111–120 of 215 posts
The kings of marketing and buzz-words at it again trying to re-spin CDNs as their invention. IPFS doesn't solve persistence of data; doesn't solve churn in p2p systems; doesn't actually 'store' anything. Sounds cool though! Space and shit, some-thing, something 'decentralized' --hand waving-- 'space', umm, can I have money now? I'm doing it.
Typical "web3" though, solving problems nobody actually has.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cutti…
Yes, the actual transfer won't be fetching from multiple sources unless it's replicated.
The difference between location-addressing and content-addressing is that it enables the content from being fetched from anywhere, which has uses outside of space too, as many storage solutions has already discovered since long time ago (multiple decades).
> SSD to cache or replicate data for others if I can possibly avoid it. That will unnecessarily shorten the lifetime of the SSD
Correct me if I'm wrong, but SSD lifetime is based on writes, not on reads. So you should be OK with replicating already saved data, in that case?
> that is such a hypothetical situation that I have absolutely no idea why it needs a real-world demonstration
The whole "IPFS in space" is a "utopia goal" of sorts, but aiming for it gives us benefits today.
Personally, I'd love to see a move from location-addressing to content-addressing as I'm often in locations with spotty global-internet connection and really poor latency. Sometimes, websites refuse to even try to serve me data, as it takes really long time for packets to go between where I am, and the host I'm trying to reach, so they decide to cut the connection as tell me "sorry, timed out..."
If the web was already built with content-addressing in mind, my machine could automatically fetch the content from another machine on my network, my neighbor, a dynamic cache at the ISP or wherever, anyone could serve me that data instead of that particular node with that particular IP on the other side of the world. Sharing a YouTube video between two computers on the same network would just transfer bytes on the local network, instead of reaching out to the internet. The benefits of this should be fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with networking today.
Realistically, I don't think IPFS will be the technology that makes this possible in 10+ years, but that doesn't mean content-addressing itself is the reason why it isn't more widespread. Content-addressing been around for a long time already, and I'm sure even more and more people will realize its value over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Caches solve this placement problem just fine today and content addressing does not alleviate the placement problem at all. Being able to arbitrary place caches anywhere and let anyone serve the data, and you can trust you're getting the right data, is a huge benefit over location-addressing. Ignoring IPFS, content-addressing makes sense for so many things, which is what lots of storage/caching/CDN solutions have d…
> Being able to arbitrary place caches anywhere and let anyone serve the data This is the grift. The "libertarians" want to be able to host their CSAM, sorry, their "freedom materials" on everyone's servers in such a way that nobody can ever "silence their freedom" because it would mean silencing the cat gifs, too. Want to be "on the net"? Well, you absolutely have to agree to host anyone else's content without quest…
Besides, how on earth is your argument even relevant when we're talking about content-addressing as a whole, without involving IPFS at all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cutti…
Imagine shipping an IPFS node to Mars and being able to have content consistency
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cutti…
So I just want to point out that IPFS was fairly deliberately designed to have numerous, forward-compatible features that could be swapped out in the future : like https://multiformats.io/ and in particular https://multiformats.io/multiaddr/ .
In the IPFS community, there's always been a fairly heated discussion about which bit of the entire system should be stuck with the term IPFS. Like, if you took away the libp2p protocol, and just served CIDs over http, would it be IPFS? What if you took away CAR files (the merkle-tree file format used to define multi-item content)? What if you're a private IPFS network, with no shared nodes with the public network (like https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet ). What if you didn't use bitswap, the file transfer protocol (Filecoin doesn't use bitswap, and mostly doesn't interconnect with the main public IPFS network). What about if you didn't use a DHT to find providers of a CID. What if you're not using any of the "IPFS" software stack, but your implementation still uses bits and pieces of content-addressability as defined in the standard?
Interestingly, right now, there are a bunch of experiments going in all of these directions: I think it's fair to say that if you wanted to test out content-addressable networks across the solar system, they probably wouldn't be IPFS as it is now, but their nature could probably be described using the primitives the IPFS stack uses, and learning about what needs to change would give a useful direction to some part of the extended IPFS ecosystem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cutti…
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 same thing could be applied to space.
Do something weird, pump up the price.
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…
Also, even for a peer-to-peer network, you still need some way to discover the peers that actually have the data, so you need some kind of centralized infrastructure that can help coordinate. Ultimately whether you connect to a CDN or to the centralized P2P facilitator is not such a massive difference.
Also, given the way ISPs typically operate, you will probably have much better bandwidth downloading from a centralized server than from a generic other end-user.
This is why BitTorrent only really has two successfully deployed use cases:
1. Windows updates and similar, where machines can rely on broadcasts on a small LAN to coordinate without needing more complex infrastructure (doesn't scale beyond LAN)
2. "Piracy", where the major advantage is that it diffuses the blame for copyright infringement, instead of presenting a single large target that holds all of it.