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IPFS, Again

macwright.org

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Re: IPFS, Again

#171

Post by dTal »

marknadal wrote: post #162
jasode wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, and do NOT require any tokens. You're looking at it from a pure technical perspective of pushing bytes around in a decentralized way. What the folks pushing "tokens" are trying to solve is the game theory of financial incentives to store & serve those decentralized bytes. In contrast, things like Bittorrent/Beaker/webtorrent/etc depend on others' "altruism" to host and serve files. Because altruism doesn't scale ,…

I agree, the problem is that Bitcoin and Filecoin (per author's IPFS scaling issues) do NOT scale though. You must solve the technical scaling problem first, then sure, heck, add tokens if you dandy. WebTorrent/GUN/etc. do scale. Add economics to that. Preferably, add something that is time-scarce so people do not have to lose money (they don't pay FB or Google! If they have to pay Filecoin, they'll still choose free…

You can't always just "layer economics" on top. Sometimes the problem is economical.

Consider what it would take to replace DNS with a distributed system. In a global namespace, names have value. You can't just operate on first-come first-served - there needs to be a system that ensures that names go to whoever wants it most. In other words, the challenge to be solved there isn't the technical one of having a DHT - that's a mostly solved problem - it's how the hell to make the names cost money, and who the money goes to. (And if you don't think the names should cost money, how do you propose allocation should work?)

Re: IPFS, Again

#172

Post by codingslave »

grahamperich wrote: post #119
codingslave wrote: post #8

This might sound a bit weird, but when I look at the employee base of protocol labs (the makers of IPFS), the most impressive employees are the business people. Multiple Harvard Business School graduates, tons of Stanford degrees. For the technical people, some are impressive, but no where near the stature of the business people. No distinguished ex-FAANG engineers, no principal engineers from notable companies, a fe…

Now scroll down to the Engineering section on the DFINITY team page (a team in the same space with similar deep pockets) https://dfinity.org/team

Exactly, a lot of the other replies to my comments did't quite get what I was getting at. DFINITY section is more what I would expect to see, and it's puzzling why IPFS is staffed the way the way it is.

Re: IPFS, Again

#173

Post by jasode »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #167
jasode wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, and do NOT require any tokens. You're looking at it from a pure technical perspective of pushing bytes around in a decentralized way. What the folks pushing "tokens" are trying to solve is the game theory of financial incentives to store & serve those decentralized bytes. In contrast, things like Bittorrent/Beaker/webtorrent/etc depend on others' "altruism" to host and serve files. Because altruism doesn't scale ,…

> altruism doesn't scale Incentives don't exist on a one dimensional scale from pure greed to pure altruism. People have lots of contextually dependent reasons for storing or sharing information. Those reasons are dynamic and super diverse. In your case, why would you need lots of people to seed your 100 GB of personal vacation photos? You can seed them just fine! But don't use bittorrent, use the right tool for the…

>, why would you need lots of people to seed your 100 GB of personal vacation photos?

I think you're missing some context for the motivation of Filecoin. One of the elevator pitches is that it can disrupt cloud storage like Amazon S3.[1][2]

People do put personal files (e.g. via a cloud backup service) on cloud storage like AWS S3. Instead of a paying a centralized Amazon, Filecoin claims they have a way for money to go to the decentralized owners of harddrives.

Therefore, if "backing up my personal vacation photos" to Amazon S3 is a use case, that means the decentralized peers hosting my uninteresting personal files is also supposed to be possible.

>But don't use bittorrent, use the right tool for the job...

Yes, exactly. That's what my reply to gp was explaining: his suggestion of webtorrent/bittorrent/gun is a protocol that solves a different problem than the one Filecoin tries to solve.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=filecoin+amazon+aws+s3

[2] deep link of Juan Benet of Filecoin mentioning the centralized cloud services: https://youtu.be/6h2WNxEV8q4?t=482

Re: IPFS, Again

#174

Post by acdha »

velcro wrote: post #66

https://www.shiftnrg.org/ might be interesting here too - IPFS-based project targeting web hosting specifically (includes a custom DNS + working on serving dynamic content, CMS, etc). BTW as a proof of concept their website is already hosted on their own IPFS cluster.

Their website is hosted on CloudFlare:

https://redbot.org/?descend=True&uri=https://www.shiftnrg.or...

They’re using DNSLink so basically what we’re seeing is that using DNS and a major CDN makes your site reliable, which does not seem like a particularly novel advance.

Re: IPFS, Again

#175

Post by dsswh »

codingslave wrote: post #8

This might sound a bit weird, but when I look at the employee base of protocol labs (the makers of IPFS), the most impressive employees are the business people. Multiple Harvard Business School graduates, tons of Stanford degrees. For the technical people, some are impressive, but no where near the stature of the business people. No distinguished ex-FAANG engineers, no principal engineers from notable companies, a fe…

That's a good observation that explains the state of things with ipfs. What they need is a few very senior engineers from say spanner that know how to do this stuff. It will be ludicrously expensive to hire them from google (a million/year per person just in compensation), it will cost them a good share of the company (for the risk), but at least they will start making progress. And no, nobody can be self taught to match the experience you get in spanner-like projects, just like nobody can self teach to build boeing-like airplanes.

Re: IPFS, Again

#176

Post by woodandsteel »

For years I've been reading HN comments sections for IPFS links for years. In the past IPFS developers would show up to defend it, but for this link at least so far I haven't seen any.

Is this an admission that IPFS is unworkable, and they don't have any prospects of making it usable in the next few years?

Re: IPFS, Again

#177

Post by stebalien »

xur17 wrote: post #101
dunkelheit wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IPFS is essentially run by a very well funded (300musd) private company. That is news to me - I've thought they were a scrappy startup. The issues mentioned in the post like glitches in the docs are excusable for a project that relies on volunteers who prefer writing code to polishing docs, but if you have $300M in funding then wtf? Just, you know, hire good project management and docs people.

My understanding was that most of the team focus has shifted over to the filecoin project in the last year or two, and they aren't dedicating as many resources to ipfs. That said, I agree that this is pretty deplorable.

Several of the key members have shifted focus but there's still a core IPFS team. But we're still spread quite thin.

We're still paying down years of documentation debt but there has been quite a bit of progress:

* Expanded https://docs.ipfs.io/ with a concepts section. * Tutorials https://proto.school/#/ * A ton of work on libp2p specs (https://github.com/libp2p/specs/commits/master) along with a full time documentation writer.

Re: IPFS, Again

#178

Post by stdcli »

janandonly wrote: post #3

Who is going to defend the free internet agains Azure, AWS and Google Cloud? They are the very opposite of a free and open internet where everyone can "run a website" on her own machine. It pains me to see a great idea like the Interplanetary File System still not working. I had similar experiences with IPFS and yes, we do need a project like this, only without the broken incentive structure attached to it. Why a "Fi…

There happens to be a great solution for this known as gaia hubs: https://docs.blockstack.org/ which you can learn about in these docs in conjunction with the immutable identities associated with them.

I have also in more context spoken recently with someone and convinced them why they should use gaia over IPFS: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/cannot-find-ipfs-driver/6147

and they brought up some other usability issues not mentioned in this critique, particularly about file pinning to keep files alive, and in general the waste behind the idea of data duplication by not separating out the auth of the user owned data with the duplication of the data itself in the DHT network, for which Blockstack has "Atlas".

Re: IPFS, Again

#179

Post by stdcli »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #2

Unfortunately, a lot of the problems in this blog post can only be solved by squaring Zooko's Triangle[1]. Most refutations of Zooko's Triangle depend on some form of blockchain. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle

Blockstack addresses Zooko's triangle in their original whitepaper: https://blockstack.org/tokenpaper.pdf

and their concept of gaia hubs is the association of immutable identities with user owned storage without the need for IPFS pinning or otherwise data duplication: docs.blockstack.org

You can see the most recent conversation about it here: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/cannot-find-ipfs-driver/6147 in which I convinced someone looking at IPFs to use gaia instead

full disclosure, I am an Engineer at Blockstack.

Re: IPFS, Again

#180

Post by stebalien »

cryptica wrote: post #27

I work for a cryptocurrency company as a software engineer and I definitely agree that a lot of projects backed by crypto funds tend to over promise and under deliver. It's clear that those who control the funds aren't always the best at judging tech talent. Big tech corporations have had years to settle down and build a reputation to attract top talent. Crypto companies tend to attract greed over talent and it shows…

IPFS was started in 2014, long before Protocol Labs started working on Filecoin.
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