Live data from Hacker News

Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

fil.org

181–190 of 215 posts

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has it? I have never seen anybody using IPFS in the wild Every time someone downloads a book from a shadow library like Library Genesis, it's through IPFS most of the time, often via an IPFS gateway such as Cloudflare's IPFS gateway, so you don't even notice it's using IPFS. These shadow libraries have millions of users per day, especially academics.

I’ve recently observed that both IPFS and the Cloudflare gateways are extremely unreliable on Libgen.

100%, and same for Standard Template Construct. There are basically no reliable IPFS gateways with book or paper content. They all get struck from the more reliable gateways immediately.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#182
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have fun dying on that hill. 30 years ago you would have been saying the internet is worthless.

Crypto isn't internet. At best, crypto is Juicero

Within 20 years Ethereum will be used as a global coordination and settlement layer, and is well on its way to achieving that.

But whatever helps you sleep better at night.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn it back into storage, and you can sell it to people that want storage. I feel like that's good enough to establish value.

But is there any other value than storage? If I have excess storage to rent to people, I get coins I can use to rent storage?

You can sell it for cash money.

The important thing is not that coins can be exchanged for a product or service that you want, it's that they can be exchanged for a product or service that many people want. And you want that trade to be the basis of the price, rather than speculation.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS and distributed filesystems have nothing to do with blockchains.

IPFS is entwined with (and pretty much 100% backed by) Filecoin, which is a blockchain. Introducing a point of incompatibility would be a nonstarter.

Nothing is "entwined". I can download kubo and run it without even knowing what Filecoin is. In fact, every user of Brave browser does it. Same thing for projects like OrbitDB. Same thing for customers of Pinata.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it should use the fact that any file A can be written as the XOR of two files B and C, where B and C look like complete noise. If you only host B and another person only hosts C, then there can be no copyright infringements, while you can still reconstruct A by simply XORing the other files together. Of course at the expense of having to store and transfer twice the amount of data.

This is engineer logic. This kind of thing would never fly in court. If you want an example, go back and look at what happened to Aereo back in 2014. They came up with a clever hack to work around broadcast TV copyright. It went to the U.S. Supreme Court and got shot down.

I see it pretty differently.

I mean, the XOR thing is a bad idea, because obviously at least one of those files is violating copyright. Trying to feign innocence is not engineer logic, it's failed logic.

But Aereo I'm still mad about. They saw that distribution is what cable companies have to pay lots of money for, so they removed distribution. It should have been fine.

The effect of the decision is that it's legal for a person to set up a remote antenna for personal use, but it's a copyright infringement to pay a company to set it up for you. Or, perhaps, that it's possible to pay a company to do so but only if it's your idea as a one-off. Either way, that doesn't make any sense as a copyright issue.

And after the supreme court decision, they tried to pivot to legally being a cable service... only to get denied recognition as one!

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is there any other value than storage? If I have excess storage to rent to people, I get coins I can use to rent storage?

You can sell it for cash money. The important thing is not that coins can be exchanged for a product or service that you want, it's that they can be exchanged for a product or service that many people want. And you want that trade to be the basis of the price, rather than speculation.

I'm all for Storj (or Sia, or Filecoin) managing to create an alternative to AWS/GCP/Azure, but even if they succeed, they are never going to be able to make their system operate at a lower cost of the existing commodity.

I recently set up a Minio cluster with 80TB (usable, 120TB total) for ~150€/month. Storj is cheap (~3.5€/TB/month), but there is no way that Storj can ever be that cheap. And we are not even talking about egress fees.

It's difficult for them to see them truly disrupting the market when their systems have by design so much overhead and middleman wanting a cut. The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices and then any advantage will be gone.

The best I see for these decentralized storage systems is to work as a tit-for-tat backup, maybe?

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can sell it for cash money. The important thing is not that coins can be exchanged for a product or service that you want, it's that they can be exchanged for a product or service that many people want. And you want that trade to be the basis of the price, rather than speculation.

I'm all for Storj (or Sia, or Filecoin) managing to create an alternative to AWS/GCP/Azure, but even if they succeed, they are never going to be able to make their system operate at a lower cost of the existing commodity. I recently set up a Minio cluster with 80TB (usable, 120TB total) for ~150€/month. Storj is cheap (~3.5€/TB/month), but there is no way that Storj can ever be that cheap. And we are not even talking…

Most people don't want to make their own clusters, or don't have enough data for it to be a good price. There's plenty of room for a service that's twice as expensive as commodity prices.

> The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices

I doubt it's ever going to be a big threat, since this kind of storage is never going to have great latency. I don't think that's an existential risk. Though even if it is, and happens, there's billions of dollars to make before we reach that point. It's not a reason to avoid the market.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is engineer logic. This kind of thing would never fly in court. If you want an example, go back and look at what happened to Aereo back in 2014. They came up with a clever hack to work around broadcast TV copyright. It went to the U.S. Supreme Court and got shot down.

I see it pretty differently. I mean, the XOR thing is a bad idea, because obviously at least one of those files is violating copyright. Trying to feign innocence is not engineer logic, it's failed logic. But Aereo I'm still mad about. They saw that distribution is what cable companies have to pay lots of money for, so they removed distribution. It should have been fine. The effect of the decision is that it's legal f…

I'm sort of mad about Aereo too. My view is the same as yours. It's unfortunate that it got shut down.

My point in the GP comment was more that if the entire justification for your technical architecture is to make an end run around some law, you have to consider the possibility that a judge is going to see what you're trying to do and may have a different interpretation. There's a big human element in the law that I think engineers, especially "code as law" blockchain people, often overlook or misunderstand.

Maybe in the future we'll have AI judges and AI lawyers and your case will be decided in 100 milliseconds. However, that's not what we have today.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS is entwined with (and pretty much 100% backed by) Filecoin, which is a blockchain. Introducing a point of incompatibility would be a nonstarter.

Nothing is "entwined". I can download kubo and run it without even knowing what Filecoin is. In fact, every user of Brave browser does it. Same thing for projects like OrbitDB. Same thing for customers of Pinata.

I can download F2FS and run it on my RAM. That doesn't mean that F2FS isn't entwined with NVMe SSDs.

In fact, while F2FS is a ludicrous example, this happens regularly with filesystems. The core design of filesystems is still built assuming that a block device will be behind it. IPFS is the same way, just s/block device/blockchain/.

Re: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it pretty differently. I mean, the XOR thing is a bad idea, because obviously at least one of those files is violating copyright. Trying to feign innocence is not engineer logic, it's failed logic. But Aereo I'm still mad about. They saw that distribution is what cable companies have to pay lots of money for, so they removed distribution. It should have been fine. The effect of the decision is that it's legal f…

I'm sort of mad about Aereo too. My view is the same as yours. It's unfortunate that it got shut down. My point in the GP comment was more that if the entire justification for your technical architecture is to make an end run around some law, you have to consider the possibility that a judge is going to see what you're trying to do and may have a different interpretation. There's a big human element in the law that I…

> There's a big human element in the law that I think engineers, especially "code as law" blockchain people, often overlook or misunderstand.

The point with the XORing is that you can't blame one person for the infringement.

Imagine twin brothers. One of them steals a painting and is caught on camera. The judge knows that one of the twins is guilty. However, he can't convict either of them exactly because of the human element in the law.

Post reply on HN