HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

Skynet is a decentralized network with lookup times that have a p50 TTFB of under 200ms. It achieves this by looking things up directly on hosts rather than routing through a DHT. There's a bit of overhead to accomplish this (around 200kb of extra bandwidth per lookup), but for a smooth web experience that tradeoff is more than worthwhile.

I'm not sure why everyone assumes that bittorrent was about currency. It wasn't, and that was its superpower. No matter how much you were able to contribute, you were able to strengthen its system, redundancy and availability.

The only problem bittorrent had in practice was a legal one that finally led to a problem of availability of discovery.

All that filecoin hype will lead to only one thing, and one thing only: the people that are popular will decide what files are worth to the system, and the masses will simply dump everything else and forget about it.

Add an inflation for every modification of any file in the whole system, and you have a perfect way to destroy real incentives.

I don't believe in most web3 projects because they always think it's about trading files with each other. It is not. Discovery and access to data should not be limited by your financial capability to buy things. The internet exploded because people got access to vast amounts of knowledge, for basically free compared to before.

Like, if I’m talking to someone over some chat setup which doesn’t have a built in “send this file directly to this person” feature, it would be nice to be able to say, give them a multihash of the file and my external ipv6 address (+ port? I’m not quite sure how routing works), and have them request the file from my computer.

Now, you might say “but how does that help with the situation where a bunch of people in a room want the same file from a distant location?”.

And, maybe it doesn’t as much? But I think if e.g. people on a local network had theirs try first if the local network already had it, and then check the given external address, that that could work?

I've just pinned a 12MiB file filled with random bytes on one of my servers (`dd if=/dev/urandom of=test.dat bs=1M count=12; ipfs add test.dat; ipfs pin `). The server has a 50mbps uplink, so transferring the file to my laptop should take about two seconds.

Dumping this blog's contents over IPFS takes the server about 3 seconds (first time load) so the network seems to be in working order, at least when downloading data. `ipfs swarm peers` lists about 800 known peers. On the server itself, `ipfs cat /ipfs/redacted > /tmp/test.dat` runs in about a second, which is all perfectly acceptable overhead for a transfer that'll take two to three seconds anyway.

On my laptop, I've tried to get the file but I just cancelled it after waiting for 16 minutes. Halfway throughout the wait, I've tried opening the file through the ipfs.io proxy, which finally gave me the file after a few minutes, but no such luck yet if I retry the ipfs command.

I don't know if it's the random file, the size, or something different, but if I'm launching a blog or publishing documents on IPFS, visitors should not be expected to wait five to ten minutes for the data to load. "After the first twenty visitors it'll get faster" is not a solution to this problem, because there won't be twenty visitors to help the network cache my content.

Maybe I'm expecting too much here; maybe the files shouldn't be expected to be available within half an hour, or before Cloudflare caches it. Maybe there's something wrong with my laptop's setup (I haven't done any port forwarding and I'm behind a firewall). Either way, if I follow the manual but can still buy a domain, set up DNS and hosting on my VPS and send a link to a friend faster than I can get the file through P2P, I don't think IPFS will ever get off the ground. Fifteen minutes is an awful lot of time for a data transfer these days!

Edit: actually, now it seems ipfs.io and cloudflare have picked up the file in their caches. Data transfer is up to normal speed now. If you want to try to replicate my experiment, I've just uploaded a new test file to /ipfs/QmbBD872kjfoutAmTKFCxTCApw9LBB9qxxRyXpEGYzsqMH.

Edit 2: I realized that by saying I downloaded the file and that the file is random, I just announced my personal IP address to the world through the IPFS hash, so I removed it. That was pretty dumb of me, and also a pretty clear problem of IPFS in my book.