8 ms·

I hope one day we will see an IPFS link

pmlnr 6y ago
What is stopping you from making and sharing one?
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
Why do people constantly have to re-invent the wheel? :( Freenet [0] has been providing censorship-resistant, anonymous, decentralized hosting for 20 years - and is still in active development! You could upload it to Freenet without any server whatsoever and it would stay online for as long as it is popular, even if your machine goes offline. And you'd be anonymous while doing so! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
- prepend 6y ago
  Freenet doesn’t make money for speculators like ipfs. Making gobs of money is an important feature driving wheel reinvention, I think.
  - jMyles 6y ago
    Are speculators making money on ipfs? How? This is news to me.
    - eruleman 6y ago
      via Filecoin: "In short: IPFS addresses and moves content, while Filecoin is an incentive layer to persist data." https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin
      - ranger207 6y ago
        Are they separate layers? Could I use IPFS in my own project, or is it intrinsically tied to Filecoin?
        jMyles 6y ago
        Of course you can. There is no substance to this line of reasoning except that PL publishes both. It's like saying speculating on py-umbral (a standalone open source project) because we use it to build NuCypher (a blockchain-dependent open source project).
        Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 6y ago
        They can. Think of it like a torrent file and a webseed. You can freely use torrents to distribute your content, but if everyone who has ever downloaded it goes offline, any new downloaders will be stuck at 0% forever. The only add on here is that you can pay some service in filecoin to keep seeding your torrent forever.
    - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
      The IPFS website at the bottom left contains a section "Protocol labs", the "About" link of that links to https://protocol.ai/ https://protocol.ai/ which says "We're decentralizing storage with Filecoin". So their end goal might be making money off that cryptocurrency... Thanks to the GP for causin me to figure out why the wheel is being re-invented here! :) :|
      - asenna 6y ago
        Why is adding an incentive mechanism to "pinning" files on IPFS inherently wrong? If you find the right incentives to a tech problem, that pushes the tech forward right? Like Satoshi Nakomoto putting together the right type of incentive to be able to create an almost unhackable network in Bitcoin (along with Ethereum and others). I'm not yet saying that Protocol Labs will ultimately find the success they're looking for BUT writing off their efforts as "just a way to make money off of cryptocurrency" I feel is pretty dismissive.
        rglullis 6y ago
        It's not dismissive. They already got their money. $257 million, to be exact. No one knows how Filecoin is going to make money except for Protocol Labs.
        cachvico 6y ago
        By providing value, therefore driving up the market price of the integral reward. Currently at $22, not bad for a random coin. I.e, the value of the coin is driven by the interest in the tech it provides.
        rglullis 6y ago
        That's a very hand-wavy answer, no? "The market price of the integral reward"? What is that supposed to mean? Filecoin is just a medium of exchange for people buying and selling storage services. Filecoin does not offer anything specific and its platform has to compete with plenty of mature, efficient alternatives. > the value of the coin is driven by the interest in the tech it provides. What "tech" does it provide? Not IPFS, for sure, that already was under development and could have come to fruition as a regular open source project. A decentralized market for storage, "proof-of-spacetime"? These might be interesting. But again, if we want to fund these things there are surely better/cheaper ways to do it. $250 million is a lot of money for the tech that was developed so far. More importantly: there is nothing about the "tech" that requires $FIL to make it work. The market dynamics will be the same whether they used FIL, DAI, ETH, wrapped BTC or even a dollar-pegged token they decided to issue. People are not going to pay more or less for their storage because the price of the token went up or down. > Currently at $22, not bad for a random coin. These are the kind of statements that almost make me side with the buttcoiners. At this point, with all the speculation, market manipulation and naive FOMO "investing", there is no useful information to be had from the price of the token.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing, I didn't even know this existed and no one brought it up during the deplatforming debate this month.
- junippor 6y ago
  Wow ok. The value of HN has decreased to almost zero for me, but you've made it worth it this month. Thanks for this!
  - fsckboy 6y ago
    your account is 4 days old... what did it decrease from? exponentially?
- nostrademons 6y ago
  I remember when this came out 20 years ago. It was part of the whole wave of P2P filesharing programs that came out between 1999-2002: Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, etc. Amazing it's still going on. BTW, for folks new in tech - it's amazing how influential that wave of programs were, even though they largely failed in the marketplace. Napster founder Sean Parker later became the first investor and first president of Facebook. Also involved in the wave (in a tangential way) was Mark Zuckerburg, whose Synapse Media Player got a $M+ buyout offer from Microsoft while he was still in high school. Uber founder Travis Kalanick's first two projects were Scour (a P2P filesharing app) and Red Swoosh (a P2P CDN). I met the AudioGalaxy founder while working on Google Search - he later went on to become one of the early Waymo engineers. The Kazaa founders later went on to found Skype, and we know where that went. Chord (an academic research project in distributed hash tables) was led by Robert Tappan Morris (originally famous for creating the Internet Worm of 1988), who then went on to co-found YCombinator, which owns the website you're reading this on. The gossip protocol invented & refined by Gnutella forms the basis for many cryptocurrency P2P protocols like Bitcoin & Ethereum. There's probably several trillion dollars in market cap attributable to the intellectual descendants of a bunch of nerds who wanted to share stuff over the Internet and fuck over the RIAA, MPAA, and governments.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Probably proof that who you know is about as important as what you can do, if not more
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      The interesting thing is that most of those people weren't actually pals when working on P2P stuff, but they were all working on the same stuff. Zuckerburg and Parker didn't meet until Facebook was growing quickly. Scour/Red Swoosh, to my knowledge, had no major connection with the other projects. I view it more like an instance of synchronicity, where a lot of bright young people looked at the world independently and decided that this was the space they wanted to be working on. And then when that space didn't pan out they went their separate ways, but the fact that they were bright & energetic meant that the successor projects became huge. (I wonder if a similar effect explains the General Magic, Paypal, and Justin.TV mafias.)
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Is it really anonymous? How does it compare to Tor and i2p?
  - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
    > Is it really anonymous? It at least aims to be so :) As with any anonymous p2p network you need to know: Your level of privacy depends on your threat level. If the government is after you, they may very well know exploits. If you just want privacy from corporations for perfectly legal reasons then you might be fine. > How does it compare to Tor and i2p? See "How is Freenet different to Tor?" here: https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html TL;DR: Freenet is a self-contained *storage* network. Tor is a *communication* network, I2P as well. The latter is also self-contained. However as they're both communication networks they do not provide censorship-resistance. The endpoints you're connecting to are central servers and can be taken down.
    - LMYahooTFY 6y ago
      >However as they're both communication networks they do not provide censorship-resistance. The endpoints you're connecting to are central servers and can be taken down. Can you elaborate on this? This reads as essentially false to my understanding. If by endpoints you mean 'relays', those are not 'central servers'. If you mean directory authorities, then yes, those are centralized. With that said, I'm still not sure what you mean by 'they do not provide censorship-resistance.' They absolutely have and do provide censorship resistance.
      - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
        > Can you elaborate on this? This reads as essentially false to my understanding. No, it's not false AFAIK :) By 'endpoint' I mean what an address on those networks actually *addresses*. Both a Tor-address (a .onion hostname, or a regular web address if you use Tor to access one), and an I2P-address, are essentially similar to an IP-address in terms of being the address of a *machine*. They are anonymized, but the data is routed to the very specific machine which the address is of. A Freenet address on the other hand is the address of a *file* - basically a hash. So in Tor and I2P, even though the machine behind the address is anonymous, you can still DoS it because you have the address of the specific machine where the data is at. In Freenet, you cannot DoS the machine because the address does *not* tell the network where the file is stored. It only tells what file you get. Any machine on the network can serve the file to you! And in fact, if you try to DoS a file by requesting it very frequently on Freenet, it will instead be distributed MORE on the network: Machines along the path where the data is routed will cache the file. That's what provides the censorship resistance.
- canofbars 6y ago
  IPFS has the benefit that anyone can pin the content and then even the original author can not take it down.
  - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
    The same applies to Freenet: - Anyone can use the "KeepAlive" [0] plugin to pin content. - Nobody can take down any content, not even the original author [1]. Censorship-resistance is a central design goal of Freenet. [0] https://github.com/freenet/plugin-KeepAlive https://github.com/freenet/plugin-KeepAlive [1] https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html
    - canofbars 6y ago
      Seems interesting. Wanted to give it a shot but it looks like they had no official docker containers and it wasn't packaged in the fedora repos. I noticed the I2P project does have a docker image and seems to do a similar thing. Do you know what the differences between the projects are?
- eternalban 6y ago
  This prompted a query as to what Ian is up to these days: https://github.com/sanity/tahrir https://github.com/sanity/tahrir http://tahrirproject.org/ http://tahrirproject.org/ "Tahrir aims to be a distributed, decentralized, scalable, and anonymous "workalike" for services like Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook. It is at an early stage of development, but is being actively worked on by a number of volunteers."
- nexthash 6y ago
  What are the benefits and disadvantages of Freenet vs IPFS? I am genuinely curious, they seem superficially similar and yet Freenet has been around for 20 years. Personally I haven't heard of it but does it have a lot of traffic/popularity compared to IPFS?
- jokoon 6y ago
  A p2p fille sharing system is not a wheel. I found that freenet was a little complex. Ipfs is quite simple and modern. Doesn't freenet use Java? Anyway, software doesn't have well respected ISO standards and 20 years is an eternity in the age of the internet. So I don't see a problem with ipfs. Also, ipfs looks like it's more flexible and reusable.
motoboi 6y ago
How to generate one?
kevincox 6y ago
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTW7sdBbZ1BXau8Cmrpv5srf38GZi1AiWWBBkvUuRr8CT/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTW7sdBbZ1BXau8Cmrpv5srf38GZi1AiWWBBkv... There you go. It's not perfect though because a lot of the links still point to live assets. But it captured the important bits.
- celsoazevedo 6y ago
  > It's not perfect though because a lot of the links still point to live assets SingleFile is good for this: - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singlefile/mpiodijhokgodhhofbcjdecpffjipkle https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singlefile/mpiodij... - https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  That only captured the first 4 paragraphs.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    I thought there only was 4. I guess I got paywalled.
    - jason505 6y ago
      MenuQQ: Agen Poker Online Terpercaya Link : http://180.215.15.109/ http://180.215.15.109/
- BelenusMordred 6y ago
  Just a tip, I find the cloudflare ipfs gateway to be a lot quicker. Only need to change the domain name of the link. eg. https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmTW7sdBbZ1BXau8Cmrpv5srf38GZi1AiWWBBkvUuRr8CT/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmTW7sdBbZ1BXau8Cmrpv5srf38...
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
j45 6y ago
The story and the individual are far more interesting

What is stopping you from making and sharing one?

Why do people constantly have to re-invent the wheel? :( Freenet [0] has been providing censorship-resistant, anonymous, decentralized hosting for 20 years - and is still in active development! You could upload it to Freenet without any server whatsoever and it would stay online for as long as it is popular, even if your machine goes offline. And you'd be anonymous while doing so! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

prepend 6y ago
Freenet doesn’t make money for speculators like ipfs. Making gobs of money is an important feature driving wheel reinvention, I think.
- jMyles 6y ago
  Are speculators making money on ipfs? How? This is news to me.
  - eruleman 6y ago
    via Filecoin: "In short: IPFS addresses and moves content, while Filecoin is an incentive layer to persist data." https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin
    - ranger207 6y ago
      Are they separate layers? Could I use IPFS in my own project, or is it intrinsically tied to Filecoin?
      - jMyles 6y ago
        Of course you can. There is no substance to this line of reasoning except that PL publishes both. It's like saying speculating on py-umbral (a standalone open source project) because we use it to build NuCypher (a blockchain-dependent open source project).
      - Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 6y ago
        They can. Think of it like a torrent file and a webseed. You can freely use torrents to distribute your content, but if everyone who has ever downloaded it goes offline, any new downloaders will be stuck at 0% forever. The only add on here is that you can pay some service in filecoin to keep seeding your torrent forever.
  - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
    The IPFS website at the bottom left contains a section "Protocol labs", the "About" link of that links to https://protocol.ai/ https://protocol.ai/ which says "We're decentralizing storage with Filecoin". So their end goal might be making money off that cryptocurrency... Thanks to the GP for causin me to figure out why the wheel is being re-invented here! :) :|
    - asenna 6y ago
      Why is adding an incentive mechanism to "pinning" files on IPFS inherently wrong? If you find the right incentives to a tech problem, that pushes the tech forward right? Like Satoshi Nakomoto putting together the right type of incentive to be able to create an almost unhackable network in Bitcoin (along with Ethereum and others). I'm not yet saying that Protocol Labs will ultimately find the success they're looking for BUT writing off their efforts as "just a way to make money off of cryptocurrency" I feel is pretty dismissive.
      - rglullis 6y ago
        It's not dismissive. They already got their money. $257 million, to be exact. No one knows how Filecoin is going to make money except for Protocol Labs.
        cachvico 6y ago
        By providing value, therefore driving up the market price of the integral reward. Currently at $22, not bad for a random coin. I.e, the value of the coin is driven by the interest in the tech it provides.
        rglullis 6y ago
        That's a very hand-wavy answer, no? "The market price of the integral reward"? What is that supposed to mean? Filecoin is just a medium of exchange for people buying and selling storage services. Filecoin does not offer anything specific and its platform has to compete with plenty of mature, efficient alternatives. > the value of the coin is driven by the interest in the tech it provides. What "tech" does it provide? Not IPFS, for sure, that already was under development and could have come to fruition as a regular open source project. A decentralized market for storage, "proof-of-spacetime"? These might be interesting. But again, if we want to fund these things there are surely better/cheaper ways to do it. $250 million is a lot of money for the tech that was developed so far. More importantly: there is nothing about the "tech" that requires $FIL to make it work. The market dynamics will be the same whether they used FIL, DAI, ETH, wrapped BTC or even a dollar-pegged token they decided to issue. People are not going to pay more or less for their storage because the price of the token went up or down. > Currently at $22, not bad for a random coin. These are the kind of statements that almost make me side with the buttcoiners. At this point, with all the speculation, market manipulation and naive FOMO "investing", there is no useful information to be had from the price of the token.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
Thank you for sharing, I didn't even know this existed and no one brought it up during the deplatforming debate this month.
junippor 6y ago
Wow ok. The value of HN has decreased to almost zero for me, but you've made it worth it this month. Thanks for this!
- fsckboy 6y ago
  your account is 4 days old... what did it decrease from? exponentially?
nostrademons 6y ago
I remember when this came out 20 years ago. It was part of the whole wave of P2P filesharing programs that came out between 1999-2002: Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, etc. Amazing it's still going on. BTW, for folks new in tech - it's amazing how influential that wave of programs were, even though they largely failed in the marketplace. Napster founder Sean Parker later became the first investor and first president of Facebook. Also involved in the wave (in a tangential way) was Mark Zuckerburg, whose Synapse Media Player got a $M+ buyout offer from Microsoft while he was still in high school. Uber founder Travis Kalanick's first two projects were Scour (a P2P filesharing app) and Red Swoosh (a P2P CDN). I met the AudioGalaxy founder while working on Google Search - he later went on to become one of the early Waymo engineers. The Kazaa founders later went on to found Skype, and we know where that went. Chord (an academic research project in distributed hash tables) was led by Robert Tappan Morris (originally famous for creating the Internet Worm of 1988), who then went on to co-found YCombinator, which owns the website you're reading this on. The gossip protocol invented & refined by Gnutella forms the basis for many cryptocurrency P2P protocols like Bitcoin & Ethereum. There's probably several trillion dollars in market cap attributable to the intellectual descendants of a bunch of nerds who wanted to share stuff over the Internet and fuck over the RIAA, MPAA, and governments.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Probably proof that who you know is about as important as what you can do, if not more
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    The interesting thing is that most of those people weren't actually pals when working on P2P stuff, but they were all working on the same stuff. Zuckerburg and Parker didn't meet until Facebook was growing quickly. Scour/Red Swoosh, to my knowledge, had no major connection with the other projects. I view it more like an instance of synchronicity, where a lot of bright young people looked at the world independently and decided that this was the space they wanted to be working on. And then when that space didn't pan out they went their separate ways, but the fact that they were bright & energetic meant that the successor projects became huge. (I wonder if a similar effect explains the General Magic, Paypal, and Justin.TV mafias.)
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Is it really anonymous? How does it compare to Tor and i2p?
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
  > Is it really anonymous? It at least aims to be so :) As with any anonymous p2p network you need to know: Your level of privacy depends on your threat level. If the government is after you, they may very well know exploits. If you just want privacy from corporations for perfectly legal reasons then you might be fine. > How does it compare to Tor and i2p? See "How is Freenet different to Tor?" here: https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html TL;DR: Freenet is a self-contained *storage* network. Tor is a *communication* network, I2P as well. The latter is also self-contained. However as they're both communication networks they do not provide censorship-resistance. The endpoints you're connecting to are central servers and can be taken down.
  - LMYahooTFY 6y ago
    >However as they're both communication networks they do not provide censorship-resistance. The endpoints you're connecting to are central servers and can be taken down. Can you elaborate on this? This reads as essentially false to my understanding. If by endpoints you mean 'relays', those are not 'central servers'. If you mean directory authorities, then yes, those are centralized. With that said, I'm still not sure what you mean by 'they do not provide censorship-resistance.' They absolutely have and do provide censorship resistance.
    - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
      > Can you elaborate on this? This reads as essentially false to my understanding. No, it's not false AFAIK :) By 'endpoint' I mean what an address on those networks actually *addresses*. Both a Tor-address (a .onion hostname, or a regular web address if you use Tor to access one), and an I2P-address, are essentially similar to an IP-address in terms of being the address of a *machine*. They are anonymized, but the data is routed to the very specific machine which the address is of. A Freenet address on the other hand is the address of a *file* - basically a hash. So in Tor and I2P, even though the machine behind the address is anonymous, you can still DoS it because you have the address of the specific machine where the data is at. In Freenet, you cannot DoS the machine because the address does *not* tell the network where the file is stored. It only tells what file you get. Any machine on the network can serve the file to you! And in fact, if you try to DoS a file by requesting it very frequently on Freenet, it will instead be distributed MORE on the network: Machines along the path where the data is routed will cache the file. That's what provides the censorship resistance.
canofbars 6y ago
IPFS has the benefit that anyone can pin the content and then even the original author can not take it down.
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
  The same applies to Freenet: - Anyone can use the "KeepAlive" [0] plugin to pin content. - Nobody can take down any content, not even the original author [1]. Censorship-resistance is a central design goal of Freenet. [0] https://github.com/freenet/plugin-KeepAlive https://github.com/freenet/plugin-KeepAlive [1] https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html https://freenetproject.org/pages/help.html
  - canofbars 6y ago
    Seems interesting. Wanted to give it a shot but it looks like they had no official docker containers and it wasn't packaged in the fedora repos. I noticed the I2P project does have a docker image and seems to do a similar thing. Do you know what the differences between the projects are?
eternalban 6y ago
This prompted a query as to what Ian is up to these days: https://github.com/sanity/tahrir https://github.com/sanity/tahrir http://tahrirproject.org/ http://tahrirproject.org/ "Tahrir aims to be a distributed, decentralized, scalable, and anonymous "workalike" for services like Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook. It is at an early stage of development, but is being actively worked on by a number of volunteers."
nexthash 6y ago
What are the benefits and disadvantages of Freenet vs IPFS? I am genuinely curious, they seem superficially similar and yet Freenet has been around for 20 years. Personally I haven't heard of it but does it have a lot of traffic/popularity compared to IPFS?
jokoon 6y ago
A p2p fille sharing system is not a wheel. I found that freenet was a little complex. Ipfs is quite simple and modern. Doesn't freenet use Java? Anyway, software doesn't have well respected ISO standards and 20 years is an eternity in the age of the internet. So I don't see a problem with ipfs. Also, ipfs looks like it's more flexible and reusable.

motoboi 6y ago

How to generate one?

kevincox 6y ago

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTW7sdBbZ1BXau8Cmrpv5srf38GZi1AiWWBBkvUuRr8CT/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTW7sdBbZ1BXau8Cmrpv5srf38GZi1AiWWBBkv... There you go. It's not perfect though because a lot of the links still point to live assets. But it captured the important bits.

celsoazevedo 6y ago
> It's not perfect though because a lot of the links still point to live assets SingleFile is good for this: - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singlefile/mpiodijhokgodhhofbcjdecpffjipkle https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singlefile/mpiodij... - https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
Scoundreller 6y ago
That only captured the first 4 paragraphs.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I thought there only was 4. I guess I got paywalled.
  - jason505 6y ago
    MenuQQ: Agen Poker Online Terpercaya Link : http://180.215.15.109/ http://180.215.15.109/
BelenusMordred 6y ago
Just a tip, I find the cloudflare ipfs gateway to be a lot quicker. Only need to change the domain name of the link. eg. https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmTW7sdBbZ1BXau8Cmrpv5srf38GZi1AiWWBBkvUuRr8CT/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmTW7sdBbZ1BXau8Cmrpv5srf38...
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

j45 6y ago

The story and the individual are far more interesting