3 ms·
IPFS is mostly fine technology for storing data in a content-addressable way. FileCoin is, at best, an inefficient way to incentivize people to store your data
by fwip 6y ago
IPFS is mostly fine technology for storing data in a content-addressable way.
FileCoin is, at best, an inefficient way to incentivize people to store your data in an imaginary trustless world. (At worst, it's an obvious scam.)
You can imagine any hosting provider offering regular IPFS hosting.
Sign up on our website, send us a list of data to store, pay us money, and we'll guarantee you can get it back or you can sue us - same as the guarantees by any conventional hosting provider. This works fine and well without gluing Filecoin to it.
- pessimizer 6y agoThe advantage would be to have a program on my computer that would negotiate prices with providers and manage latency and redundancy. This could of course also be solved if storage providers, as a group, standardized on a single protocol (creating a commodity industry.) I'm not sure there's a huge difference between that and this, other than anonymity for providers (which is the major critique of this blogpost.)
- kevincox 6y agoIPFS is not a storage technology. IPFS is a retrieval technology. In fact the two technologies would complement each other really well. Imagine that you could pay someone to make content available on IPFS, basically a distributed pinning service. However this isn't trivial because IPFS generally assumes that people with files would like to share them, however a for-profit storage node would be incentivized to use as little bandwidth as possible.
- fwip 6y agoIPFS includes both storage and retrieval. I outlined in my post a specific, trivial way to pay somebody to make data available on IPFS.
- kevincox 6y agoI guess we are arguing semantics but your last paragraph sounds like you are asking someone to do storage and make it available over IPFS, I still see the storage part as quite disparate. This is like saying HTTP provides storage because you can pay someone to host your files and allow you to access them over HTTP.