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IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

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Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#91

Post by JuniperMesos »

api wrote: post #37
Macha wrote: post #2

All those NFT holders where the NFT resolved to a ipfs.io link in shambles

Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix. Insane. I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that. That and how badly so…

An NFT doesn't have to be just a link; nothing in principle stops someone creating a NFT that stores the full bytes of some digital asset directly on the blockchain, just as nothing in principle stops someone from creating a NFT that doesn't do this (or equivalently, a NFT whose on-chain content is simply a text hyperlink to something). The Bitcoin Ordinals concept of Inscriptions (https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html), which is an attempt to build a NFT system for Bitcoin, does culturally encourage placing the bytes of a digital asset into the Bitcoin blockchain, and the tooling around it assumes this model; but again nothing prevents someone from creating an Inscription whose contents are simply a link to something else.

And of course there's no reason why a NFT has to be used to represent ownership of some kind of digital art - there are other uses for NFTs, such as modeling transferable network permissions or resources.

Ultimately NFTs are a just a specific application of blockchain technology, to represent some kind of resource on a blockchain which could in principle be digital art. If people care about ownership of NFTs representing digital art, that's a social fact about what kinds of art there is market demand for; and whether it matters that the bytes of the digital art are on a blockchain or linked from somewhere else (where they could get taken down or bitrot) is also a social fact.

I actually agree that treating NFTs that merely contain a link to some bytes elsewhere that worked at one point in time is a pretty dumb thing to care about, or have a market for (and the use cases for NFTs where the bytes are actually on-chain are, at best, fairly limited, although I wouldn't say completely nonexistent). And certainly the NFT market of 2021 or so, which had a lot of such NFTs, was driven by a weird social mania and people attempting to grift upon that social mania. This has never bothered me though, because I feel the same way about many markets for physical pieces of art; and ultimately it needs to be possible for people to create markets for things I personally think are dumb or at least don't care about.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#92

Post by Grombobulous »

muragekibicho wrote: post #85
gwerbin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's silly about it? Content-addressable decentralized storage -- not tied to a cryptocurrency -- is really valuable for censorship-resistant archiving of politically-sensitive data (such as climate change research).

It's the crypto aspect that's silly. Tech is cool IMO. However, the crypto adjacency makes it all look scammy tbh.

In addition to that, this noble goal of being an insurance policy against censorship never played out.

How hard would it be for a country to block the clients and browser extensions you need to use it in the first place? Or to develop a firewall technology that’s capable of blocking the traffic?

Probably not that hard, especially since nobody uses IPFS for anything business critical since it’s not all that great at doing things that you need from file storage systems.

Most reasons you store files somewhere benefit from not being decentralized. You usually want some combination of performance, security, durability, and availability. Decentralization is not generally a demand of file storage.

The only reason it’s decentralized is because blockchain and crypto was hype 10 years ago.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#93

Post by zamadatix »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #91
api wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix. Insane. I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that. That and how badly so…

An NFT doesn't have to be just a link; nothing in principle stops someone creating a NFT that stores the full bytes of some digital asset directly on the blockchain, just as nothing in principle stops someone from creating a NFT that doesn't do this (or equivalently, a NFT whose on-chain content is simply a text hyperlink to something). The Bitcoin Ordinals concept of Inscriptions ( https://docs.ordinals.com/inscript…

I don't think they were saying they found out all NFTs must only be links, just they found out the NFTs being peddled usually were. As you say, bytes are bytes regardless what they represent - it's just a lot easier to grift something like a 32 byte hash or a link on a chain because storing all those bytes in the blockchain would have been a damned expensive way to run a grift.

There is a difference between markets for things I don't care about and markets for things I do care a lot about, just not in a positive way. I don't think it's necessary to allow an open market exchange for phone scammers, for example, and it has nothing to do with how uninterested I am in buying people's information. Not all NFT had to fall towards that kind of thing, it's just there was so little practical usage actually being done that 99% of it ended up being that way.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#94

Post by bastawhiz »

dgellow wrote: post #24
devttyeu wrote: post #4

Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago. For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day). Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently su…

What is PL doing nowadays? I checked the website and don’t understand at all

It's buzzword soup. All their projects lead to domains with vague descriptions and pictures of the team and zero substance at all.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#95

Post by frollogaston »

api wrote: post #37
Macha wrote: post #2

All those NFT holders where the NFT resolved to a ipfs.io link in shambles

Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix. Insane. I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that. That and how badly so…

It was common to store ipfs:// links to the assets, which is reasonable. Though some of them didn't.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#96

Post by [deleted] »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #91
api wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix. Insane. I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that. That and how badly so…

An NFT doesn't have to be just a link; nothing in principle stops someone creating a NFT that stores the full bytes of some digital asset directly on the blockchain, just as nothing in principle stops someone from creating a NFT that doesn't do this (or equivalently, a NFT whose on-chain content is simply a text hyperlink to something). The Bitcoin Ordinals concept of Inscriptions ( https://docs.ordinals.com/inscript…

[deleted]

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#97

Post by erlend_sh »

devttyeu wrote: post #4

Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago. For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day). Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently su…

Perhaps the best thing to have come out of IPFS is DASL, used in AT protocol: https://dasl.ing/

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#98

Post by hiccuphippo »

haunter wrote: post #44
jMyles wrote: post #34

I publish all of my music in ways that are pirate-friendly, which for the moment just means Bit Torrent and IPFS. See: https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?

See I thought if IPFS was picked up by the piracy scene (some bigger private trackers for example) then it probably would have been more successful. Alas I haven't seen it outside of libgen and even there I thought it was a backup option only.

I always thought it could be the evolution of Bittorrent: updatable torrents (with IPNS), peers sharing files from different "bundles" as long as the bits match.

The problem was that there was no good client for it that was better than current torrent clients. When I tested it you had to keep a duplicate of the files in the ipfs cache directory and the client was CLI based which would alienate most users. There's probably no way to have private trackers or to track seed/leech ratios for communities too.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#99

Post by bastawhiz »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #48

> If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS. Seriously it bugs me when people…

This is honestly just the nitpickiest complaint of all. Criticizing people who just found out they're losing their jobs for which solution they use to collect fond memories from their users is an outrageous thing to get upset over. Just don't fill out the form.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#100

Post by lallysingh »

muragekibicho wrote: post #73
mikert89 wrote: post #12

Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy

I guess IPFS is an artifact from the crypto craze. It's pretty silly if you think of it. However, I must admit, I got my first ever developer grant from Filecoin while they were flush with ZIRP era money. btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.

IIRC IPFS was the latest in a long line of Distributed Content-Addressed systems that long predate crypto. AFAICT (obviously I wasn't paying much attention) they went crypto (FileCoin) to fund a base population of storage users to bootstrap its popularity.

But that didn't pan out.

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