5 ms·

IPFS appears here every 6 months, every 6 months the same questions get asked, the same problems get raised, the same collective sigh of bewilderment/disappoint

IPFS appears here every 6 months, every 6 months the same questions get asked, the same problems get raised, the same collective sigh of bewilderment/disappointment appears to emanate from the comments, and it goes away again for another 6 months. Everybody wants something this clever and community-spirited to work, but the basic problem is, I don't want my data to be vulnerable to slow, unreliable endpoints, or people switching off their IPFS servers. I can't really trust an unremunerated volunteer system with my data, and I don't believe that my keeping your data is remuneration enough for you to keep mine forever. Peer-to-peer is excellent for ephemeral streaming stuff like chat, file transfer, even gaming. But it is not good for permanence unless some monetary remuneration gets involved, either via a centralizing entity asking for payments (dropbox et al), or a distributed monetization system like bitcoin. Somewhere, somehow, someone needs to get paid to keep the system running.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
...Which is why you keep your server up. It's not perfect, but it's still better than HTTP. And no doubt a cottage industry will spring up in paying nodes to pin specific data.
c22 10y ago
I would say the impermanence is one of the most appealing aspects of the system. Content that no one uses and that no one is willing to sustain gets culled from the network, what more could you ask for?
- vegabook 10y ago
  I assume you would also like ext4 to automatically delete your seldom used files, without asking?
  - c22 10y ago
    That's absurd, ext4 solves a different problem. This is about distribution.
    - vegabook 10y ago
      it is the Internet Protocol File System. The clue is in the name. The analogy is entirely relevant. This thing is not just a replacement for http.
wott 10y ago
> IPFS appears here every 6 months, every 6 months the same questions get asked, the same problems get raised, the same collective sigh of bewilderment/disappointment appears to emanate from the comments, and it goes away again for another 6 months. Sounds like XMPP.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

...Which is why you keep your server up. It's not perfect, but it's still better than HTTP. And no doubt a cottage industry will spring up in paying nodes to pin specific data.

c22 10y ago

I would say the impermanence is one of the most appealing aspects of the system. Content that no one uses and that no one is willing to sustain gets culled from the network, what more could you ask for?

vegabook 10y ago
I assume you would also like ext4 to automatically delete your seldom used files, without asking?
- c22 10y ago
  That's absurd, ext4 solves a different problem. This is about distribution.
  - vegabook 10y ago
    it is the Internet Protocol File System. The clue is in the name. The analogy is entirely relevant. This thing is not just a replacement for http.

wott 10y ago

> IPFS appears here every 6 months, every 6 months the same questions get asked, the same problems get raised, the same collective sigh of bewilderment/disappointment appears to emanate from the comments, and it goes away again for another 6 months. Sounds like XMPP.