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IPFS, Again

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Re: IPFS, Again

#51

Just today I was looking into IPFS vs DAT, does anybody have any insights about the similarities/differences other than the ones listed here [1]? From far away, DAT looks smaller and better documented (perhaps less ambitious, too?) Apparently the best IPFS overview is the 2015 paper [2] which looks pretty daunting and does not seem to cover any practical considerations. 1: https://docs.datproject.org/docs/faq#how-is-…

Don't forget Swarm. https://swarm.ethereum.org/

So Swarm vs DAT vs IPFS.

Re: IPFS, Again

#52
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anecdotally, from what I've seen in various languages, native speakers do seem to make more mistakes that are tied to spelling/pronunciation (than, then, their they're in English, aller, allé in French) whereas non-native speakers make more grammar mistakes (for example I tend to put articles at wrong places or forget them in both English and French, but the spelling mistakes are absolutely jarring).

Re: IPFS, Again

#53
IPFS looks good on paper. In practice my experience wasn't very good. ZeroNet, on the other hand, feels like the future for DWeb and that's the direction I'm personally headed. What about you?

Re: IPFS, Again

#54

I work for a cryptocurrency company as a software engineer and I definitely agree that a lot of projects backed by crypto funds tend to over promise and under deliver. It's clear that those who control the funds aren't always the best at judging tech talent. Big tech corporations have had years to settle down and build a reputation to attract top talent. Crypto companies tend to attract greed over talent and it shows…

I've seen this argument before and tend to disagree. There is certainly greed, but I think the larger problem is that crypto doesn't have users.

I don't think it's particularly novel in 2019 to say that a successful app is built off of the feedback of its users. Any app, regardless of intentions or engineering prowess, is going to struggle if it doesn't have a sizeable user base providing feedback (and devs who listen to that feedback).

Re: IPFS, Again

#55
I don't think this is ultimately an IFPS problem. How I've always understood IPFS is the protocol being a decentralized blob storage. You would use it in place of a CDN, to share files, or other building blocks for something higher-level. This is in contrast to browsing where there are established semantics on addressing absolute and relative URIs, and clustering relevant content under hierarchical addresses in the URI path.

The author insisted on doing this on bare IPFS but I think this is (vaguely) analogous to building a website based on IP addresses and port numbers, not URIs. To the point: the semantics just aren't there.

I could imagine an IPFS based web site being built with a local URI resolution map as part of the bundle of objects that is the web page. The sub pages would refer to symbolic URIs like before but the browser would also download a site map that links URIs to actual hashes of the latest revision, and resolve references like "foo/bar.html" or "/root/foo.html" based on the map. Or a proxy could do this transparently, translating URI requests to hashes and fetching data directly from IPFS, then serving it back to the browser as if it was downloaded from "/root/foo.html" instead of "ipfs://50ad443758222efea0286f3a94db2c25".

The top-level entry to the web page would basically be this URI resolution map which, as content-addressable, would effectively refer to a single revision of the web page. This could be implemented as a separate URI scheme, like ipfs-uri://bb9f6cbcc28829b57dd25102f67b9d37/main/news.html where ipfs://bb9f6cbcc28829b57dd25102f67b9d37 would point to the URI map and the URI handler would resolve the relative URIs such as /main/news.html based on the offered mappings.

But all this does require extra lifting from the browser or a proxy. I don't think IPFS as designed is feasible to replace something like HTTP which was explicitly meant to work with URIs.

Re: IPFS, Again

#56
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a native English speaker, words in the language appear to be stored against sound rather than anything else. When trying to write clear English to be read, I am reading it to myself as I write to ensure that it reads clearly, and so it's more an audio process, allowing for confusion of words that sound similar.

I would guess that those who have learned the language have a more logical, grammar based structure and write more deliberately.

Re: IPFS, Again

#57
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have not been hurt enough by centralized DNS and CA certification yet. As soon as that happens the masses will adopt the decentralized version in droves.

It might just never happen. Until then the "worse is better" rule applies.

I have used ncdns in conjunction with dnsmasq in the past and I am happy that there is a solution out there that works just in case the other fails.

Re: IPFS, Again

#58
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think because in some English dialects "than" and "then" sound very similar and many people (myself included) write by basically transcribing their internal monologue.

Re: IPFS, Again

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The funny thing about every comment which positively mentions Nano is the writer invariably has zero idea what tradeoffs are made in the consensus protocol to make it faster. There are no free lunches in distributed systems which must contend with byzantine failures.

Re: IPFS, Again

#60

Just today I was looking into IPFS vs DAT, does anybody have any insights about the similarities/differences other than the ones listed here [1]? From far away, DAT looks smaller and better documented (perhaps less ambitious, too?) Apparently the best IPFS overview is the 2015 paper [2] which looks pretty daunting and does not seem to cover any practical considerations. 1: https://docs.datproject.org/docs/faq#how-is-…

There's also Arweave, which is targeted on hosting web sites in a decentralized way.

- https://www.arweave.org/ - https://github.com/ArweaveTeam/arweave

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