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IPFS, Again

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Re: IPFS, Again

#151

Post by api »

Reelin wrote: post #150
api wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get what you're saying, but I still disagree.

NAT doesn't help privacy either. There are a million plus one ways to fingerprint or track a web browser without knowing anything about the end user's IP. A modern browser presents a ton of surface area. It's also quite easy to track by externally visible IP or IP prefix (e.g. /24 or /64 in IPv6) if you make certain nearly-always-valid assumptions about the timing and sequential nature of user behavior.

I think a lot of people just don't grasp how easy tracking actually is. Think of how obscure and sophisticated hardware-level attacks have become: Spectre, RAMBleed, etc. Now imagine the surface area presented by a browser. It can and does get that clever.

The only way to really prevent tracking is to use a sandboxed browser with strong anti-tracking features and redirect your traffic... or use a P2P decentralized system!

If we didn't have NAT, we'd probably have much more privacy-respecting P2P alternatives to the centralized web and we'd also have easy to use P2P systems for anonymizing requests by bouncing them off other peers. In other words without NAT our privacy tech would be better.

I'll be more accurate than saying NAT is Satan. NAT is a massive piece of technical debt. It's a "simple" hack that breaks something fundamental about the Internet, namely namespace unity. That in turn makes a ton of other stuff exponentially more difficult.

Re: IPFS, Again

#152

Post by Reelin »

grahamperich wrote: post #119
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…

Now scroll down to the Engineering section on the DFINITY team page (a team in the same space with similar deep pockets) https://dfinity.org/team

That looks really interesting, but apparently they are terrible at picking names. Their website talks about ICP (Internet Computer Protocol). Searching for this leads to the identically abbreviated (and apparently already well established) Internet Cache Protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Cache_Protocol).

Re: IPFS, Again

#153

Post by tmcw »

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.

This was a simple typo; I accidentally used a sound-alike. It's fixed in the post, thanks for noting it!

Re: IPFS, Again

#154

Post by DenseComet »

stefek99 wrote: post #121

Recently I was playing with IPFS: https://genesis.re/kleros-metaevidence-metahash/ Using another part of crypto ecosystem (Infura) It's still not straightforward. BTW... A few weeks ago I saw on HN an automated tool to publish static website on IPFS. It was pretty sleek...

Can you link the tool?

Re: IPFS, Again

#155

Post by willglynn »

asark wrote: post #114
ezoe wrote: 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…

IPFS also needlessly rolled their own TLS replacement:

https://github.com/ipfs/specs/issues/29

> I would add that if TLS can be used without all the X.509 nonsense, and with our own choice of pubkeys, including using different signing public keys (not the DHE keys) in the same conn, then we can consider breaking our "not TLS pls" stance.

TLS fit their requirements all along, they just… decided to reinvent it instead of reading about how to use it.

Re: IPFS, Again

#156

Post by zzzcpan »

api wrote: post #142
beders wrote: 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.…

Things aren't that bad. Hole punching can still work most of the time for broadband and you don't really need all that many nodes with routable IP addresses. Scale makes this problem even less of an issue. Mobile networks are somewhat problematic though, but they cannot be heavy nodes either way and have to be lightweight clients that piggy back from normal nodes.

Re: IPFS, Again

#157

Post by jasode »

marknadal wrote: post #149
dTal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>, and do NOT require any tokens.

You're looking at it from a pure technical perspective of pushing bytes around in a decentralized way.

What the folks pushing "tokens" are trying to solve is the game theory of financial incentives to store & serve those decentralized bytes. In contrast, things like Bittorrent/Beaker/webtorrent/etc depend on others' "altruism" to host and serve files.

Because altruism doesn't scale, that's why nobody wants to seed my 100 gigabytes of personal vacation photos. Sure, they'll be happy to seed & disseminate the latest cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop or a bluray rip of the latest Marvel Avengers movie. But my personal files are uninteresting to the current decentralized web.

(But I'm not claiming Filecoin actually solves the incentive puzzle. I'm merely pointing out that the "problem" Filecoin tries to solve is at a higher abstraction level (the economics) than webtorrent (the protocol).)

Re: IPFS, Again

#158

Post by blurbleblurble »

dboreham wrote: post #76
ezoe wrote: 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?

IPFS doesn't rely on DNS. Most Dat deployments do, however.

This strikes me as a little disingenuous. Neither IPFS nor DAT are inherently dependent on DNS. If you're referring to HTTP the gateways that lots of people use with both IPFS and DAT in order to host static sites, arguably that's because support for UDP and other useful p2p tools in the browser is experimental! But people still find both IPFS and DAT useful for hosting static files. (libdweb is really exciting by the way: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb)

From what I can tell, most "serious deployments" of DAT and IPFS are made by people directly using the loose underlying collections of libraries that implement each of them. These people often end up putting together application specific transport and discovery layers that work for their specific application.

Re: IPFS, Again

#159

Post by pushtheenvelope »

ElKrist wrote: post #139
skyfaller wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't support Ethereum as it uses proof-of-work, and while it is a different implementation than Bitcoin, proof-of-work is inherently energy-intensive / environmentally problematic. If blockchain technology were to become popular and widely used by ordinary people, its already worrying environmental impact would skyrocket, assuming the technology is capable of scaling at all. We need to bring the energy consumption…

Can someone give a proper counter-argument to this? I keep telling my friends hyped by bitcoin that I do not believe in its future as a currency for real daily exchanges because of this energy consumption problem. Is there any serious track to address this issue? Unlike most technologies, I do not see the traditional efficiency gains when the technology gets more mature. It seems inherent to proof-of-work and cannot…

the bitcoin viewpoint is that being backed by energy consumption is a Good Thing. Its harder to manipulate than Proof-Of-Stake or other alternative consensus protocols.

At a larger societal level, we should definitely be worried about tackling emissions for climate change. For this, very few people are advocating getting rid of energy consumption in our societies. Yes, in the short term, people recommend being mindful of the emissions impact of your lifestyle (e.g. a flight has a large carbon footprint) but in the longer scheme of humanity's development we'll always have greater and increasing energy needs.

With that in mind, a lot of focus has been on using non-emissions producing energy (solar, wind, nuclear, etc.) to mitigate climate change. Seen in this context, bitcoin is agnostic to the source of the energy, and its Proof-Of-Work protocol is fine.

Re: IPFS, Again

#160

Post by ForHackernews »

ca98am79 wrote: post #147
dTal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a ridiculous misunderstanding of value. Just because you waste valuable resources to produce something doesn't mean the thing you produce is now valuable. If I feed my dog millions of dollars worth of beluga caviar, it doesn't mean his dogshit is now worth millions.

To the degree that bitcoin is valuable today, it's because speculators think somebody else will pay them more for it in the future.

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