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IPFS, Again

macwright.org

141–150 of 227 posts

Re: IPFS, Again

#141
I agree that IPNS is pretty unusable (do names still expire after 1 day?).

Last I saw, the IPFS devs seemed to be pretty excited by a pub/sub mechanism they were building into the system; potentially to replace the workings of IPNS.

Is that a stable or useful alternative for indexing changing content like a blog? How decentralised is the pub/sub (i.e. do new subscribers need to contact the publisher, or are messages persisted for a time in the network)?

Re: IPFS, Again

#142
post #64

Anyone remember the P2P craze of the early 2000s'? Or was it late 90s? What's left over from that? Freenet? What I'm always wondering about: Someone needs to foot the server/bandwidth bills. Who? If you run a Pi on your home network and serve requests with your 5MB/s upload: That's fine. More power to you. We need more of that. (and in that case, you are paying your ISP) But the transformation envisioned and the band…

The main barrier to P2P isn't cost or bandwidth or algorithms. The main barrier is NAT. As long as IPv4 with P2P-unfriendly symmetric NAT is the dominant way of accessing the network, P2P will remain hard and niche.

One ugly hack to get around one problem (IPv4 address scarcity) has single-handedly transformed the structure of the Internet from a mesh to a top-down monopoly-driven medium. NAT is like literally Satan.

It wouldn't be quite as evil if it weren't so often symmetric, but for some odd reason symmetric is what many vendors implement. I can't for the life of me understand why symmetric NAT exists when the same scalability can be achieved with port restricted cone NAT that falls back to symmetric-like behavior if port preservation is not possible due to resource exhaustion. That would yield working P2P >90% of the time instead of <5% of the time.

Re: IPFS, Again

#143
post #69

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. Maybe the "proof" section of the FAQ will explain the difference: https://filecoin.io/faqs#what-s-the-difference-between-all-t... If you've already read that FAQ and still disagree, are you saying you can embed the incentives to store terabytes of others' data and also the proof of that storage into existing Bitcoin blocks? (I'…

In fact, Bitcoin's blockchain is not the right data structure for something like this.

Re: IPFS, Again

#144
post #114
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is both likely to fail. NIH syndrome is strong with both cases. For efficient file transfer protocol between peers, Bittorrent protocol have multiple independent implementations that is working right now. They should build on top of that. Instead, both DAT and IPFS try to implement their own protocol with dubious additional features. For IPFS, it even relies on traditional DNS. What are they thinking?

> NIH syndrome is strong with both cases. Seriously. IPFS decided the standard URL format wasn't good enough so invented something worse, which was pretty funny/sad. I never saw reasons for it that made any sense. See: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/issues/227 [EDIT] here's the original, deeply "LOLWUT?" justification for it, quoted in this comment on another issue. Other justifications were given but this was the moti…

Their scheme as described in #227 would make sense, if they were designing IPFS as a service for Plan 9.

Re: IPFS, Again

#145
IPFS is a victim of the great plague of modern software development: over-engineering. They've spent far too much time coding and far too little time thinking of ways to avoid coding by simplifying their algorithms and protocols and most importantly by carefully defining and scoping their problem.

The massive amount of cryptocurrency funny money they raised makes this problem worse, not better. Lots of money leads to too many cooks in the kitchen. Large organizations require immense discipline to avoid scope creep and runaway complexity growth. They need someone to say "no!" 95% of the time and relentlessly exterminate features and not allow things to be released unless they are ready and actually solve a problem.

Most large organizations don't have this, which is why most "enterprise" software is a mass of twine and chewing gum. In the case of enterprise over-engineered bloatware you usually have some corporate requirement forcing its use. No corporate requirement forces IPFS or any of Protocol Labs' other sprawling mega-projects to be used, so nobody is going to use them.

Re: IPFS, Again

#147
post #80

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…

Filecoin isn't a currency. It's a token that proves "I replicated x amount of data, y reliably, for z amount of time", and (protocol-wise) can be exchanged for file storage services only. The market decides how much file storage is actually worth , by arbitrage. The same principle goes for Namecoin, incidentally. The token embodies the value of the resource. I actually think this kind of thing is a much more stable b…

It isn't valuable because "we" say so (whoever "we" is). One reason it is valuable is because millions of dollars of energy resource is put into it to ensure that it is decentralized

Re: IPFS, Again

#148
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the cost that's preventing what you mentioned. It's the ISPs which don't allow incoming traffic and have symmetric NATs all over there network. IPV6 is here and we should have gotten rid of NAT long ago but there's no incentive for corporations or ISPs so we are stuck here.

That's true as well. ISPs have no interest allowing end users to host anything meaningful.

well it's against the terms of service (though if you have no other ISP options, it's more like terms of slavery)

Re: IPFS, Again

#149
post #80

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…

Filecoin isn't a currency. It's a token that proves "I replicated x amount of data, y reliably, for z amount of time", and (protocol-wise) can be exchanged for file storage services only. The market decides how much file storage is actually worth , by arbitrage. The same principle goes for Namecoin, incidentally. The token embodies the value of the resource. I actually think this kind of thing is a much more stable b…

We don't need tokens.

We need P2P stuff that works.

Like https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent and https://github.com/amark/gun

They're both run in production, at scale (millions of users), and do NOT require any tokens.

Re: IPFS, Again

#150
post #142
post #64

Anyone remember the P2P craze of the early 2000s'? Or was it late 90s? What's left over from that? Freenet? What I'm always wondering about: Someone needs to foot the server/bandwidth bills. Who? If you run a Pi on your home network and serve requests with your 5MB/s upload: That's fine. More power to you. We need more of that. (and in that case, you are paying your ISP) But the transformation envisioned and the band…

The main barrier to P2P isn't cost or bandwidth or algorithms. The main barrier is NAT. As long as IPv4 with P2P-unfriendly symmetric NAT is the dominant way of accessing the network, P2P will remain hard and niche. One ugly hack to get around one problem (IPv4 address scarcity) has single-handedly transformed the structure of the Internet from a mesh to a top-down monopoly-driven medium. NAT is like literally Satan.…

> NAT is like literally Satan.

NAT is merely a tool. Using it to restrict user activity is bad. Using it on your home network to preserve your privacy (ie how many devices you have and what each is doing) is good. There are also other use cases (both good and bad) that I'm omitting here.

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