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IPFS, Again

macwright.org

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Re: IPFS, Again

#41

Post by dpacmittal »

tlrobinson wrote: post #21
janandonly wrote: post #3

Who is going to defend the free internet agains Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? They are the very opposite of a free and open internet where everyone can "run a website" on her own machine. It pains me to see a great idea like the Interplanetary File System still not working. I had similar experiences with IPFS and yes, we do need a project like this, only without the broken incentive structure attached to it. Why a "Fi…

> Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin. Because it’s a lot easier to raise $300 million on a bit of hype selling your own coin. (Also Bitcoin micropayments aren’t quite there yet, but I’m not sure any other truly decentralized cryptocurrency really is either)

I feel Nano is doing an outstanding job. It's what bitcoin was supposed to be.

Re: IPFS, Again

#42

Post by neiman »

We've been playing a lot recently with the concept of IPFS websites.

We even created a plugin (https://github.com/almonit/almonit-plugin - unreleased officially yet!) for websites that combine IPFS with ENS (a decentralized DNS). Our repository contains a list of decentralized websites using this method. We found about 20 so far.

Technically, IPFS work well for us, but we made sure to have a server seeding our website at all times (where we suffer similar problems like the author of the post describes).

Even then, we still had to make sure that the website is available in all main gateways, since most people don't run their own IPFS daemon. The strange part is that sometimes content is available in one gateway, but not in others. Or sometimes it's available in one gateway, but we can't get it on our local IPFS node.

I understand that IPFS is not a blockchain, so I can't expect all the nodes to have the same content. But I do expect the main gateways to communicate more directly with each other.

Conceptually, IPSF websites are a bit like sending your website to someone via an unreliable slow mail; i.e., it's not that attractive. You can make it somehow more dynamic, using what they call IPNS (it allows you to update your content). But the result is so slow, that even the most devoted monk would lose his patience eventually.

A workaround is using a decentralized name system, like ENS.

This works very well, but the result are still static websites. No comments or anything really interesting happening.

Those websites are censorship-resistance and very robust, you don't have to worry about ddos attacks. But then again, how many people worry about such things?

That said, I still like the concept of IPFS. We are exploring a few options to add dynamic behavior to that now, where the dream is to mimic existing services in a decentralized way.

Surely, they won't work as well, but the pro would be that it will be controlled by the users, and that they will be able to survive financially with no ads.

Re: IPFS, Again

#44

Post by sprash »

pmlnr wrote: post #39
PureParadigm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to give an example of a blockchain approach to this: Ethereum Name Service [1]. 1. https://ens.domains/

There was namecoin way before that, with .bit domains and failed to solve anything.

I never tried ENS but namecoin works flawlessly as intended. It is actually more reliable than classic DNS.

It may have failed at adoption, but the problem of decentralizing DNS has been solved.

Re: IPFS, Again

#45

Post by davidgerard »

darthreid wrote: post #7
janandonly wrote: post #3

Who is going to defend the free internet agains Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? They are the very opposite of a free and open internet where everyone can "run a website" on her own machine. It pains me to see a great idea like the Interplanetary File System still not working. I had similar experiences with IPFS and yes, we do need a project like this, only without the broken incentive structure attached to it. Why a "Fi…

Sadly a lot of the mechanisms behind bitcoin make for it to be difficult to use in a vast transaction setting (millions/sec, similar to credit cards), which would be required for using its blockchain for proof of work purposes. That’s why alternatives exist in order to solve these “problems” that the BTC community either choose not to fix or simply won’t. It’ll be interesting to see what crypto people would intend to…

IPFS is from the crypto people. This is what blockchain advocates put forward as the solution to mass storage for their blockchain dreams.

IPFS is basically BitTorrent with magnet links - hashes to address content, if you want to be sure your obscure content will stay around then you have to seed it, etc. There's some fancier stuff on top, but if you know that's how it works, all else follows.

You can tell how "blockchain" IPFS is from the way that advocates seem chronically unable to tell "could" from "does" - stuff that doesn't exist and/or doesn't work is routinely talked about as if it's here and working in the present. This leads to disappointed posts like the one linked.

Re: IPFS, Again

#46

Post by yason »

yoz-y wrote: post #38
WanderPanda wrote: post #35

Non-native speaker here, is the usage of "than" in "Your browser than uses DNS, a decentralized naming system, ..." actually correct? I happen to see this a lot and I am not sure if this is a spelling mistake when people want to write "then" or if it is actually intended.

It is a very common spelling mistake.

I wonder why? It seems to be common with native speakers.

I'm not native in English but, for me, it would seem to be nearly impossible to mix these two words even in a moment of carelessness. They mark greatly differing meanings and thus they practically live in different slots in my brain. Even a blind typo won't explain it because 'a' and 'e' are not too adjacent on a qwerty.

Re: IPFS, Again

#47

Post by davidgerard »

sprash wrote: post #44
pmlnr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was namecoin way before that, with .bit domains and failed to solve anything.

I never tried ENS but namecoin works flawlessly as intended. It is actually more reliable than classic DNS. It may have failed at adoption, but the problem of decentralizing DNS has been solved.

> It may have failed at adoption, but the problem ... has been solved.

I am unconvinced that a solution nobody uses counts as a solution to a problem anyone has.

Re: IPFS, Again

#48

Post by progval »

janandonly wrote: post #3

Who is going to defend the free internet agains Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? They are the very opposite of a free and open internet where everyone can "run a website" on her own machine. It pains me to see a great idea like the Interplanetary File System still not working. I had similar experiences with IPFS and yes, we do need a project like this, only without the broken incentive structure attached to it. Why a "Fi…

> Why a "Filecoin"? We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin.

Filecoin's promise is to be tightly coupled with file storage, to set up contracts that are automatically enforced by the network. Bitcoin does not do this.

I don't know much about it, but maybe Ethereum could be used to do that, though

Re: IPFS, Again

#49

Post by tinco »

bauerd wrote: post #40
codingslave wrote: post #8

This might sound a bit weird, but when I look at the employee base of protocol labs (the makers of IPFS), the most impressive employees are the business people. Multiple Harvard Business School graduates, tons of Stanford degrees. For the technical people, some are impressive, but no where near the stature of the business people. No distinguished ex-FAANG engineers, no principal engineers from notable companies, a fe…

Your argument is that IPFS would be a better product had they hired those distinguished ex-FAANG engineers instead of obscure developers? The article outlines mostly UX and product decision problems. It doesn't seem to me that their engineering teams are holding them back.

UX and product decisions for software tooling are usually made by engineering teams. Of course I'd also like to take offense to the ex-faang stigma but I think it's not unfair to assume having engineers with experience working on high quality high polish products would increase the chance of producing a high quality high polish product.

Re: IPFS, Again

#50

Post by davidgerard »

sprash wrote: post #19

A good alternative to IPFS that works today is magnet links and torrents. There are "youtube competitors" that offload the high bandwith requirements via webtorrents running in javascript. You can not host your full webpage with it but you can reduce bandwith costs drastically. A good alternative to DNS is namecoin. It already works flawlessly and I honestly wonder why it has not been adopted more widely.

I think if you're proposing something as a "good alternative", then being able to understand why it got near-zero adoption, and failed in the real world, is probably important.

I would say that Namecoin appears to solve a problem that nobody actually has in practice.

I know advocates are pushing Ethereum Name Service, which does the same thing - but again, what are the lessons learned from nobody bothering with Namecoin?

(Namecoin is interesting, as it was literally the first altcoin. It hadn't occurred to anyone to fork the Bitcoin code and make their own coin until then.)

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