4 ms·

I wish people would ask this question of IPFS more often. Storage, especially long-term storage, requires incentives! Just look at BitTorrent -- at best, you co

I wish people would ask this question of IPFS more often. Storage, especially long-term storage, requires incentives! Just look at BitTorrent -- at best, you continue seeding a file after downloading it out of the goodness of your heart, or (more commonly) because you can't be bothered to remove each torrent file after it finishes. In practice, the only way to keep torrent files alive for a long time is out-of-band incentives, primarily in the form of "points" on a private tracker. Even then, seeders have little incentive to seed content that isn't personally valuable to them, since they can get just as many "points" for seeding an equal amount of valuable content. In other words, good luck finding high-quality seeders for your personal photos. Ultimately, if you want someone to store your data, you need to pay them (in traditional currency or otherwise)!

jude- 8y ago
I agree. This is also why Blockstack isn't built on IPFS -- your data is only available as long as someone's pinned it. Gaia (the Blockstack storage system) will let you use IPFS as your backing store, but at the end of the day it gives users the choice as to where and how their data gets hosted. This way the user can select the best cost/performance trade-offs for hosting and storing their data.
cercatrova 8y ago
Platforms like Sia, Filecoin, Storj, and Maidsafe do exactly this; they pay their hosters their requisite amount in coins by the hostee.
- nemo1618 8y ago
  I guess I should have disclosed that I am the co-founder of Sia. So I may be slightly biased in my opinion of which decentralized storage option is best. :P
PyroLagus 8y ago
> I wish people would ask this question of IPFS more often. Well, that's what Filecoin is for. Although I'm generally skeptical of cryptocurrency, as well as the scalability of technologies like IPFS. But we'll see.
theamk 8y ago
Don't discount human relationships! For example, I have at least few friends who would be willing a small server in their apartment for me (especially since nowdays, such servers are physically small and draw very little power). In the theoretical case where the personal photos are hosted on IPFS, they could provide storage for me. And since it is IPFS, it would not require much -- even if they get super popular, the outgoing bandwidth is still relatively small. Going further, imaging a web build on IPFS, where it is considered acceptable and recommended to pin all the sites you link to. So ipfs hacker news pins all the articles that people are linking to, and my browser bookmarks pin all the bookmarked content (possibly via Firefox sync service), and my personal website pins all the outgoing links so they never go broken. (Note that this likely would not with the videos very well, but I am fine with that -- most of things I bookmark, and most of HN content for that matter, is video-free) This is all dreams today of course -- there is a number of technical reasons and missing technologies that make that setup non-feasible now. But wouldn't it be nice to have no broken links?

jude- 8y ago

I agree. This is also why Blockstack isn't built on IPFS -- your data is only available as long as someone's pinned it. Gaia (the Blockstack storage system) will let you use IPFS as your backing store, but at the end of the day it gives users the choice as to where and how their data gets hosted. This way the user can select the best cost/performance trade-offs for hosting and storing their data.

cercatrova 8y ago

Platforms like Sia, Filecoin, Storj, and Maidsafe do exactly this; they pay their hosters their requisite amount in coins by the hostee.

nemo1618 8y ago
I guess I should have disclosed that I am the co-founder of Sia. So I may be slightly biased in my opinion of which decentralized storage option is best. :P

PyroLagus 8y ago

> I wish people would ask this question of IPFS more often. Well, that's what Filecoin is for. Although I'm generally skeptical of cryptocurrency, as well as the scalability of technologies like IPFS. But we'll see.

theamk 8y ago

Don't discount human relationships! For example, I have at least few friends who would be willing a small server in their apartment for me (especially since nowdays, such servers are physically small and draw very little power). In the theoretical case where the personal photos are hosted on IPFS, they could provide storage for me. And since it is IPFS, it would not require much -- even if they get super popular, the outgoing bandwidth is still relatively small. Going further, imaging a web build on IPFS, where it is considered acceptable and recommended to pin all the sites you link to. So ipfs hacker news pins all the articles that people are linking to, and my browser bookmarks pin all the bookmarked content (possibly via Firefox sync service), and my personal website pins all the outgoing links so they never go broken. (Note that this likely would not with the videos very well, but I am fine with that -- most of things I bookmark, and most of HN content for that matter, is video-free) This is all dreams today of course -- there is a number of technical reasons and missing technologies that make that setup non-feasible now. But wouldn't it be nice to have no broken links?