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Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

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Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#81
post #80
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I missed something obvious, but does the IPFS project itself say anywhere that it does "file preservation"? The only thing I can find from official resources is documentation saying IPFS does not do that at all. Example from https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/what-is-ipfs/#what-ipfs-isn-... > What IPFS isn't > IPFS is not ... A storage provider: While there are storage providers built with IPFS support (typically…

The only times I've seen IPFS being brought up in the interned discussions was by people who claimed that their token startup will guarantee preservation of some data via IPFS. This was also a usual argument in comparisons to commercial cloud storage. Reading your link I don't quite understand how come they claim IPFS is both a protocol AND a network of nodes AND not a storage. For example TCP is a protocol, but TCP…

> The only times I've seen IPFS being brought up in the interned discussions was by people who claimed that their token startup

Sounds like those people either don't understand what they're saying, or they're mindlessly shilling for Filecoin. Both are obviously shitty, but I don't think it's fair to point the team behind IPFS in a bad light because of what others say about it.

> I don't quite understand how come they claim IPFS is both a protocol AND a network of nodes AND not a storage

IPFS is a protocol, IPFS is also the name of the network. IPFS doesn't automatically distribute data, hence it's not "storage", but a protocol for doing storage.

In the analogy to TCP, TCP/http are the most common protocols, and the most common network is what we call "Internet". Initially, there was many competing networks, until eventually The Internet overtook all the other networks and essentially "won".

(edit: again, gross over-simplification about the history the internet and more, hopefully won't be too misleading. Better overview can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet)

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#82

Well the caching aspect of IPFS is useful for space, the transport protocols are way too chatty and latency sensitive for real usage.

The too chatty protocol is bitswap. Because the merkle-tree is not coupled to the protocol, they developped their own custom protocol on top of UDP for communication.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#83
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torrents with extra steps, eh?

It's basically the same idea as magnet links, so you could say it's torrents with the same steps.

More specifically, I think it’s basically the same idea as trackerless magnet links where you find peers for your file via a DHT. In fact, the Mainline DHT used by most BitTorrent clients is apparently very similar to the DHT used by IPFS. They are both Kademlia implementations.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is Storj and Sia. It raises the question, though: I can pay Storj S3 with STORJ tokens, and I can also pay for renterd space with Sia tokens, and I can also pay for IPFS with Filecoin, and all of them still work with good old credit cards. What "intrinsic" value is there for any of these tokens, if they can only be used on their own internal economies? And before the "but permissionless, so I can pay with crypto!"…

I’ve earned Storj for years by renting excess hard drive space to store other people’s files. Having a native currency lets you innovate in some unique ways. Microtransactions are not practical with credit cards and other traditional settlement methods. The reasons not to use something like DAI are fundraising (unfortunately - crypto VCs really like seeing a token), network bloat/decentralization, and leadership risk…

I also run my own Storj node. It took at least one year to pay back the hard drive. Now that they are cutting down the payout for hosting, I am receiving barely enough to justify the power bill.

No one cares about microtransactions, and I'm yet to see a customer who likes a product or service but refuses to make a pre-payment of $10.

None of the reasons you mentioned for a token are beneficial to the end user.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#85
post #38

I'm still a little lost. Could someone more knowledgeable than me explain how operations in space would benefit from a public content-addressable filesystem? This seems like the kind of application that works best when bandwidth and storage are cheap, and I would have assumed that that, in space, both are about as far from cheap as you can get.

The internet traditionally uses location-addressing. A DNS name pointing to a IP which has a specific location your computer tries to reach in order to fetch the content. This means that particular node needs to respond to you, and the bandwidth is depending on the bandwidth available on the particular path to that specific node. Instead, IPFS uses content-addressing, where the content is hashed and given a ID based…

Caches solve this placement problem just fine today and content addressing does not alleviate the placement problem at all.

Reality is the space thing is just part of the usual crypto grift narrative building.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#86

I'm still a little lost. Could someone more knowledgeable than me explain how operations in space would benefit from a public content-addressable filesystem? This seems like the kind of application that works best when bandwidth and storage are cheap, and I would have assumed that that, in space, both are about as far from cheap as you can get.

I think the idea behind content addressable databases like this is that they are supposed to be permanent. Putting it out into space may be a way of saying "its never going down".

It’s only not going down if the content is actually present in such nodes. It’s not.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#87
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is Storj and Sia. It raises the question, though: I can pay Storj S3 with STORJ tokens, and I can also pay for renterd space with Sia tokens, and I can also pay for IPFS with Filecoin, and all of them still work with good old credit cards. What "intrinsic" value is there for any of these tokens, if they can only be used on their own internal economies? And before the "but permissionless, so I can pay with crypto!"…

I guess if you are inside the crypto ecosystem, it's easier to pay nodes via tokens.

It's not. They pay out via zksync (layer 2 system) to avoid fees, but they only accept payment in the main chain.

So if you want to cash out or use the tokens you receive, you need to eat the fees. It's ridiculous and a clear mechanism for them to restrict the circulating supply.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is Storj and Sia. It raises the question, though: I can pay Storj S3 with STORJ tokens, and I can also pay for renterd space with Sia tokens, and I can also pay for IPFS with Filecoin, and all of them still work with good old credit cards. What "intrinsic" value is there for any of these tokens, if they can only be used on their own internal economies? And before the "but permissionless, so I can pay with crypto!"…

I’ve earned Storj for years by renting excess hard drive space to store other people’s files. Having a native currency lets you innovate in some unique ways. Microtransactions are not practical with credit cards and other traditional settlement methods. The reasons not to use something like DAI are fundraising (unfortunately - crypto VCs really like seeing a token), network bloat/decentralization, and leadership risk…

> I’ve earned Storj for years

That makes sense, but then what can you do with Storj?

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#89
post #23

Well the caching aspect of IPFS is useful for space, the transport protocols are way too chatty and latency sensitive for real usage.

Isn't the QUIC transport the default since v0.6.0? Compared to TCP, it's much better suited for satellite communications.

Quic is not suited for satellite communications. There are good custom protocols though that are FEC heavy.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#90
post #38

I'm still a little lost. Could someone more knowledgeable than me explain how operations in space would benefit from a public content-addressable filesystem? This seems like the kind of application that works best when bandwidth and storage are cheap, and I would have assumed that that, in space, both are about as far from cheap as you can get.

The internet traditionally uses location-addressing. A DNS name pointing to a IP which has a specific location your computer tries to reach in order to fetch the content. This means that particular node needs to respond to you, and the bandwidth is depending on the bandwidth available on the particular path to that specific node. Instead, IPFS uses content-addressing, where the content is hashed and given a ID based…

OK. But, going back to my comment about cheap. This claim:

> The benefit of this is that you can fetch the data from anywhere

Only works if the data I want is being replicated in many locations. But storage in spacecraft is presumably a tightly constrained resource, due to the need to use technology that's space-hardened and has an extremely good reliability record, and is therefore probably far from being both cutting edge and high density. JWST, for example, only has 68GB of storage despite being an instrument for taking high resolution photographs.

I would guess that that creates a situation that is very far from the one content-addressable storage is trying to solve. The goal isn't on-demand access to arbitrary files that are just sitting around in long term storage, because I'm guessing that, in space, there is effectively no long-term storage of data files in the first place. Instead, what you're looking to do is to get the data off of the spacecraft and down to earth as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then delete it from the spacecraft's storage so that you can make room to do more cool space stuff.

And I also don't want to be using my spacecraft's SSD to cache or replicate data for others if I can possibly avoid it. That will unnecessarily shorten the lifetime of the SSD, and, by extension, the piece of hardware that I just spent millions or perhaps even billions of dollars to build and launch into space.

And I just can't follow you as far as

> imagine being on the moon and requesting some website

because, right here right now, that is such a hypothetical situation that I have absolutely no idea why it needs a real-world demonstration of proof of concept using currently-available technology. Let's wait to see if browsing the Web from the moon leaves the domain of science fiction and becomes science reality first, so that then we can benefit from whatever technology exists in that future when we're solving the problem.

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