Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

ipfs.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 337 posts

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#161

Post by noman-land »

acdha wrote: post #141
noman-land wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love IPFS. It's one of my favorite recent technologies, but I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. Decentralized tech doesn't work well until the network effects build up. IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands…

> think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. This interesting given your description: > IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands of people, and finding it and downloading it would be extremely fast. This idea hasn’t been…

IPFS is basically BitTorrent if all the torrents could share with each other. IPFS is as if each "torrent" is a single chunk of data instead of a siloed collection of stuff.

IPFS expands BitTorrent into a global filesystem.

You can mount IPFS on your filesystem and address files by pointing at local resources on your machine. So you could have an HTML file say ``. You can't do that with BitTorrent.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#162

Post by davidgerard »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62
adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #58

IPFS needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance? Right now it does none of those things well. The client chews through CPU and memory when seemingly doing nothing. If I try to download content, it is far slower than BitTorrent unless I go…

Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?

Saying "imagine if we said that about a technology that doesn't suck" doesn't make a technology that clearly sucks, not suck.

The Web was a hit because it was really obviously useful for real work from the moment of its creation. IPFS is BitTorrent with magnet: links, and the seeding problems that implies, and the rest is janky nonsense.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#163

Post by jayd16 »

Gigachad wrote: post #142
v_london wrote: post #139

Pretty interesting. A lot of people here are focusing on permanence, but for me the main difference on addressing by content vs by host name is the loss of authorship it opens up for the web. Since a research paper of essay is referred to by its hash, the owner effectively gives away all control of the work when it's first published. There will be no editing, no taking down unwanted work, and no real way to build an…

IPFS claims to solve this with their name service IPNS which can update to point to a new hash with a revised file. Where the original hash can be cached and used but users can refer to the NS version and get the latest version. But last I saw, the name on IPNS had to be frequently pushed by the original server or it would go away.

Seems like at that point it might be easier to just build a new http+ protocol that supports document signing and focuses on bringing caching back.

You could use all the current web/http/DNS infrastructure, and add certified/cacheable GET results.

Anyone could run their own proxy and cache what they see fit. Seems like an easier transition as it could be fully compatible with the current web.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#164

Post by davidgerard »

Gigachad wrote: post #142
v_london wrote: post #139

Pretty interesting. A lot of people here are focusing on permanence, but for me the main difference on addressing by content vs by host name is the loss of authorship it opens up for the web. Since a research paper of essay is referred to by its hash, the owner effectively gives away all control of the work when it's first published. There will be no editing, no taking down unwanted work, and no real way to build an…

IPFS claims to solve this with their name service IPNS which can update to point to a new hash with a revised file. Where the original hash can be cached and used but users can refer to the NS version and get the latest version. But last I saw, the name on IPNS had to be frequently pushed by the original server or it would go away.

IPNS doesn't work. Whenever you press them on this point, they'll admit it doesn't work.

But IPFS has the crypto problem of conflating the stuff that works now with the stuff that's hypothetical in its marketing, and not admitting that the latter is janky nonsense that doesn't bloody work.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#165

Post by davidgerard »

CharlesW wrote: post #23

The author claims that IPFS enables a "permanent web" and eliminates 404-like experiences. How does IPFS guarantee that all published content will be available forever? (In my beginner-level knowledge of IPFS, this is the first I've heard that claim. It seems absurd.)

It absolutely guarantees nothing of the sort.

A big problem in the NFT space of late is that OpenSea sells NFTs that link to an IPFS URL, then doesn't bother seeding the image after it's sold - so a pile of NFT images no longer exist anywhere on the IPFS.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdj79/peoples-expensive-nft...

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#166

Post by Semiapies »

CharlesW wrote: post #23

The author claims that IPFS enables a "permanent web" and eliminates 404-like experiences. How does IPFS guarantee that all published content will be available forever? (In my beginner-level knowledge of IPFS, this is the first I've heard that claim. It seems absurd.)

It's the fundamental lie of IPFS. IPFS people will jump in and say that it's not a lie, what they're actually saying is yadda yadda, but then they turn around and say exactly that five minutes later. It's the motte-and-bailey ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy ) of IPFS.

In a world of finite storage, nobody's going to keep up a copy of everything. Nobody will have a copy of most things. Even if IPFS worked acceptably, even if it worked as very narrowly promised, plenty of stuff would fall off the web. At best, we'd see somewhat fewer temporary disruptions of very currently popular content.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#169

Post by nephanth »

saurik wrote: post #117
noman-land wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love IPFS. It's one of my favorite recent technologies, but I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. Decentralized tech doesn't work well until the network effects build up. IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands…

> If millions of people were using IPFS... ...then IPFS would just get even slower and use even more resources to manage the index and find content as I am pretty sure the DHT they are using doesn't scale the way you seem to think it does.

Why ? iirc the time I studied them, DHTs scale pretty well (like log(size of the network) complexity for everything).

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#170

Post by Gigachad »

davidgerard wrote: post #164
Gigachad wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS claims to solve this with their name service IPNS which can update to point to a new hash with a revised file. Where the original hash can be cached and used but users can refer to the NS version and get the latest version. But last I saw, the name on IPNS had to be frequently pushed by the original server or it would go away.

IPNS doesn't work. Whenever you press them on this point, they'll admit it doesn't work. But IPFS has the crypto problem of conflating the stuff that works now with the stuff that's hypothetical in its marketing, and not admitting that the latter is janky nonsense that doesn't bloody work.

Yeah this is what I saw 4 years ago. Shame it still isn't working. Insane how crypto projects spend all this effort on flashy landing pages, marketing, hype. But if you actually try to use the product, you find out it just doesn't actually work.
Post reply on HN