Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IPFS 0.5

blog.ipfs.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 145 posts

Re: IPFS 0.5

#111

Post by [deleted] »

tribler wrote: post #68
carapace wrote: post #42

I really really want to use this, I have used it in the past. It works great as far as I could tell except for one thing: bandwidth limits[1]. Now I can do this myself, because I'm all "+337" and what not. (I used trickle as described in the comment[2]. Seemed to work fine. Nice and stable.) But I can't recommend Joe and Jane Consumer to install IPFS and some other thing with a straight face, because they'll say, "We…

plus IPFS wants to enforce copyrights worldwide: [1,2] Businesses principles plus monthly bandwidth usage matter for real people. [1] https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/code-of-conduc... [2] https://discuss.ipfs.io/tos#8

[deleted]

Re: IPFS 0.5

#112

Post by solarkraft »

jarfil wrote: post #5
xur17 wrote: post #3

> The Inter-Planetary Name System (IPNS), our system for creating mutable links for content addresses, now provides faster naming lookups and has a new experimental pubsub transport to speed up record distribution. Providing an IPNS record is now 30-40x faster in 1K node network simulations! IPNS performance was abysmal last time I tried to use ipfs (took > 30 seconds a fair amount of the time). Curious to see what i…

The ping from Earth to Mars varies between 360 and 2600 seconds, so 30 might still be fast enough for an "interplanetary" thing.

Isn't the point of IPFS exactly to get those pings far down due to the file being hosted on your planet?

Re: IPFS 0.5

#113

Post by rglullis »

jhoechtl wrote: post #79
rglullis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your arguments do not follow: > which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. No. A commodity is simply any kind of good that is considered equivalent no matter who made it. Oil is a commodity, there is plenty of competition and there is still plenty of profit to be made (current crisis excluded) > While it is very hard to make an economic profit selling grain, many people do farm grain and m…

The point is perfect competition, highlight on perfect. In oil business there are profits because competition is not perfect. Note that perfect here is rather a theoretical, economic term. In reality, market regulations and peoples socio-economic attitutes prevent a perfect competition. The mentioned missing trust could be alleviated by IPFS becoming a widely trusted, distributed, unstoppable service.

Are we talking past one another?

My point is exactly that if Filecoin does get to be a place that gets "perfect competition" as you say, then there is no profit to be made. If there is no profit to be made, what is the economic incentive to spend on disks/internet/computers and be a storage seller?

Before you say "there is a market for those with excess capacity", answer me this: if the market is focused on those with excess capacity, what mechanisms are in place this "perfect competition" to remove all chance of profit and get the price of excess capacity to reach basically zero?

I get IPFS, I think. I do believe that it technically it makes sense. What I don't get is Filecoin.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#114

Post by londons_explore »

diggan wrote: post #99
londons_explore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For IPFS to work, there needs to be no central authority who can block files. Todays IPFS is a long way from that - any Joe Random can DoS any particular hash by getting their node at the right place in the DHT and blackholing requests.

> can DoS any particular hash Can you explain more how this is possible? So we have one evil user Karen who wants to block access to content ABC. She will spam the DHT with requests to content ABC. After a while, nodes will stop responding as she hits the rate limit. Now her DHT requests goes into the void. Now Joey wants to request content ABC too. He requests the content, and because no other nodes are responding t…

There's a smarter attack...

Every node in the network 'owns' some of the keyspace.

Karen can simply keep reconnecting to the network (brute forcing her PeerID, which determines which bit of the keyspace her node will be responsible for) till she gets assigned that bit of keyspace. Then she can black hole requests to it.

You can defend against that by having multiple owners for a given bit of keyspace (known as quorum in the IPFS design), but evil Karen can simply pretend to be all of the machines hosting that bit of keyspace.

The brute forcing sounds hard, but in a million node IPFS network, on average you only need to do 1 million sha256 hashes, which takes under a second on modern hardware.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#115

Post by zozbot234 »

Nursie wrote: post #101
anchpop wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually the intent of filecoin. In perfect competition, which is the ideal state for a commodity, there is no economic profit. The reason Amazon and other companies are able to make a profit selling cloud storage is because there is not yet perfect competition. Right now if I wanted to compete with Amazon, I could buy 2 or 3 petabytes of storage space and some bandwidth. But nobody would trust me not to lose…

That's the economic flaw in all of this - Amazon have economies of scale and access to cheap power and network connectivity and that means smaller competitors will be locked out of the market. You're not going to be running a node on your spare capacity that brings in more than your costs, in fact unless you're a datacentre operator, you're going to be making a loss. In the end it favours big centralised services, an…

Cryptocoin miners' profit is largely based on "access to cheap power and network connectivity", and many of them run fairly large-scale operations but nowhere near the same scale as Amazon. No reason why a "file coin" should be any different.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#116

Post by rglullis »

zozbot234 wrote: post #115
Nursie wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the economic flaw in all of this - Amazon have economies of scale and access to cheap power and network connectivity and that means smaller competitors will be locked out of the market. You're not going to be running a node on your spare capacity that brings in more than your costs, in fact unless you're a datacentre operator, you're going to be making a loss. In the end it favours big centralised services, an…

Cryptocoin miners' profit is largely based on "access to cheap power and network connectivity", and many of them run fairly large-scale operations but nowhere near the same scale as Amazon. No reason why a "file coin" should be any different.

That is missing the point. No one doubts that it is possible to bring down the costs of storage and its infrastructure. The point is that no matter how low these costs are all nodes are driven to undercut each other until their profitability is zero.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#117

Post by skyde »

IPFS need a way to get paid for a block over a period of time. Does not need to be real money just token you can use later to pay for your file to be seeded.

Basically I host your file and you host my file. With some algorithm to make sure number of seeder for each block never go to 0

Re: IPFS 0.5

#118

Post by momack2 »

skyde wrote: post #117

IPFS need a way to get paid for a block over a period of time. Does not need to be real money just token you can use later to pay for your file to be seeded. Basically I host your file and you host my file. With some algorithm to make sure number of seeder for each block never go to 0

Check out Filecoin (https://filecoin.io) - token for buying/selling file storage for IPFS data. You can earn tokens for renting out your disk space and use them to purchase backup/hosting from others.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#119

Post by momack2 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #95

Good progress. I looked at IPFS a few months ago from the point of view of fitting a decentralized file store. The decentralized requirement came primarily from the point of view wanting to fit this in a broader product that is all about decentralized for various reasons. Key problems in this space: - decentralized is something techies obsess about but that has as of yet no business value whatsoever. Customers don't…

Saying there's "no business value" in tools coming out of this space/building on IPFS is nonsense. Sure, the vast majority of people won't care about using a tool because it's decentralized in and of itself, but they _will_ choose tools that give them features they care about - like working better offline, having faster downloads/uploads, being more reliable and trustworthy, preserving their agency and control, etc. These implications from building a distributed system (ex able to collaborate when disconnected from central servers) are strong business reasons for folks to use one service over another, but that isn't clear from saying "it's decentralized". Look at Netflix using IPFS for faster container image distribution (business value: more productive developers - https://blog.ipfs.io/2020-02-14-improved-bitswap-for-contain...), Audius & Matters.news using IPFS to give content creators more ownership over their own data, Berty & OpenBazaar using IPFS for private messaging/marketplaces -- clearly there is business value in removing middle-men/central points of failure & control in these applications.

You absolutely can incentivize others to pin content. Check out Infura (infura.io), Pinata (pinata.cloud), Temporal (temporal.cloud), and Eternum (eternum.io) - these are all services you can pay to host your IPFS data with reasonable uptime. They have an incentive to keep your content around because you pay them to. Filecoin is a distributed solution to that (and making active progress - they have a testnet out with over 5PB of proven storage: https://filecoin.io/blog/roadmap-update-april-2020/), but you don't have to wait for that to land.

Re: IPFS 0.5

#120

Post by momack2 »

tribler wrote: post #68
carapace wrote: post #42

I really really want to use this, I have used it in the past. It works great as far as I could tell except for one thing: bandwidth limits[1]. Now I can do this myself, because I'm all "+337" and what not. (I used trickle as described in the comment[2]. Seemed to work fine. Nice and stable.) But I can't recommend Joe and Jane Consumer to install IPFS and some other thing with a straight face, because they'll say, "We…

plus IPFS wants to enforce copyrights worldwide: [1,2] Businesses principles plus monthly bandwidth usage matter for real people. [1] https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/code-of-conduc... [2] https://discuss.ipfs.io/tos#8

Our TOS applies to the IPFS HTTP Gateway where Protocol Labs run the infrastructure (bridging data in the IPFS Network to users over HTTP) to ease onboarding/development. There are many different IPFS Gateways (https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/), with different local jurisdictions that can each choose their own TOS.

We do not and cannot control the data that each individual node is hosting in the IPFS Network. Each node can choose what they want to host - no central party can filter or blacklist content globally for the entire network. The ipfs.io Gateway is just one of many portals used to view content stored by third parties on the Internet.

That aside, we definitely don't want to 'apply copyright worldwide'. For one, it's not consistent! Trying to create a central rule for all nodes about what is and isn't "allowed" for the system as a whole doesn't work and is part of the problem with more centralized systems like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. Instead, give each node the power to decide what it does/doesn't want to host, and easy tooling to abide by local requirements/restrictions if they so choose.

Post reply on HN