Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The decentralized WeTransfer

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#31

Post by jani123 »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #6

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…

I agree with you on the ¨they already are using WeTransfer, or Dropbox for that matter. Why should they switch to this? Because it's decentralized? Now you have to explain to them what that means and why that's beneficial to them, and if you're successful there, they still have to: trust the code (and they only can do that by understanding it) and trust that you're actually deploying that code on your live interface.

But is it a good argument?

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#32

Post by StavrosK »

monokh wrote: post #27
StavrosK wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> But I don't believe this app is using any actual seeding mechanisms of IPFS from a user perspective

I'm not sure what you mean here. Any user can "seed" any IPFS file they want, they don't need anything from this service.

> in which case it would be no different than a centralised solution

A distributed solution with N=1 isn't the same as a centralized solution. The difference is that distributed solutions can easily increase N, but centralized solutions can't. In this case, you can distribute the file from as many nodes as you control, which makes this service much better than a centralized solution.

> Also, when you use this app, you aren't doing this through an IPFS node to then be able to seed it

Sure, but you can use something like www.eternum.io (or just run your own IPFS node) to fix that. If you don't want to do either, of course you won't have any of the advantages. It's like saying "cars aren't better than couches, they aren't much more comfortable and they don't run if you don't start the engine".

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#35

Post by monokh »

StavrosK wrote: post #32
monokh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> But I don't believe this app is using any actual seeding mechanisms of IPFS from a user perspective I'm not sure what you mean here. Any user can "seed" any IPFS file they want, they don't need anything from this service. > in which case it would be no different than a centralised solution A distributed solution with N=1 isn't the same as a centralized solution. The difference is that distributed solutions can easi…

You might be misunderstanding my position. I think IPFS is great and should be used. But this specific project is not really attending to any problems.

It's in the core functionality of IPFS to be able to host a file and the http proxy is available by default by IPFS. So the real problems are distributing and decentralising the file (such as by running an IPFS node) and this project is not making the slightest attempt at that. Without that there is little point in using this service as it is just like any other centralised hosting service, just so happens that the file is on IPFS.

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#38

Post by hanklazard »

monokh wrote: post #16
mtgx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I understand, merely hosting something on IPFS doesn't make it decentralised if there is only one node. Doesn't that apply to torrents, too? If 2 or more people don't own (and share) the exact same content, then of course it's not decentralized.

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…

>It would be something else, if the way to get a hold of this file would be through an IPFS node that the user was running.

I agree, this seems to sort of bypass IPFS on the download side because my mom doesn’t have to have a node running to download the picture I send her.

However, one potential benefit of this service could be to act as a foot-in-the-door to gain a user base ... I could imagine a .dmg /.exe in the future setting up an IPFS node for your average non-techie user. Still, that doesn’t solve the problem of competing with existing & simple centralized solutions with similar features, as noted in other comments.

Glad to see people building projects with IPFS. Nice work.

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#39

Post by StavrosK »

monokh wrote: post #35
StavrosK wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don't believe this app is using any actual seeding mechanisms of IPFS from a user perspective I'm not sure what you mean here. Any user can "seed" any IPFS file they want, they don't need anything from this service. > in which case it would be no different than a centralised solution A distributed solution with N=1 isn't the same as a centralized solution. The difference is that distributed solutions can easi…

You might be misunderstanding my position. I think IPFS is great and should be used. But this specific project is not really attending to any problems. It's in the core functionality of IPFS to be able to host a file and the http proxy is available by default by IPFS. So the real problems are distributing and decentralising the file (such as by running an IPFS node) and this project is not making the slightest attemp…

Oh, I see what you mean now, that it's not much better than raw IPFS. In that case, I might agree, although I think UX matters a lot too.

Re: The decentralized WeTransfer

#40

Post by ar0 »

Huh. Does this tool encrypt your files before sending them? If it is like “WeTransfer”, you would expect your files to be available only to people who know the private sharing link.

However, my understanding is that IPFS will publish the file hash to adjacent notes, so unless they are encrypted people can listen for your provider records and look at your (presumably privately shared) files: https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/is-it-possible-to-store-private-ob...

Post reply on HN