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IPFS, Again

macwright.org

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Re: IPFS, Again

#161

Post by Reelin »

api wrote: post #151
Reelin wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> NAT is a massive piece of technical debt.

Well at the ISP level, yes, absolutely!

Regarding privacy, your response seems very focused on web browsing. I agree that NAT plays no role there - it's at a lower level. I was referring only to the potential for masking devices - with NAT, there's no way to tell how many (or how few) devices are producing a given stream of traffic. To the extent possible, I'd rather external observers (particularly my ISP) not be able to tell what's going on inside my network or how it's configured.

In case this isn't making sense, imagine a scenario in which your ISP equates simultaneously active IP addresses to number of active devices and then adopts a fee structure based on this. Or perhaps just tries to profile the types of devices that are active on your network in order to sell that data to third parties. For example, identifying how many Alexas or smart locks or whatevers that you have, correlating that with how many devices are streaming or browsing, correlating this with customer demographics, and so on.

NAT is a useful tool for engaging in namespace shenanigans - consider NAT-based load balancing, for example. It can also be used for ill, and I agree that the current state of affairs is unfortunate.

Re: IPFS, Again

#162

Post by marknadal »

jasode wrote: post #157
marknadal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ,…

I agree, the problem is that Bitcoin and Filecoin (per author's IPFS scaling issues) do NOT scale though.

You must solve the technical scaling problem first, then sure, heck, add tokens if you dandy.

WebTorrent/GUN/etc. do scale. Add economics to that.

Preferably, add something that is time-scarce so people do not have to lose money (they don't pay FB or Google! If they have to pay Filecoin, they'll still choose free FB), something like BAT or Pirate Booty ( https://hackernoon.com/hollywood-crypto-behavioral-economics... ).

Re: IPFS, Again

#163

Post by api »

Reelin wrote: post #161
api wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> NAT is a massive piece of technical debt. Well at the ISP level, yes, absolutely! Regarding privacy, your response seems very focused on web browsing. I agree that NAT plays no role there - it's at a lower level. I was referring only to the potential for masking devices - with NAT, there's no way to tell how many (or how few) devices are producing a given stream of traffic. To the extent possible, I'd rather extern…

There are cases where NAT can be used beneficially but those are probably less than 10% of NAT usage. Most NAT usage is to get around IPv4 address shortages. Symmetric NAT is just pointless.

I also still think you're not fully enlightened as to just how easy tracking can be. It's not just web browsers. Every single distinguishable characteristic of a client forms one bit in a hash that can be used to track it, and thus distinguishing precision is 2^N where N is the number of bits of information that can be gathered.

Your IPv4 /24 already provides 24 almost always unique bits, so that's a good start for any tracker. Now start correlating /24's over time using clustering algorithms. Now start TCP fingerprinting, keeping track of pinned certs, measuring anything and everything that can be measured about a client. Pretty soon you're up to something like 32 bits which is one in four billion.

I use web browsers as an example because they're just embarrassingly easy to fingerprint.

Re: IPFS, Again

#164

Post by drngdds »

cryptica wrote: post #27

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…

Are there any ICO-backed projects that didn't overpromise and underdeliver (or not deliver at all)?

Re: IPFS, Again

#165

Post by ghoulfarmer »

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 wiki has a number of counter-arguments https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_mining_is_a_waste_o...

The future for ethereum is proof-of-stake. This project is called Casper and will be in Ethereum 2.0. For Bitcoin most transactions will be off-loaded to layer-2 networks but PoW will remain on the main chain.

Re: IPFS, Again

#166

Post by acdha »

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…

> We already have a tested and working native internet currency: bitcoin.

Bitcoin manages low 6 figure transactions per day, using as much energy as the entire country of New Zealand to do so. That’s far from internet scale (or even “single Raspberry Pi”-scale) and, because it was designed around gold bug economics, the protocol says it can never improve because the whole point was to scale the overhead as a function of network size.

Fundamentally, the reason why none of these have worked comes down to economics: if you’re storing things, you want provable access times and reliability but the costs of doing so in a decentralized system are much higher than in a centralized model because you need more copies to balance out the lack of trust. That also hurts on the other side of this: if you’re considering hosting, you need to charge more to cover your risk of getting involved in legal proceedings and there’s a fairly high threshold where that risk just isn’t worth it.

Re: IPFS, Again

#167

Post by blurbleblurble »

jasode wrote: post #157
marknadal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ,…

> altruism doesn't scale

Incentives don't exist on a one dimensional scale from pure greed to pure altruism.

People have lots of contextually dependent reasons for storing or sharing information. Those reasons are dynamic and super diverse.

In your case, why would you need lots of people to seed your 100 GB of personal vacation photos? You can seed them just fine! But don't use bittorrent, use the right tool for the job...

As a matter of fact, for the past 4 years I've been using btsync/resilio/syncthing to backup my personal media across different devices, as well as 70GB of audio projects. It's been working great.

That seems like a relatively small scale. And I'll bet some of those photos would be interesting enough to family and friends that they'd seed them.

From my naive perspective, the information itself is much more raw of a "currency" than any abstract economy built on top of it. Its "value" is determined by its relevance to one or many people, and p2p sharing, I believe, has the ability to accommodate this across many scales.

Why did public trackers fail? It wasn't because people didn't want to seed the content, it's because seeding the content became legally dangerous (and the trackers got shut down). To me, that's not a failure of "altruism", it's a failure caused by greed and an inability of industry to adapt.

And also by the reality that the tools are prototype level. Bittorrent and bitcoin are two incredible examples of applied cryptography and network science. They've showed us what's possible, but they're only the tip of the iceberg.

For many applications, lack of commodification is a feature, not a bug. What's holding us back is that the tools aren't built yet, but that's a work in progress!

Re: IPFS, Again

#168

Post by ukd1 »

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)

Also, why filecoin -at all- when siacoin exists and works already. Filecoin is vaporware.

Re: IPFS, Again

#169

Post by ukd1 »

progval wrote: post #48
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

Or you could just use siacoin, which already does this for storage

Re: IPFS, Again

#170

Post by Reelin »

api wrote: post #163
Reelin wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NAT is a massive piece of technical debt. Well at the ISP level, yes, absolutely! Regarding privacy, your response seems very focused on web browsing. I agree that NAT plays no role there - it's at a lower level. I was referring only to the potential for masking devices - with NAT, there's no way to tell how many (or how few) devices are producing a given stream of traffic. To the extent possible, I'd rather extern…

There are cases where NAT can be used beneficially but those are probably less than 10% of NAT usage. Most NAT usage is to get around IPv4 address shortages. Symmetric NAT is just pointless. I also still think you're not fully enlightened as to just how easy tracking can be. It's not just web browsers. Every single distinguishable characteristic of a client forms one bit in a hash that can be used to track it, and th…

> Symmetric NAT is just pointless.

Fair enough, I don't know enough about usage of different NAT types to debate such things (and never intended to).

Regarding tracking, I'm still not sure that we're talking about the same thing here. Are you saying that fingerprinting could be used to accurately extract per-device data from the aggregated stream? That is, if an entire network is hosted behind a single external address via NAT, are you suggesting that the carrier could reconstruct the separate fingerprints from the aggregate data stream that they have access to?

If so, that would be news to me. Obviously they can make some educated guesses (a single device probably isn't originating simultaneous Netflix and YouTube video streams), but I'm assuming that aggregated (TLS encrypted) data streams are going to be fairly difficult for an external observer to tease apart.

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