptocurrency" solution looking for a problem to solve? Thanks, no, thanks! :)
- Kiro 5y ago
  No, it's not. IPFS has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies (Filecoin was added as a separate incentive layer but is not part of IPFS). Sad that even technologists immediately associate decentralization with cryptocurrencies.
f7ebc20c97 5y ago
What's difference between IPFS and Oxen??
neiman 5y ago
The "permanent web" goal didn't survive that well. I work closely with IPFS since 2018, and it's not part of the narative by now. The distributed part is still going strong, but in my eyes distributed (or decentralization) should be a tool, not a goal. The question is which kind of Internet we want to build with these distributed infrastructure? If it's just cloning the current Internet, then I don't see what it brings. My personal answer is that we should build a democratic Internet. One where people are members of the Internet, instead of mere users, and decisions are made in a democratic process, like in a state. This kind of Internet can only be implemented using the distributed/decentralized tools.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  So the minority of users see/talk about/hear what the majority wants? So they are forced just fork it and form their own distributed network independent and isolated from the internet at large?
  - neiman 5y ago
    That's not how democracy works.
Datsundere 5y ago
This has been bothering for the longest time. I would love to learn more about efforts that are being taken to avoid these workarounds we have for certs expiring, dns issues and such. A lot of website hacking could've been avoided with a better design like even having encryption as standard.
- Falkon1313 5y ago
  Well a lot of hacking could also be avoided if everything were just plain publicly-accessible static files. Which is what they're talking about with IPFS. But that would be a very different web from today's, where most content comes from dynamic CMS/CMF, blog software, forum software, or other web apps. It addresses things like the old personal homepage of the mid-90s, but not much at all about the modern web. It also doesn't address the major outages (like we've seen with cert revocations or DNS outages, etc.)
userbinator 5y ago
I see no mention in the comments so far of eMule/ed2k, Winny, Share, etc. --- all the other P2P systems that came before torrents became dominant. This doesn't seem particularly different from those.
pdimitar 5y ago
Not on a network that can easily and quickly blacklist hashes sent to them to the authorities. (Sadly I don't keep the links anymore to prove it. It was somewhere in one of their GitHub repos however, inside an issue.) I'd love to support them but they don't stand behind their "uncensorable" original slogan.
FalconSensei 5y ago
> IPFS is actually more similar to a single bittorrent swarm exchanging git objects So definitely not permanent, right?
- cmckn 5y ago
  I’d call IPFS immutable rather than permanent. Which is a cool idea for media files at least, but isn’t very useful for something like a blog post. I think the “HTTP is obsolete” claim is a bit laughable. IPFS is essentially just bittorrent, reimagined (with comparatively no users, so not very useful yet).
Const-me 5y ago
The main performance challenge is hardware not software, it's power management on mobile devices. After a new iPhone will be able to work for a few days on battery, while constantly transmitting data at 10-100 megabits/second, P2P will be good again. Before iPhone, peer 2 peer tech were doing OK. Then mobile broadband came, and centralized services basically won. Now we (at least in some places) have mobile broadband of symmetrical 50-100 mbit/sec, yet p2p still doesn't work on mobile. Despite the bandwidth is now good, electricity and thermals still aren't.
ftyers 5y ago
There is still only one implementation of the protocol and no fully functioning Python API. (Disclaimer: I love IPFS, but until it has better support for programmers who don't want to use Go, it's unlikely to get much traction).
- PLDiscordian 5y ago
  While I do use Go, I just use the HTTP API to interact with the go-ipfs daemon. Are you looking to use it in a different way in Python?
anaganisk 5y ago
As long as there are no actual, native iOS, android and PC Apps built on top of IPFS or even an access GUI or interface with browser on those platforms, IPFS can stop dreaming of replacing HTTP. Apart from mere 1-2% of world population who use internet, no one else is going to download a binary and run a CLI, and visit 127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs. For majority of people chrome is a gateway to internet (for them Http is a prefix u put in-front of a url) unless ipfs goes to that level, http is as relevant as ever. I know software devs who don’t know they could access files from browser via file:// protocol.
- PLDiscordian 5y ago
  We're actually working on that, and have made progress with Brave and Opera. You're right that for wide, mainstream adoption, we'll need to expand onto platforms like Android/iOS, and that's the dream, honestly. Working on URIs like IPFS:// and IPNS://, which are supported in Brave/Opera to an extent. It's a long road though, with lots of negotiations with lots of organizations. I do feel optimistic about it though.
  - anaganisk 5y ago
    Maybe I’m making it too simple but Native iOS, Android and desktop clients be a good start? Even a good desktop client could drive the adoption like crazy. Torrents never required any negotiations, it never depended on organisations to implement support. Just package it enough as a standalone app. Ipns can follow. If enough people are storing/accessing content in IPFS, organisations all implement interfaces on their own.
jl6 5y ago
Is there an IPFS server that can run within a fixed memory budget? Last time I tried the Go implementation, its memory usage increased steadily over the course of 72 hours and then got killed when it approached a gigabyte (which was all the VM’s memory).
st_goliath 5y ago
I wonder if the author of this ever heard about Project Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu The idea on how a decentralized web of hypertext documents should be done right isn't exactly new. AFAIK the fact that in the HTTP+HTML web stack, servers going down meant documents disappearing and links going stale was criticized even at the time. The HTTP+HTML stack winning out is probably one of the many examples of "good enough" winning over "perfect".
bullen 5y ago
I have a slight issue with the title, why not IPFS over HTTP? Why are all these entites (both corporate and not) trying to deprecate the main protocol used by humans? HTTP is simple and works, what ever you do build on top of HTTP instead of TCP/UDP.
- detaro 5y ago
  HTTP would be an odd choice for a dynamic peer-to-peer protocol like IPFS.
  - bullen 5y ago
    It might seem like it at first, but P2P always needs a peer finder, and that should be HTTP. I predict that in a relatively short timespan everyone will host a HTTP server on their port 80 atleast those that can get an external IPv4 address before the cost starts surging. The point is: port 80 is and should be open. When you do other ports and protocols you never know what the IPS/router/firewall/OS is going to block. But if IPv6 ever reaches inertial mass you are right! Edit: As far as IPFS is concerned we allready have bittorrent and that uses HTTP so their point is moot, I'm driving another tangent though: Everything that can be HTTP, should be HTTP; and to proove it I made the most scalable multiplayer protocol: http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html
    - detaro 5y ago
      Expecting a server on an external port is already quite limited, plenty users that can't do that for various reasons. Bittorrent also doesn't use HTTP for the P2P parts.
      - bullen 5y ago
        Sure, and that is the real battle, who can get an external IP! Yep, I'm ok with the P2P stuff to be over UDP, but if you ever made UDP hole-punching work you will realize it's not necessarily the most straight forward solution. P2P does not scale for all problems, while distributed client/server does! The bottleneck never was network bandwidth (binary vs. text), it's been atomic parallelism since multi-core processors peaked in concurrent RAM bandwidth 2014+ after DDR4 increased latency. Copying files is not a problem because you can always make files smaller by reducing quality!
austincheney 5y ago
As an outsider looking in IPFS will struggle to catch on with non technical people, like Tor. It can be the best thing ever for privacy, access, or whatever. It still won’t catch on. This is the Linux problem as explained by Torvald. The problem is that it isn’t unique enough from the existing experience and the problems it claims to solve aren’t something non technical people care about. Web distribution in its current form works. Even if it’s supremely shitty grandma can still post photos on Facebook. If a new distribution format wants to win it needs to be different in a way an 8 year old and grandma can equally understand. IPFS is not that. What 8 year olds and grandma equally understand is that content is king, the layman term for client/server model. More likely the future will purely be a focus on web technologies for application experiences and distribution. Kill the client/server model. If grandma wants to share photos with grandkids she doesn’t need Facebook at all. She only needs a network, a silent distribution/security model, and the right application interface. No server, no cloud, no third party required.
jokoon 5y ago
I would gladly see a client that lets users allocate between 50 to 200MB of storage to host other websites. It could run on phones and would allow redundancy.
captainbland 5y ago
I did like the concept of IPFS around the time this was written but now it feels to me like it misses the wood for the trees. The thing is that the web by its nature is already decentralised. The real issue with the web today isn't really some technical, architectural flaw. Centralisation has emerged in this already reasonably well decentralised system because of network effect driven accumulation, the market and pre-existing wealth from investors tipping the scales. Yes IPFS is a more thorough attempt to create a distributed web, yet I doubt it is fully immune to the forces that captured and centralised the existing web, except for the fact that it is currently unpopular. Or it will remain unpopular because there's no incentive for private enterprises to invest much in a system where they can't control their own corner of it and few users like using systems built on the cheap when flashy, well funded alternatives exist, if it is truly that resilient to centralisation. Whichever way you want to slice it. The social forces that cause centralisation in the web are the same forces that cause e.g. monopoly and extreme wealth accrual in the rest of society. And the fix has to be social, not technical.
holoduke 5y ago
What is ipfs really trying to solve. They artificially came up with some issues they think are annoying with HTTP. But is the rest of world thinking the same? I don't think so. Nothing wrong with current situation.
ultra_nick 5y ago
It's crazy how many people don't get the IPFS/Dweb. It's like the invention of personal computers. It's going to change everything like the shift from time share department computers did. Imagine what programmers could do if YouTube size infrastructure was free for every developer. IPFS is just the boring protocol the enables the next internet of stuff. The stuff that comes out in the next 20 years will be crazy.
- 7373737373 5y ago
  It won't be free, but it may be cheaper
worldmerge 5y ago
This is very cool! Also should be noted this is from 2015, would love to hear a follow up to this.
enz 5y ago
> “With HTTP, you search for locations. With IPFS, you search for content.” Well, that's the difference between an URL and an URI, right? HTTP seems URL-oriented while IPFS seems URI-oriented.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Not quite. A URI is any identifier, a URL is a identifier to a location while a URN is identifier only containing a name. IPFS hashes are URIs/URNs while both URLs and URNs are URIs.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Additionally, what the "for content" statement is trying to get across is that there is necessarily only one IPFS address possible for a given unique piece of binary content. Which is a quality not universal among URNs either.
  - enz 5y ago
    Oh, I see. Thanks for the clarification!
- nivertech 5y ago
  URL - Uniform Resource Locator URN - Uniform Resource Name URI - Uniform Resource Identifier URI is too generic, "I" in URI means "Identifier", which can be either a semantic/natural or a technical/surrogate key. And in many case it's the same Locator is in URL. IPFS is a CAS (Content Addressable Storage), so an "Identifier" there is a semantic key (i.e. hash of the content).
jeroenhd 5y ago
I like IPFS, I really do, but whenever I try to use it, it's either too slow to become usable or sometimes it plain doesn't work. I pinned a whole bunch of files on IPFS a while back to experiment with it and the system seems to work, but every time I try to fetch those resources from a location that hasn't cached the content yet, it takes several seconds to show me the HTML/JSON/PNG files. HTTP may be inefficient for document storage, but IPFS is inefficient for almost everything else. I like the concepts behind IPFS but it's simply not practical to use the system in its current form. I hope my issues will get resolved at some point but I can't shake the thought that it'll die a silent death like so many attempts to replace the internet before it.
- leesalminen 5y ago
  I agree that the http caching layers are currently needed to achieve decent UX. But it’s also possible that won’t be necessary forever. The network could expand and get to the point where resolution time comes down to accessible levels. Only time will tell I suppose.
  - lillecarl 5y ago
    When downloading content using a magnet link downloads are usually quite slow started, while torrent files usually start directly. It's not a fair comparison since the torrents are from a private tracker with high quality peers, but it's noticeable that the DHT stuff is slower. Not sure how cjdns solves that. Will the network be faster the more people join it? Is centralized infra inevitable for fast things because of all assumptions and insight a centralized provider can use? BTC is also slow, I don't know of any cryptocurrency that can provide VISA transaction volumes, even if they use more power than some countries alone.
    - Taek 5y ago
      Cryptocurrency is different from storage because cryptocurrency needs to provide global consistency guarantees. Skynet is a decentralized network with lookup times that have a p50 TTFB of under 200ms. It achieves this by looking things up directly on hosts rather than routing through a DHT. There's a bit of overhead to accomplish this (around 200kb of extra bandwidth per lookup), but for a smooth web experience that tradeoff is more than worthwhile.
dleslie 5y ago
> All the static content stored with the site still loads, and my modern browser still renders the page (HTML, unlike HTTP, has excellent lasting power). But any links offsite or to dynamically served content are dead. For every weird example like this, there are countless examples of incredibly useful content that have also long since vanished. Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see where they claim that IPFS can provide a solution for dynamic content; which makes up a huge portion of what is served over HTTP.
- alvarlagerlof 5y ago
  It won't, but much of the web could work well on JAMStack, and there's no reason that couldn't be supported.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    JAMStack isn't much of an option for services that can't trust the clients and cannot rely on high latency consensus algorithms. It's also brutal for battery life.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    JAMStack != static site served entirely by a CDN. There’s an A for API in there. Where’s the A for IPFS? There’s no such thing.
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      It can be built, but I don't think there are any frameworks that make it easy. A JSON file can be an API, but authentication and encryption using static publicly available files is more challenging, especially for a large number of users. That is where blockchain solutions come into place.
sergiotapia 5y ago
Is there a way to install something on my local machine and host IPFS content to help "the swarm". If they combine this with some kind of crypto monetary incentive it would go a long way for people to help "the swarm". Odysee is looking into adding crypto to your balance when you serve content that helps viewers.
- noen 5y ago
  No. I tried. For weeks. Filecoin is the mechanism for this. And they do everything humanly possible to both technically keep the ecosystem open, while at the same time making it practically impossible for any non-data center vendor to take part. The min hardware specs are absurdly large. Most of the services required are not prepackaged alum any way, the exercise is left to the implementer for almost everything. If you don’t have 100k+ to drop in hardware, there’s no community help for you. It’s a shame because ipfs is well structured from the other end, but it’s not really decentralized in any way other than naming.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    Yeah I looked in to filecoin as well and it's not nearly as simple as setting up a raspberry pi with a 1tb HDD attached. You have to have a latest gen array of GPUs sitting there constantly cryptographically proving the entire content of the HDD every minute. As with all crypto tech, its insanely inefficient and you may as well use google drive or s3.
- Willamin 5y ago
  Maybe FileCoin is what you're looking for? https://filecoin.io https://filecoin.io
  - neilalexander 5y ago
    Note that the system requirements are way out of the league of the average home user (32GB RAM, 8 cores, several TB disk space). Plus, if the chain is growing at 38GB/day (as the Filecoin website suggests), that’s a traffic average of 3.8Mbit/s 24 hours a day.
carapace 5y ago
(2015)
0xtr 5y ago
I really like IPFS but their standard desktop client sucks big time. I've had a lot of performance problems where it freezes whenever I click a tab or even doesn't go to the tab I click on. It makes the whole experience a lot worse than it needs to.
yewenjie 5y ago
What is one cool use-case/ semi-killer app for IPFS go get started with?
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
The analogy is just plain wrong. search for content = it presumes that there's a google-like indexing of content, and then a DNS-like way to retrieve it. It seems to me that IPFS, in this analogy, is simply a different way to address a web page / document. note: I am very familiar with IPFS. I just think that this analogy is really poor.
topynate 5y ago
I like IPFS for making Libgen faster (with a little help from Cloudflare). If it also manages to solve hard problems of decentralization and content-addressable storage, that's just a bonus.
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dools 5y ago
“ As a result of liquifying information and making it the publication of it more egalitarian and accessible, HTTP has made almost everything about our culture better.” That didn’t age well …
alfl 5y ago
In “The Innovator’s Dilemma” Christiansen presents data from the storage market supporting the argument that disruptive innovations happen when inventions outcompete incumbent products on value criteria that appeal to engineers and enthusiasts but that don’t have immediate commercial applications. I think that’s what happening in the storage market, again, with IPFS.
drdeca 5y ago
What I would like, I think, is the ability to specify both the multihash and a place to request the data from. Like, if I’m talking to someone over some chat setup which doesn’t have a built in “send this file directly to this person” feature, it would be nice to be able to say, give them a multihash of the file and my external ipv6 address (+ port? I’m not quite sure how routing works), and have them request the file from my computer. Now, you might say “but how does that help with the situation where a bunch of people in a room want the same file from a distant location?”. And, maybe it doesn’t as much? But I think if e.g. people on a local network had theirs try first if the local network already had it, and then check the given external address, that that could work?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  If you have a hash of the underlying resource (note that this is different from how IPFS works) then http[s]://<authority>/.well-known/ni/sha-256/<base64-url hash> is supposed to enable this. The ni: URI scheme also allows for an authority field, which is used as a hint on how to locate the resource.
  - drdeca 5y ago
    That does sound very much like what I want! I’m somewhat surprised that I hadn’t heard of the ni scheme before tonight. Is there some nice software (can be cmd only, but ideally multi-platform) to do that where both parties are on separate residential connections, and where the receiving party side software automatically checks that the received data matches the hash? Because if so, that seems to serve exactly the purpose I’m thinking of! Thank you for the direction
- andrecarini 5y ago
  You have just invented torrents! > give them a multihash magnet URIs > place to request data from trackers > try local network first Already baked in!
  - drdeca 5y ago
    Just learned that apparently BitTorrent 2 supports multihash in magnet URI , including the merkle tree thing, so yeah that does sound like, exactly what I’m looking for? So, sounds like I ought to learn to use bit torrent.
shp0ngle 5y ago
Anyone has any experience with the FileCoin thing? If I want to “save” some data in FileCoin/IPFS/whatever, and I want it there forever, is it cheap? Expensive? Can I be reasonably sure it stays there? I want some actual current results, not “one day in the future”, heard that too much from *Coin proponents
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  > Estuary is currently in its alpha testing phase. Because of this, there are some restrictions to the service: > The service is temporarily limited to users wanting to store meaningful public data. You can apply for an invite → so… no?
  - shp0ngle 5y ago
    Ah, I can also use my own machine. > Enough space to store the current Lotus chain (preferably on an SSD storage medium). The chain grows at approximately 38 GiB per day. The chain can be synced from trusted state snapshots and compacted or pruned to a minimum size of around 33Gib. The full history was around 10TiB in June of 2021. Ugh. OK I will pass then
    - PLDiscordian 5y ago
      Don't be discouraged! Using your own machine might be painful, but in the meantime https://web3.storage https://web3.storage should give you long-term storage for free. It's built on top of Estuary, and the only reason why data isn't said to be kept "forever" is because forever is a long time, and life doesn't give guarantees, but data will persist as long as possible, and notices will be sent out of the service is ever terminated to the best of the team's ability. I look at web3.storage type services as an excellent resource into getting your data on IPFS/Filecoin for free, without needing to work with the current intimidating situation which is lotus. I'm fairly sure work is going in to make it easier to monetize your free space, but I'm not as deep in the Filecoin teams, and I'm not 100% sure what the work on that front looks like right now. Lotus is really only needed if you want to store other people's data as I understand it.
k__ 5y ago
Interesting things happening in that space. Arweave seems to be another approach to the problem. https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/
bborud 5y ago
This is very badly written and I think the author might benefit from rewriting this. Start with a description of the solution. If you can't cover it in 1-2 paragraphs at the beginning, you are in trouble. Don't focus so much on what everyone else is doing wrong - focus on what you are doing and let others be the judge of whether this is better.

510 points by Hakeemmidan 5y ago

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anaphor 5y ago

Named-data networking is literally what this is describing, except NDN works as a replacement for TCP, not HTTP. In the long term I'd rather have it work at a lower level and not have to think about it much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg

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yoursunny 5y ago
NDN can work as a replacement for IP too, running directly over Ethernet or other link layer technology.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Well IPFS, or else something like it, need to establish the network/utility, and then we can increasingly optimize it with dedicated stuff at lower layers. I don't think going straight to the hard parts is going to work without much more government policy to push through the investment -- seems strictly harder than going the 0-cost overlay-network only approach, because clearly we are demand-constrained not efficiency-constrained. I was tipped off to https://twitter.com/_John_Handel/status/1443925299394134016 https://twitter.com/_John_Handel/status/1443925299394134016 which I honestly think might be the approach to think about how networks in a broader sense than regular telecommunications are bootstrapped.
xccx 5y ago
NDN is the way p2p no huge IP infrastructure between nodes interest packets at narrow waist (like human attention, scarce) sign all packets, more secure, easier to trust|not hash for pointers, no surprises in containers crypto apply more cryptography, less web3 baloney broadcast radio native, no emulation of copper wire data, closer to where you want, find faster, keep content you want w/out intermediation, need to find "where" within IP/udp/tcp addresses https://youtu.be/P-GN-pYfRoo?t=1825 https://youtu.be/P-GN-pYfRoo?t=1825 node to node https://youtu.be/yLGzGK4c-ws?t=4817 https://youtu.be/yLGzGK4c-ws?t=4817 more application, less security hassle http://youtu.be/uvnP-_R-RYA?t=3018 http://youtu.be/uvnP-_R-RYA?t=3018 hash name the data https://youtu.be/gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 https://youtu.be/gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 data integrity w/out need to trust foreign server

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Ericson2314 5y ago

I like to explain it by comparing Amazon warehouses to the post office. Post office send black-box data point to to point. Amazon gets you thinggy matching SKU from arbitrary location.

adrianmonk 5y ago
I guess it would be hard to do chess-by-mail via Amazon warehouses/shipping. And I can't order a bank statement from Amazon.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Of course. One does not replace the other. It's most like I think we should nationalize the Amazon warehouse system and put under the post office. Perhaps both are valid interpretations of the US constitution's postal clause, "To establish Post Offices and post Roads" even!
yholio 5y ago
And therein lies the problem with content addressable networks: they make no sense in the economic world of the internet, where data transport and storage is not free, they make sense in a world owned by a single corporation.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Huh? The same efficiency gains should apply to both applications of content based routing. I do think there is a natural monopoly, but that is just and argument for nationalizing things. (And agreements like there being one IP protocol or whatever.)
Jasper_ 5y ago
Some might argue they fail to do the "thingy matching SKU" effectively these days.

TeeMassive 5y ago

Ok cool, I love decentralized content distribution frameworks too. But what do I have to install to use it? As with most of these attempts to decentralization, it fails because of the mostly absent effort spent on ease of use.

TheOtherWW 5y ago
Layer 2 solutions that focus on ease-of-use and other properties to make these technologies become more mainstream are starting to emerge. One such solution is Filebase, which offers an S3 compatible abstraction layer to Sia, Storj and other decentralized networks. You can use any S3 compatible tool right out of the box, or simply drag and drop. [1] https://filebase.com https://filebase.com
grumbel 5y ago
Command line client can be found over at: * https://docs.ipfs.io/install/command-line/#official-distributions https://docs.ipfs.io/install/command-line/#official-distribu... Single pre-compiled binary, no dependencies. Starting it is just a matter of: ipfs daemon WebUI will show up at: * http://127.0.0.1:5001/webui http://127.0.0.1:5001/webui Another useful command on Linux: ipfs mount This make IPFS available as fuse filesystem in the directory /ipfs/, so you can directly access IPFS content without manually downloading it.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  You are missing the point. Less than 5% of people are what most people would describe as coders and from my experience, I would say less than a third of those are not afraid of using a terminal. Why do you think people still pay for IDEs and fancy git clients with a UI? And of that, only a tiny fraction would have heard of decentralized social media / websites. If these kind of projects want any global attention then they should be as easy to install as most applications on Android or Apple. Bitcoin began becoming popular when easy to use wallet applications and currency exchange began being mainstream. Same for BitTorrent, Signal and IRC.
  - 5y ago

CharlesW 5y ago

The author claims that IPFS enables a "permanent web" and eliminates 404-like experiences. How does IPFS guarantee that all published content will be available forever? (In my beginner-level knowledge of IPFS, this is the first I've heard that claim. It seems absurd.)

leesalminen 5y ago
I wonder if it could make running a service like archive.org easier. Or if it could allow for a distributed archive.org service where nerds worldwide can contribute x GB storage to the cause?
- Sargos 5y ago
  This is one of the biggest stated use cases of IPFS as it effectively replaces archive.org with a better version that is more distributed, has better uptime, and more importantly has a much larger and nearly complete and pristine version of the entire internet for conceivably as long as the internet itself exists.
  - acdha 5y ago
    It does only the first of those things: using content hashes means that anyone can populate an archive which is easily discovered. For the rest, hosting takes money. People will not archive the entire internet for free and IPFS is not a magic wand which eliminates the need to have people like the skilled IA team. It could make their jobs easier but that’s far from “nearly complete” and no more or less pristine.
    - naasking 5y ago
      It gives you the tools to build an archive.org equivalent using volunteer storage though, rather Than asking for monetary donations. All you need is a database of known content hashes and a database of volunteers and you randomly distribute content among volunteers and periodically ensure a minimum number of clients are replicating each known hash.

dpweb 5y ago

I like the concept of immutable content, but HTTP eliminated top down control of information? Well, we’re all dependent on the Internet which can be shut down at any time by any government, and normally almost completely dependent on FAANG companies. I applaud the freedom activist spirit but the only exciting technologies in this regard must be P2P and not Internet carried.

Zababa 5y ago

So IPFS is basically some kind of automatic behind-the-scene torrenting? I see how that solves the "dead server" problem, but how does that solves the "content longevity" problem?

xwdv 5y ago
Incentives must be created for storing content. Imagine if each request was really more like a bounty where the requester would pay the host when the file is delivered.
- sergiotapia 5y ago
  This is what I'm saying. If there's a financial incentive to store popular content, or a higher incentive to host "at-risk" content this would work out, no? I have no idea how hard this would be to implement. I'm new to ipfs and crypto.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    The way it works is by using a smart contract so that content and payment can be exchanged simultaneously and payment is only delivered when the hash of the file matches what is expected.
- j_mo 5y ago
  I think "you host mine, I'll host yours" works better here than a financial incentive. If you can specify "I've got 1gb spare to replicate other people's assets, as long as each of them replicates mine in return" then your incentive to replicate other people's sites is more redundancy and bandwidth for your own. If you also prioritise files that have the least replicas across the entire network, and allow servers to re-distribute the content they are replicating, it would surely become quite hard for a file to be lost forever. This makes more sense to me than having each site pay for their own data to be replicated, because those who don't pay don't get their content replicated, which results in missing content when the server eventually disappears. That is just as bad as HTTP.

syngrog66 5y ago

I love the idea of IPFS but the last 2 times I tried using it, it simply didnt work. There was no "there" there. The simplest use cases like "I want file X from the ether, make it happen" like you could do with torrents -- nothing ever happened. I read the docs and tutorials but no luck. Felt like docs were missing some special incantation or setup step, or precondition. Or the CLI wasnt giving me feedback on some blocking error, and it was failing silently. Dunno. Gave up. Hope to revisit some day. Because in theory it would be useful tech to have in my toolbox.

unnouinceput 5y ago

So, they reinvented torrents? Or old timers, do you remember the peer-to-peer connection from 90's called DC++ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B)? Like this IPFS, you'd connect to a hub (IPFS calls this a node) and get what people were sharing. This IPFS only takes that step a little further with hashing and distributing. Also, if this gets implemented widely, hash collision is going to be wild

abecedarius 5y ago
BitTorrent was invented to cut down the scope of an earlier IPFS-ish system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_(peer-to-peer_network)#Evil_Geniuses_for_a_Better_Tomorrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_(peer-to-peer_network)#Ev... It's reasonable to try again at the bigger goals now that there's more infrastructure / theoretical progress / audience.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I see this kind of claim posted a lot, but what does IPFS actually do that torrents do not? What is a new use case which has been enabled?
  - linuxandrew 5y ago
    In terms of the protocol IPNS, DNSLink and PubSub come to mind. You can publish things that change over time. IPFS also does some deduplication against the data when you publish things. In terms of the software, browser integration, which there isn't a whole lot around for BitTorrent AFAIK.

jmull 5y ago

I wonder how people are incentivized to host content well? Whether HTTP or IPFS, you want content: (1) hosted/stored redundantly enough for availability but not over-hosted/stored because that raises costs. (2) hosted “near” to requesters to make efficient use of the network, which limits costs and increases speed. (Near in terms of the network infrastructure.) With HTTP I understand how this works (the content publisher figures out a hosting solution balancing what they are willing/able to pay and what kind of availability and speed they want/need). Not sure with IPFS though. If people are choosing what to host, wouldn’t the hosting be uneven, with some content under-hosted (or not hosted at all) and some popular content greatly over-hosted? …leading to an inefficient system? Under—hosted content would be slow to retrieve or simply unavailable. Over-hosted content is wasting resources, making the system more costly than it needs to be (somebody is paying for the storage and servers to make that storage available). I realize this a alpha/experimental, but without a strong answer to this, I don’t see how the system can work at scale.

doliveira 5y ago

On a side note, do you all know about some research or PoC in the direction of a globally distributed knowledge graph or something of sorts? Or at least a more technical name I could google. I think it's so bad that so much of the Internet information is siloed in walled gardens and that pages have to be dynamically generated and routed across the globe every single time... Imagine how it's gonna be when we get to Mars, for instance. Storing this knowledge graph in IPFS files seems like a logical step to me (as an absolute layman, though)

breck 5y ago
The Internet in a Box project is an interesting angle: https://internet-in-a-box.org/ https://internet-in-a-box.org/
noman-land 5y ago
There's a project at MIT that seems to be precisely this. Underlay. https://underlay.mit.edu/ https://underlay.mit.edu/

dreyfan 5y ago

I'll just point to the millions of torrent files today that will remain unseeded forever. Durability with P2P only works as a complement to centralization.

ugjka 5y ago
I think streaming is killing torrents and the fact that you need a VPN in many countries to avoid getting fined
- ativzzz 5y ago
  I agree with this, I haven't torrented anything in a very long time as most of things I want are streamable somewhere (and I don't care about file ownership), or set up for direct download on some forum somewhere.
  - Tom4hawk 5y ago
    There are other problems. I personally encountered this issue with Netflix: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/community-netflix-and-hulu-remove-advanced-dungeons-and-dragons-episode/ https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/community-netflix-and-hulu-remo...
- afiori 5y ago
  torrents needs to be available over a browser interface to hide in the usual https traffic
  - ajvs 5y ago
    See WebTorrent for this

adfrhgeaq5hy 5y ago

IPFS needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance? Right now it does none of those things well. The client chews through CPU and memory when seemingly doing nothing. If I try to download content, it is far slower than BitTorrent unless I go through a centralized gateway. If I add content it takes ages to propagate, making it utterly unsuitable as a replacement for a web server. There is no system to keep content alive so links will still die. The name system is byzantine and I don't think anyone uses it. Unfortunately, they are now unable to pivot because they did that asinine ICO. The right thing to do is to give up on the FileCoin nonsense and build a system that solves a problem better than anything else, but that is no longer allowed because they already sold something else to their "investors"

skyde 5y ago
what did they sold to investor? The idea that people will pay for hosting using filecoin?
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I think that the question of what user-facing purpose(s) a technology can be put to is somehow qualitatively different than what backend roles it might play. I could be wrong.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  It's been 6 years now and IPFS is still stuck with the same problems it had at the start with no real pathway to being useful. Most technology does something useful early on. I don't know the timeline for the web but I don't imagine it involved 6 years of marketing and selling to investors while not serving any purpose well.

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d--b 5y ago

> it efficiently (20 hops for a network of 10,000,000) finds the nodes that have the data using a Distributed Hash Table See this is the part I always doubted. I haven’t done the math, but does it really scale up to the size of the internet?

hikerclimber1 5y ago

Everything is subjective. Especially laws.

supperburg 5y ago

Just create an easy way to host stuff. Support a cultural shift toward dithered images and a universal text format. Make hiring a host cheap and easy and make hosting locally easy. Small sizes makes backing up easier and cheaper. Create a service where people can store a shard of the backup of the new internet and in return have their content added to the collective backup. I really think it’s about a cultural shift more than anything. Because without a collective realization that bandwidth and file sizes need to be reigned in, the content on the internet will just live at the perpetually ascending ceiling of what the internet can handle. And in that situation there will never be a way to make the internet a robust, equitable and interesting place.

warkdarrior 5y ago
> file sizes need to be reigned in Tell that to all of the content creators, corporate or not.

mwfunk 5y ago

You don't search for locations with HTTP, any more than a shipping company searches for addresses to deliver to. The problem with bad metaphors is it derails discussion, which I am arguably doing with this comment.

goodmachine 5y ago

Peergos is an interesting human-friendly project built on top of IPFS. Works great so far. Of interest: they provide a trustless way to store your data encrypted data on centralised boxes (S3, Backblaze) if you want. https://peergos.org/ https://peergos.org/

mayli 5y ago

ironically, few links on this 2015 post are dead, and most of them being ipfs releated. https://ipfs.io/ipns/QmTodvhq9CUS9hH8rirt4YmihxJKZ5tYez8PtDmpWrVMKP https://ipfs.io/ipns/QmTodvhq9CUS9hH8rirt4YmihxJKZ5tYez8PtDm... https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.git.sexy/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.git.sexy/

remram 5y ago
> It's time for ... (2015) The title shows clearly that they were wrong.

Flocular 5y ago

It sounds like freenet to me. How will this allow for governments to censor CSAM?

ptaq 5y ago

Economy of scale is hard to combat with a technically decentralized protocol. Let's assume all goes well and in 2-5-20 years IPFS is the web. A random Joe has an IPFS server in his basement, because it's profitable or at least convenient for him. Most of the traffic never reaches AWS or CouldFlare. What do they do about it? They pretend to be random Joes and mirror the same setup. Obviously Amazon will manage their servers more efficiently than an army of Joes, so the nothing really changes: we end up with a decentralized protocol where 90% of traffic just happens to end up on AWS servers anyway.

PLDiscordian 5y ago
At least in your universe, if AWS goes down, some things still work.

jimpick 5y ago

People hating on IPFS DHT performance probably aren’t using the experimental accelerated DHT client. https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/experimental-features.md#accelerated-dht-client https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/experimenta...

anaganisk 5y ago
Probably because it’s experimental and is not mainstream yet.

_8j50 5y ago

How do you manage access control with IPFS? Just because someone knows a hash does not mean they are allowed to access the content. EDIT: It seems [1] they want you to encrypt content and do access control outside of ipfs. Imagine ext4 telling you to do acl's on your own. To me, it is a little more than bittorrent without acls and at-rest confidentiality built-in. [1] https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/376 https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/376

v_london 5y ago

Pretty interesting. A lot of people here are focusing on permanence, but for me the main difference on addressing by content vs by host name is the loss of authorship it opens up for the web. Since a research paper of essay is referred to by its hash, the owner effectively gives away all control of the work when it's first published. There will be no editing, no taking down unwanted work, and no real way to build an interactive website that allows dynamic linking to other materials by the author. It's interesting how the same people promoting the "creator economy" also tend to promote the cryptocurrency space and IPFS without an ounce of self-awareness. IPFS sounds awful for creators of all kinds in the same way as BitTorrent was awful for artists. I can definitely see a use case for IPFS as a file storage for trustless systems such as smart contracts, which are designed as immutable, trustless systems.

Gigachad 5y ago
IPFS claims to solve this with their name service IPNS which can update to point to a new hash with a revised file. Where the original hash can be cached and used but users can refer to the NS version and get the latest version. But last I saw, the name on IPNS had to be frequently pushed by the original server or it would go away.
- davidgerard 5y ago
  IPNS doesn't work. Whenever you press them on this point, they'll admit it doesn't work. But IPFS has the crypto problem of conflating the stuff that works now with the stuff that's hypothetical in its marketing, and not admitting that the latter is janky nonsense that doesn't bloody work.
  - PLDiscordian 5y ago
    Sorry, I don't know when you last tried out IPFS, but IPNS does in fact work: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns/ https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns/ Again, I'm not sure when it wasn't working, or when it began working (it's always worked since I've been around), but IPNS has made huge strides, I use it every day. Even https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io is using IPNS, it's very popular.

NewEntryHN 5y ago

HTTP is an application protocol and most of this article doesn't make any sense.

jayd16 5y ago

Does IPFS have an append only primitive? Something like the signed owner can add to an existing document? Is that built in or something you'd have to handle in the application layer?

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555 - Sept 2015 (235 comments)

democracy 5y ago

Oh it's one of the "cryptocurrency" solution looking for a problem to solve? Thanks, no, thanks! :)

Kiro 5y ago
No, it's not. IPFS has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies (Filecoin was added as a separate incentive layer but is not part of IPFS). Sad that even technologists immediately associate decentralization with cryptocurrencies.

f7ebc20c97 5y ago

What's difference between IPFS and Oxen??

neiman 5y ago

The "permanent web" goal didn't survive that well. I work closely with IPFS since 2018, and it's not part of the narative by now. The distributed part is still going strong, but in my eyes distributed (or decentralization) should be a tool, not a goal. The question is which kind of Internet we want to build with these distributed infrastructure? If it's just cloning the current Internet, then I don't see what it brings. My personal answer is that we should build a democratic Internet. One where people are members of the Internet, instead of mere users, and decisions are made in a democratic process, like in a state. This kind of Internet can only be implemented using the distributed/decentralized tools.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
So the minority of users see/talk about/hear what the majority wants? So they are forced just fork it and form their own distributed network independent and isolated from the internet at large?
- neiman 5y ago
  That's not how democracy works.

Datsundere 5y ago

This has been bothering for the longest time. I would love to learn more about efforts that are being taken to avoid these workarounds we have for certs expiring, dns issues and such. A lot of website hacking could've been avoided with a better design like even having encryption as standard.

Falkon1313 5y ago
Well a lot of hacking could also be avoided if everything were just plain publicly-accessible static files. Which is what they're talking about with IPFS. But that would be a very different web from today's, where most content comes from dynamic CMS/CMF, blog software, forum software, or other web apps. It addresses things like the old personal homepage of the mid-90s, but not much at all about the modern web. It also doesn't address the major outages (like we've seen with cert revocations or DNS outages, etc.)

userbinator 5y ago

I see no mention in the comments so far of eMule/ed2k, Winny, Share, etc. --- all the other P2P systems that came before torrents became dominant. This doesn't seem particularly different from those.

pdimitar 5y ago

Not on a network that can easily and quickly blacklist hashes sent to them to the authorities. (Sadly I don't keep the links anymore to prove it. It was somewhere in one of their GitHub repos however, inside an issue.) I'd love to support them but they don't stand behind their "uncensorable" original slogan.

FalconSensei 5y ago

> IPFS is actually more similar to a single bittorrent swarm exchanging git objects So definitely not permanent, right?

cmckn 5y ago
I’d call IPFS immutable rather than permanent. Which is a cool idea for media files at least, but isn’t very useful for something like a blog post. I think the “HTTP is obsolete” claim is a bit laughable. IPFS is essentially just bittorrent, reimagined (with comparatively no users, so not very useful yet).

Const-me 5y ago

The main performance challenge is hardware not software, it's power management on mobile devices. After a new iPhone will be able to work for a few days on battery, while constantly transmitting data at 10-100 megabits/second, P2P will be good again. Before iPhone, peer 2 peer tech were doing OK. Then mobile broadband came, and centralized services basically won. Now we (at least in some places) have mobile broadband of symmetrical 50-100 mbit/sec, yet p2p still doesn't work on mobile. Despite the bandwidth is now good, electricity and thermals still aren't.

ftyers 5y ago

There is still only one implementation of the protocol and no fully functioning Python API. (Disclaimer: I love IPFS, but until it has better support for programmers who don't want to use Go, it's unlikely to get much traction).

PLDiscordian 5y ago
While I do use Go, I just use the HTTP API to interact with the go-ipfs daemon. Are you looking to use it in a different way in Python?

anaganisk 5y ago

As long as there are no actual, native iOS, android and PC Apps built on top of IPFS or even an access GUI or interface with browser on those platforms, IPFS can stop dreaming of replacing HTTP. Apart from mere 1-2% of world population who use internet, no one else is going to download a binary and run a CLI, and visit 127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs. For majority of people chrome is a gateway to internet (for them Http is a prefix u put in-front of a url) unless ipfs goes to that level, http is as relevant as ever. I know software devs who don’t know they could access files from browser via file:// protocol.

PLDiscordian 5y ago
We're actually working on that, and have made progress with Brave and Opera. You're right that for wide, mainstream adoption, we'll need to expand onto platforms like Android/iOS, and that's the dream, honestly. Working on URIs like IPFS:// and IPNS://, which are supported in Brave/Opera to an extent. It's a long road though, with lots of negotiations with lots of organizations. I do feel optimistic about it though.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Maybe I’m making it too simple but Native iOS, Android and desktop clients be a good start? Even a good desktop client could drive the adoption like crazy. Torrents never required any negotiations, it never depended on organisations to implement support. Just package it enough as a standalone app. Ipns can follow. If enough people are storing/accessing content in IPFS, organisations all implement interfaces on their own.

jl6 5y ago

Is there an IPFS server that can run within a fixed memory budget? Last time I tried the Go implementation, its memory usage increased steadily over the course of 72 hours and then got killed when it approached a gigabyte (which was all the VM’s memory).

st_goliath 5y ago

I wonder if the author of this ever heard about Project Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu The idea on how a decentralized web of hypertext documents should be done right isn't exactly new. AFAIK the fact that in the HTTP+HTML web stack, servers going down meant documents disappearing and links going stale was criticized even at the time. The HTTP+HTML stack winning out is probably one of the many examples of "good enough" winning over "perfect".

bullen 5y ago

I have a slight issue with the title, why not IPFS over HTTP? Why are all these entites (both corporate and not) trying to deprecate the main protocol used by humans? HTTP is simple and works, what ever you do build on top of HTTP instead of TCP/UDP.

detaro 5y ago
HTTP would be an odd choice for a dynamic peer-to-peer protocol like IPFS.
- bullen 5y ago
  It might seem like it at first, but P2P always needs a peer finder, and that should be HTTP. I predict that in a relatively short timespan everyone will host a HTTP server on their port 80 atleast those that can get an external IPv4 address before the cost starts surging. The point is: port 80 is and should be open. When you do other ports and protocols you never know what the IPS/router/firewall/OS is going to block. But if IPv6 ever reaches inertial mass you are right! Edit: As far as IPFS is concerned we allready have bittorrent and that uses HTTP so their point is moot, I'm driving another tangent though: Everything that can be HTTP, should be HTTP; and to proove it I made the most scalable multiplayer protocol: http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html
  - detaro 5y ago
    Expecting a server on an external port is already quite limited, plenty users that can't do that for various reasons. Bittorrent also doesn't use HTTP for the P2P parts.
    - bullen 5y ago
      Sure, and that is the real battle, who can get an external IP! Yep, I'm ok with the P2P stuff to be over UDP, but if you ever made UDP hole-punching work you will realize it's not necessarily the most straight forward solution. P2P does not scale for all problems, while distributed client/server does! The bottleneck never was network bandwidth (binary vs. text), it's been atomic parallelism since multi-core processors peaked in concurrent RAM bandwidth 2014+ after DDR4 increased latency. Copying files is not a problem because you can always make files smaller by reducing quality!

austincheney 5y ago

As an outsider looking in IPFS will struggle to catch on with non technical people, like Tor. It can be the best thing ever for privacy, access, or whatever. It still won’t catch on. This is the Linux problem as explained by Torvald. The problem is that it isn’t unique enough from the existing experience and the problems it claims to solve aren’t something non technical people care about. Web distribution in its current form works. Even if it’s supremely shitty grandma can still post photos on Facebook. If a new distribution format wants to win it needs to be different in a way an 8 year old and grandma can equally understand. IPFS is not that. What 8 year olds and grandma equally understand is that content is king, the layman term for client/server model. More likely the future will purely be a focus on web technologies for application experiences and distribution. Kill the client/server model. If grandma wants to share photos with grandkids she doesn’t need Facebook at all. She only needs a network, a silent distribution/security model, and the right application interface. No server, no cloud, no third party required.

jokoon 5y ago

I would gladly see a client that lets users allocate between 50 to 200MB of storage to host other websites. It could run on phones and would allow redundancy.

captainbland 5y ago

I did like the concept of IPFS around the time this was written but now it feels to me like it misses the wood for the trees. The thing is that the web by its nature is already decentralised. The real issue with the web today isn't really some technical, architectural flaw. Centralisation has emerged in this already reasonably well decentralised system because of network effect driven accumulation, the market and pre-existing wealth from investors tipping the scales. Yes IPFS is a more thorough attempt to create a distributed web, yet I doubt it is fully immune to the forces that captured and centralised the existing web, except for the fact that it is currently unpopular. Or it will remain unpopular because there's no incentive for private enterprises to invest much in a system where they can't control their own corner of it and few users like using systems built on the cheap when flashy, well funded alternatives exist, if it is truly that resilient to centralisation. Whichever way you want to slice it. The social forces that cause centralisation in the web are the same forces that cause e.g. monopoly and extreme wealth accrual in the rest of society. And the fix has to be social, not technical.

holoduke 5y ago

What is ipfs really trying to solve. They artificially came up with some issues they think are annoying with HTTP. But is the rest of world thinking the same? I don't think so. Nothing wrong with current situation.

ultra_nick 5y ago

It's crazy how many people don't get the IPFS/Dweb. It's like the invention of personal computers. It's going to change everything like the shift from time share department computers did. Imagine what programmers could do if YouTube size infrastructure was free for every developer. IPFS is just the boring protocol the enables the next internet of stuff. The stuff that comes out in the next 20 years will be crazy.

7373737373 5y ago
It won't be free, but it may be cheaper

worldmerge 5y ago

This is very cool! Also should be noted this is from 2015, would love to hear a follow up to this.

enz 5y ago

> “With HTTP, you search for locations. With IPFS, you search for content.” Well, that's the difference between an URL and an URI, right? HTTP seems URL-oriented while IPFS seems URI-oriented.

capableweb 5y ago
Not quite. A URI is any identifier, a URL is a identifier to a location while a URN is identifier only containing a name. IPFS hashes are URIs/URNs while both URLs and URNs are URIs.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Additionally, what the "for content" statement is trying to get across is that there is necessarily only one IPFS address possible for a given unique piece of binary content. Which is a quality not universal among URNs either.
- enz 5y ago
  Oh, I see. Thanks for the clarification!
nivertech 5y ago
URL - Uniform Resource Locator URN - Uniform Resource Name URI - Uniform Resource Identifier URI is too generic, "I" in URI means "Identifier", which can be either a semantic/natural or a technical/surrogate key. And in many case it's the same Locator is in URL. IPFS is a CAS (Content Addressable Storage), so an "Identifier" there is a semantic key (i.e. hash of the content).

jeroenhd 5y ago

I like IPFS, I really do, but whenever I try to use it, it's either too slow to become usable or sometimes it plain doesn't work. I pinned a whole bunch of files on IPFS a while back to experiment with it and the system seems to work, but every time I try to fetch those resources from a location that hasn't cached the content yet, it takes several seconds to show me the HTML/JSON/PNG files. HTTP may be inefficient for document storage, but IPFS is inefficient for almost everything else. I like the concepts behind IPFS but it's simply not practical to use the system in its current form. I hope my issues will get resolved at some point but I can't shake the thought that it'll die a silent death like so many attempts to replace the internet before it.

leesalminen 5y ago
I agree that the http caching layers are currently needed to achieve decent UX. But it’s also possible that won’t be necessary forever. The network could expand and get to the point where resolution time comes down to accessible levels. Only time will tell I suppose.
- lillecarl 5y ago
  When downloading content using a magnet link downloads are usually quite slow started, while torrent files usually start directly. It's not a fair comparison since the torrents are from a private tracker with high quality peers, but it's noticeable that the DHT stuff is slower. Not sure how cjdns solves that. Will the network be faster the more people join it? Is centralized infra inevitable for fast things because of all assumptions and insight a centralized provider can use? BTC is also slow, I don't know of any cryptocurrency that can provide VISA transaction volumes, even if they use more power than some countries alone.
  - Taek 5y ago
    Cryptocurrency is different from storage because cryptocurrency needs to provide global consistency guarantees. Skynet is a decentralized network with lookup times that have a p50 TTFB of under 200ms. It achieves this by looking things up directly on hosts rather than routing through a DHT. There's a bit of overhead to accomplish this (around 200kb of extra bandwidth per lookup), but for a smooth web experience that tradeoff is more than worthwhile.

dleslie 5y ago

> All the static content stored with the site still loads, and my modern browser still renders the page (HTML, unlike HTTP, has excellent lasting power). But any links offsite or to dynamically served content are dead. For every weird example like this, there are countless examples of incredibly useful content that have also long since vanished. Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see where they claim that IPFS can provide a solution for dynamic content; which makes up a huge portion of what is served over HTTP.

alvarlagerlof 5y ago
It won't, but much of the web could work well on JAMStack, and there's no reason that couldn't be supported.
- dleslie 5y ago
  JAMStack isn't much of an option for services that can't trust the clients and cannot rely on high latency consensus algorithms. It's also brutal for battery life.
- oefrha 5y ago
  JAMStack != static site served entirely by a CDN. There’s an A for API in there. Where’s the A for IPFS? There’s no such thing.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    It can be built, but I don't think there are any frameworks that make it easy. A JSON file can be an API, but authentication and encryption using static publicly available files is more challenging, especially for a large number of users. That is where blockchain solutions come into place.

sergiotapia 5y ago

Is there a way to install something on my local machine and host IPFS content to help "the swarm". If they combine this with some kind of crypto monetary incentive it would go a long way for people to help "the swarm". Odysee is looking into adding crypto to your balance when you serve content that helps viewers.

noen 5y ago
No. I tried. For weeks. Filecoin is the mechanism for this. And they do everything humanly possible to both technically keep the ecosystem open, while at the same time making it practically impossible for any non-data center vendor to take part. The min hardware specs are absurdly large. Most of the services required are not prepackaged alum any way, the exercise is left to the implementer for almost everything. If you don’t have 100k+ to drop in hardware, there’s no community help for you. It’s a shame because ipfs is well structured from the other end, but it’s not really decentralized in any way other than naming.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Yeah I looked in to filecoin as well and it's not nearly as simple as setting up a raspberry pi with a 1tb HDD attached. You have to have a latest gen array of GPUs sitting there constantly cryptographically proving the entire content of the HDD every minute. As with all crypto tech, its insanely inefficient and you may as well use google drive or s3.
Willamin 5y ago
Maybe FileCoin is what you're looking for? https://filecoin.io https://filecoin.io
- neilalexander 5y ago
  Note that the system requirements are way out of the league of the average home user (32GB RAM, 8 cores, several TB disk space). Plus, if the chain is growing at 38GB/day (as the Filecoin website suggests), that’s a traffic average of 3.8Mbit/s 24 hours a day.

carapace 5y ago

(2015)

0xtr 5y ago

I really like IPFS but their standard desktop client sucks big time. I've had a lot of performance problems where it freezes whenever I click a tab or even doesn't go to the tab I click on. It makes the whole experience a lot worse than it needs to.

yewenjie 5y ago

What is one cool use-case/ semi-killer app for IPFS go get started with?

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

The analogy is just plain wrong. search for content = it presumes that there's a google-like indexing of content, and then a DNS-like way to retrieve it. It seems to me that IPFS, in this analogy, is simply a different way to address a web page / document. note: I am very familiar with IPFS. I just think that this analogy is really poor.

topynate 5y ago

I like IPFS for making Libgen faster (with a little help from Cloudflare). If it also manages to solve hard problems of decentralization and content-addressable storage, that's just a bonus.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dools 5y ago

“ As a result of liquifying information and making it the publication of it more egalitarian and accessible, HTTP has made almost everything about our culture better.” That didn’t age well …

alfl 5y ago

In “The Innovator’s Dilemma” Christiansen presents data from the storage market supporting the argument that disruptive innovations happen when inventions outcompete incumbent products on value criteria that appeal to engineers and enthusiasts but that don’t have immediate commercial applications. I think that’s what happening in the storage market, again, with IPFS.

drdeca 5y ago

What I would like, I think, is the ability to specify both the multihash and a place to request the data from. Like, if I’m talking to someone over some chat setup which doesn’t have a built in “send this file directly to this person” feature, it would be nice to be able to say, give them a multihash of the file and my external ipv6 address (+ port? I’m not quite sure how routing works), and have them request the file from my computer. Now, you might say “but how does that help with the situation where a bunch of people in a room want the same file from a distant location?”. And, maybe it doesn’t as much? But I think if e.g. people on a local network had theirs try first if the local network already had it, and then check the given external address, that that could work?

zozbot234 5y ago
If you have a hash of the underlying resource (note that this is different from how IPFS works) then http[s]://<authority>/.well-known/ni/sha-256/<base64-url hash> is supposed to enable this. The ni: URI scheme also allows for an authority field, which is used as a hint on how to locate the resource.
- drdeca 5y ago
  That does sound very much like what I want! I’m somewhat surprised that I hadn’t heard of the ni scheme before tonight. Is there some nice software (can be cmd only, but ideally multi-platform) to do that where both parties are on separate residential connections, and where the receiving party side software automatically checks that the received data matches the hash? Because if so, that seems to serve exactly the purpose I’m thinking of! Thank you for the direction
andrecarini 5y ago
You have just invented torrents! > give them a multihash magnet URIs > place to request data from trackers > try local network first Already baked in!
- drdeca 5y ago
  Just learned that apparently BitTorrent 2 supports multihash in magnet URI , including the merkle tree thing, so yeah that does sound like, exactly what I’m looking for? So, sounds like I ought to learn to use bit torrent.

shp0ngle 5y ago

Anyone has any experience with the FileCoin thing? If I want to “save” some data in FileCoin/IPFS/whatever, and I want it there forever, is it cheap? Expensive? Can I be reasonably sure it stays there? I want some actual current results, not “one day in the future”, heard that too much from *Coin proponents

shp0ngle 5y ago
> Estuary is currently in its alpha testing phase. Because of this, there are some restrictions to the service: > The service is temporarily limited to users wanting to store meaningful public data. You can apply for an invite → so… no?
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  Ah, I can also use my own machine. > Enough space to store the current Lotus chain (preferably on an SSD storage medium). The chain grows at approximately 38 GiB per day. The chain can be synced from trusted state snapshots and compacted or pruned to a minimum size of around 33Gib. The full history was around 10TiB in June of 2021. Ugh. OK I will pass then
  - PLDiscordian 5y ago
    Don't be discouraged! Using your own machine might be painful, but in the meantime https://web3.storage https://web3.storage should give you long-term storage for free. It's built on top of Estuary, and the only reason why data isn't said to be kept "forever" is because forever is a long time, and life doesn't give guarantees, but data will persist as long as possible, and notices will be sent out of the service is ever terminated to the best of the team's ability. I look at web3.storage type services as an excellent resource into getting your data on IPFS/Filecoin for free, without needing to work with the current intimidating situation which is lotus. I'm fairly sure work is going in to make it easier to monetize your free space, but I'm not as deep in the Filecoin teams, and I'm not 100% sure what the work on that front looks like right now. Lotus is really only needed if you want to store other people's data as I understand it.

k__ 5y ago

Interesting things happening in that space. Arweave seems to be another approach to the problem. https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/

bborud 5y ago

This is very badly written and I think the author might benefit from rewriting this. Start with a description of the solution. If you can't cover it in 1-2 paragraphs at the beginning, you are in trouble. Don't focus so much on what everyone else is doing wrong - focus on what you are doing and let others be the judge of whether this is better.