IPFS is the Distributed Web

The problem is that content that is not access becomes garbage collected and that links and listings will most likely not point towards the hash itself and instead at the IPNS entry.

It doesn't have much more protection than a DNS entry if the private key is stolen; you could use the last known IP but it's not very practical and might eventually become dead if the IP changes.

In the same way, the old content may remain online after an attacker takes over and people could continue using it but it only remains online if people are using it. If the attack remains unknown for long enough there is no previous version IIRC.

>I think there was some discussion about having there be a chain

Still same problem, if the private key gets leaked, a malicious attacker can manipulate the entries on the chain.

The real solution is something like Swarm or Filecoin where Users can actually encourage keeping old versions around, something IPFS lacks atm. Theoretically any IPFS link can become dead once it's no longer used, which is a problem.

Merely putting the entries on chain solves little, you need to actually encourage archiving of data to get resilient against attacks.

Even then, you would also need some sort of PKI, where someone can set a master key which authorizes other nodes to manipulate content and can also revoke that. This allows to easily fight off attacks based on leaked private keys.

However, the PKI should remain largely private, not much different to Bitcoin Cold and Hot Wallets.

Disclaimer: I have worked on building the Internet since before the web, and have a BOFH kind of point of view of things, 2 or 3 times over now ..

I support IPFS - and things like it - as a technologist/hacker/punk-ass because, in fact, we have built an utter monstrosity of a beast of a spaghetti god of an Internet, and we can always do better.

Software - and by extension, inter-networking - is like music. There will always be better ways to do it, beyond the horizon of what is current and now. Just because what we've got "basically works, even though its all broken", doesn't mean we can't 'fix whats broken'.

To those of us in the group of your postulate, whats broken is the fact that its all so damned hierarchical, and requires canonical/authority issue and agency in multiple forms before the bits can flow. We can't just set up an IP address - we also have to have DNS, serve content on it on some port, etc. And, on top of this, we end up having to sort it out all the way down the OSI stack, at the hardware layer, by keeping as many hosts as possible up and running as are required to service the customers, here and now, who are using our service.

All of that is what is broken about the current Internet, but of course the irony is that it is all that works about the Internet at the same time.

So, IPFS/distributed/etc. means this: we can un-bork all of the above, and just have all the things route down to the real, hard, user of the system, i.e. the original content provider. IPFS, and its ilk, is all about putting the original content provider in control, while also having the network - as a function of its operating capability - contribute to helping those content providers who become, eventually, popular.

So, we don't have a lot of rigid hierarchy - we have instead multi-variate spread spectra of responsibility/duty to serve up the bits of it all - packets at a time, as part of participation in the whole - to those who want something, and those who know how to find it, from those who have something, and know how to name it.

In short, "its not about the network any more, its the people..."

> you need to actually encourage archiving of data to get resilient against attacks.

Yes, but this feels like a distinct issue. Neither of these things are enough on their own (encouraging mirrors or providing the tech to distribute the hosting).

You still have to serve the content from a server, since you cannot depend on the kindness of strangers to persist your content.