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Protocol Labs is a Y-Combinator company with investors such as Naval and USV. They have already built out IPFS -- a popular decentralized file sharing protocol.
by product50 9y ago
Protocol Labs is a Y-Combinator company with investors such as Naval and USV. They have already built out IPFS -- a popular decentralized file sharing protocol. If there is any team you want to bet on making decentralized storage possible, Protocol Labs is on the top of that list.
- VMG 9y ago> They have already built out IPFS -- a popular decentralized file sharing protocol. How popular? Who uses it?
- mungoid 9y agoI don't know much about it but they have 8.5k stars on github so it seems fairly popular.
- samastur 9y agoI star everything I find interesting so I may find it later, but in reality I did this maybe a handful of times which makes my stars ~99% meaningless. Not saying everyone does this, but I doubt my behaviour is rare and I wouldn't read too much into github stars as they are too cheap to create. Look for actual use.
- hobofan 9y agoYup, can confirm. The most stared project I helped create has +5k stars from hitting the HN frontpage a few times, and there are very few actual users (by now probably none). IPFS has compared to that much healthier growth, and for the number of stars they have a pretty decent userbase from what I can gather.
- nannal 9y agoI use it, I pin files in exchange for bitcoin, like filecoin only without the vapourware. My biggest client at the minute is dtube.video but there are audio "clones" and document based clones in development that I'm aware of too.
- alwillis 9y agoThe Filecoin Primer states that over 5 billion files are stored on IPFS, with over 500 GB per day flowing through the HTTP-to-IPFS gateway: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWimYyZHzChb35EYojGduWHBdhf9SD5NHqf8MjZ4n3Qrr/Filecoin-Primer.7-25.pdf https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWimYyZHzChb35EYojGduWHBdhf9SD5NHqf8Mj... Especially for a new a fairly new protocol, I'd say IPFS is popular.
- wils1245 9y ago500 GB a day doesn't sound like the kind of adoption that justifies a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars though.
- alwillis 9y agoThat's not what the ICO was about; with IPFS and Filecoin, a very lucrative, decentralized storage market is likely on its way. Instead of proof of work mining that burns tons of electricity, storing and distributing files will become a new kind of useful mining. That's a big deal.
- simias 9y agoIPFS is cool tech but "popular" might be overselling it a bit. Furthermore it's still unclear why they would ever need more than a quarter billion dollar to build their products when they managed to build IPFS with a tiny fraction of that. I'm not saying they're necessarily dishonest but it shows that the current ICO system is rather broken. Instead of slowly building up investments in rounds as your technology proves itself ICOs incentivize you to raise ridiculous amounts of money right at the start.
- unkown-unknowns 9y agoPopular when seen in relation to other options for decentralized storage perhaps. It might be a small group at the moment but they can still be large in a small space.
- sschueller 9y agoHow much money was needed to create IPFS? There seems to be zero interest in creating something new and open like bitcoin but instead make as much money as possible.
- davidgerard 9y agoIt's literally only "popular" as a buzzword. Functionally it's basically BitTorrent with magnet links. Also, it's not actually finished or production quality yet.