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The decentralized WeTransfer

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21–30 of 52 posts

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#21

This is the problem I see with decentralized projects. The user experience here, is essentially the same as WeTransfer. The only difference is the underlying technologies. Now, one would have to either blindly trust that the infrastructure is truly decentralized, or have the time and necessary skills to audit the code. And then they'd have to trust that web server is actually hooking up to the code that was just audi…

"Thus, the decentralization community has got a marketing problem."

Yes, and it's because security is a feature, not a solution.

99% of people (think your Mother, or your non-techie buddy back home) - do not care that much about these things. 'The feature' they care about is 'sharing'. They can already get that robustly via regular services.

So maybe 'it's nice' to have some degree of extra privacy', but not if they actually have to do something, think about it, install something - yada yada.

For a select few, privacy/security is in and of itself a feature, and might be a primary motivation for use/purchase, but it's a small group.

Example: intellectually, I care about the issue, but really, I could care less that Instagram has 3 of my photos, or that FB has a very small number of posts that I've made.

I believe the 'decentralization' movement will happen when:

A) On the consumer side it's easy, obvious, there is a push - and possibly when adoption isn't necessarily driven by the decentralized nature, rather, something else, a 'benefit' that is derived

B) Enterprise. They will definitely not want their data out in the world willy nilly. Think of how much critical data Salesforce has for example. After a few more leaks, it could be that CIO's everywhere demand more 'on premise' and this could be an opening for more decentralized services.

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#23

This is the problem I see with decentralized projects. The user experience here, is essentially the same as WeTransfer. The only difference is the underlying technologies. Now, one would have to either blindly trust that the infrastructure is truly decentralized, or have the time and necessary skills to audit the code. And then they'd have to trust that web server is actually hooking up to the code that was just audi…

But for example, wetransfer only allow to upload 2GB files, my proposal unlimited and permanent. I believe people don't need to know it uses blockchain...

That's a feature, not a product. I'm assuming you can transfer larger files through WeChat if you pay?

I believe decentralised systems serve a purpose (especially in fintech), but I'm not sure this solves an actual a problem (marketing it will be 10,000 harder than building it).

Also, as a business open sourcing stuff hardly ever makes sense. Not sure what your goal was with this (cool tech though!) but if it was to set up a business, I don't think that was a great decision.

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for example, wetransfer only allow to upload 2GB files, my proposal unlimited and permanent. I believe people don't need to know it uses blockchain...

That's a feature, not a product. I'm assuming you can transfer larger files through WeChat if you pay? I believe decentralised systems serve a purpose (especially in fintech), but I'm not sure this solves an actual a problem (marketing it will be 10,000 harder than building it). Also, as a business open sourcing stuff hardly ever makes sense. Not sure what your goal was with this (cool tech though!) but if it was to…

censorhip? Here in my country, there are webpages blocked(blocking dns). We see there is a lot of censorhip on the internet. IPFS is permanent, anyone can't eliminate that content. You can get access, with lots of gateways.

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#25
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent reports of google docs arbitrarily removing people's access to their documents seem like pretty good marketing for decentralized solutions.

That was a bug. Are you saying decentralized solutions won't ever have bugs which temporarily prevent people from accessing certain files until the bug gets fixed?

If a bug on your end could prevent other people from accessing data then I wouldn't call that decentralised.

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I guess the difference is, torrents have an inherent mechanism of becoming distributed. Once someone else has a whole/part of the file, they begin seeding immediately (unless stopped of course). In the case of this app, I just receive a download link which is a proxy for pulling something from the network. It would be something else, if the way to get a hold of this file would be through an IPFS node that the u…

I'm not really sure what you mean. IPFS works just like torrents. As soon as you receive the file, you start "seeding" it.

Yes it does. But I don't believe this app is using any actual seeding mechanisms of IPFS from a user perspective. Which is why i'm asking about where the nodes would be to make this distributed and decentralised.

My guess is that the server of this project uploads and "pins" this file in IPFS, in which case it would be no different than a centralised solution. If the server goes down, your file is unaccessible.

Also, when you use this app, you aren't doing this through an IPFS node to then be able to seed it. You are just downloading the already hosted file using a HTTP proxy service that can download from IPFS.

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