6 ms·

I love IPFS. It's one of my favorite recent technologies, but I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. Decentralized tech doesn't

I love IPFS. It's one of my favorite recent technologies, but I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. Decentralized tech doesn't work well until the network effects build up. IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands of people, and finding it and downloading it would be extremely fast. Then subsequent viewings would be instantaneous because you can cache it for life. This leaves interesting incentives for monetizing pinning and caching for less popular content. It makes sense if you ask me. If I love a piece of music so much that I'm willing to give it to others for free then everyone benefits from being able to access it easier. Content that people care about organically becomes more resilient and nearly impossible to remove. Content that no one cares about is slow and inefficient because it has to be hauled out of cold storage the one time a year anyone cares. If someone thinks that content is more important than people are giving it credit for they can host it or pay for someone else to do it. If you have a website and you have "fans" that subscribe to you and help pin all your stuff, then your stuff becomes faster and easier to get. Your "fans" can even get paid for helping to serve your content. So, to me, it's early days for IPFS, and the way to make it better is to try to build apps that increase its usage, so the power of the network effects is felt.

wly_cdgr 5y ago
> IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. That sounds like the worst of the current internet, but even worse
- z3c0 5y ago
  Or, you know, BitTorrent, which works perfectly fine.
  - vangelis 5y ago
    There's a reason private trackers have to incentivize keeping the long tail alive.
    - noman-land 5y ago
      Look at any public tracker and you'll find torrents that are very old, swarming strong.
      - azinman2 5y ago
        Along with those that have 0 seeders.
        kortilla 5y ago
        IPFS solved that by making sure even popular stuff is difficult to get.
        unknownOrigin 5y ago
        Thanks, quite a bit of coffee is now on my keyboard...
        SwimSwimHungry 5y ago
        Dude this made my day. Thanks! xD
      - retrac 5y ago
        Survivor bias, there.
      - FalconSensei 5y ago
        Sometimes I try to get something that is a year old (or even 6 months) and it's stuck for weeks at 99%
    - z3c0 5y ago
      Yes, there is a reason: because they're private and have limited users.
adfrhgeaq5hy 5y ago
It isn't that early. They have a stupendous amount of money and have been around since 2014. By now they should have something to show for their work.
saurik 5y ago
> If millions of people were using IPFS... ...then IPFS would just get even slower and use even more resources to manage the index and find content as I am pretty sure the DHT they are using doesn't scale the way you seem to think it does.
- nephanth 5y ago
  Why ? iirc the time I studied them, DHTs scale pretty well (like log(size of the network) complexity for everything).
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    log(size of the network) still means it gets slower as it gets larger without any aforementioned speed advantages for all but the IPFS Google popularity equivalent class content.
    - gspr 5y ago
      You seem to underestimate how slowly logarithms grow.
      - saurik 5y ago
        That doesn't matter, as it clearly grows faster than constant (as in, O(1)), which means that as the system gets larger it will take more time to do queries and maintain the index (which is ridiculously expensive on IPFS), not less (which was the claim we are contending is wrong... a claim which would still be wrong even if the system somehow were magically constant); and any supposed advantages in "caching" don't fix this (except maybe for extremely popular files: at best, ones more popular than the median file, though my intuition tells me it is going to be some inverse log worse than that, and I also suspect it might be the mean file instead of the median) as one is going to expect the number of unique files stored in the system as well as the number of queries performed to scale with the number of people using the system.
kortilla 5y ago
It’s not a young idea though. The basic technology for p2p networks has been around for decades. DHTs, voting, vouching, etc were all got academia topics like 10-20 years ago. It’s just engineering skills at this point. I remember popcorntime was as responsive as Netflix at the time it came out and it scared the shit out of the MPAA so they killed it with prejudice. IPFS doesn’t have an excuse for sucking beyond a basic lack of engineering effort.
acdha 5y ago
> think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. This interesting given your description: > IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands of people, and finding it and downloading it would be extremely fast. This idea hasn’t been new since the turn of the century (BitTorrent offered exactly that in 2001) and nothing in that description explains why this is different than the many previous attempts. It’d be interesting to hear about how IPFS plans to maintain that without the problems with abuse and how it keeps competitive performance relative to non-P2P in a world where things like CDNs are much cheaper and easily available than they were around the turn of the century. Using P2P means giving up a lot of control for the content provider and that’s a challenge both from the perspective of the types of content offered and the ability to update or otherwise support it on your schedule.
- noman-land 5y ago
  IPFS is basically BitTorrent if all the torrents could share with each other. IPFS is as if each "torrent" is a single chunk of data instead of a siloed collection of stuff. IPFS expands BitTorrent into a global filesystem. You can mount IPFS on your filesystem and address files by pointing at local resources on your machine. So you could have an HTML file say `<img src="/ipfs/QmCoolPic" />`. You can't do that with BitTorrent.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    Okay, but it's not 2001 anymore. Bittorrent was useful because parallelizing uploads across a broad network increased speed to a degree that content hosts couldn't manage. But that's not true anymore, most internet power-users are on broadband connections, many of which are symmetric, transfer speeds up or down are no longer a limiter that pushes people towards decentralization. So when considering a decentralized system like IPFS, the downsides of decentralization, like availability, edit control, and service support, are much more salient. There are a lot of things that "could work if everybody uses it". You can never get there if the thing isn't desirable compared to existing alternatives.
amelius 5y ago
> IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. So niche content is difficult to get a hold of? Sounds like a bad idea.
- haggy102 5y ago
  Yeah sounds like our existing situation where content is largely moderated by centralized governing bodies. Big -1
- naasking 5y ago
  No more difficult than it already was to obtain. The point being, obtaining the popular stuff is no longer subject to DoS because distributed caching is built into the protocol itself.
kbumsik 5y ago
> If millions of people were using IPFS You criticize that people have unrealistic expectation, and then you are making an unrealistic claim...
- noman-land 5y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. Ethereum 2 is using libp2p to facilitate p2p communication between nodes. IPFS also uses libp2p. That means that every Ethereum node could easily become an IPFS node so people may end up running an IPFS node without even realizing it.
nl 5y ago
> I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. It launched in Feb 2015. Things that have launched since then: The idea of Donald Trump as President of the USA TikTok Covid-19 Tesla Model 3 OpenAI It's entirely possible that everything could change any day now. It's equally plausible that it's just a bad implementation of a decent idea, and something similar could come along and deliver on its promise.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >The idea of Donald Trump as President of the USA I find this disturbing, because not only is it not true, that it originated in 2015, and many people have commented on how The Simpsons predicted it in 2000... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_to_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_to_the_Future ...but the reason they predicted it had a lot to do with Trump running in 2000, and more recently, he's reportedly been saying he is such a winner he won the first time he ran. So it reminds me of the famous photo with Stalin and the "vanishing Commissar"...but what do you know - that has been deleted from Wikipedia recently! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Commissar_Vanishes_2.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Commissar_Vanish... It was there prior to 2016 though: https://web.archive.org/web/20150516002908/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Commissar_Vanishes_2.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20150516002908/https://commons.w...
  - nl 5y ago
    You are missing the point of what I'm saying. Trump wasn't taken seriously as a candidate in 2015. He didn't declare his candidacy until July 2015 at which point his odds were 150/1 and it didn't get above 66/1 in 2015. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-36392621 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-36392621 In 2000 his run wasn't taken seriously either. He had a approval rating of 7%. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidential_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidenti...
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      Ok, fine, you wrote "the idea" and you meant "taking seriously". But I suspect you had it right the first time. I sort of think "the idea" is the relevant stage. And that adds ~15 years to that particular thing.
FalconSensei 5y ago
> If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands of people, and finding it and downloading it would be extremely fast. Except that most people outside tech would probably be using phones/tablets/crappy pcs, with upload speed that is 10% of their download speed.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

> IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. That sounds like the worst of the current internet, but even worse

z3c0 5y ago
Or, you know, BitTorrent, which works perfectly fine.
- vangelis 5y ago
  There's a reason private trackers have to incentivize keeping the long tail alive.
  - noman-land 5y ago
    Look at any public tracker and you'll find torrents that are very old, swarming strong.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Along with those that have 0 seeders.
      - kortilla 5y ago
        IPFS solved that by making sure even popular stuff is difficult to get.
        unknownOrigin 5y ago
        Thanks, quite a bit of coffee is now on my keyboard...
        SwimSwimHungry 5y ago
        Dude this made my day. Thanks! xD
    - retrac 5y ago
      Survivor bias, there.
    - FalconSensei 5y ago
      Sometimes I try to get something that is a year old (or even 6 months) and it's stuck for weeks at 99%
  - z3c0 5y ago
    Yes, there is a reason: because they're private and have limited users.

adfrhgeaq5hy 5y ago

It isn't that early. They have a stupendous amount of money and have been around since 2014. By now they should have something to show for their work.

saurik 5y ago

> If millions of people were using IPFS... ...then IPFS would just get even slower and use even more resources to manage the index and find content as I am pretty sure the DHT they are using doesn't scale the way you seem to think it does.

nephanth 5y ago
Why ? iirc the time I studied them, DHTs scale pretty well (like log(size of the network) complexity for everything).
- zamadatix 5y ago
  log(size of the network) still means it gets slower as it gets larger without any aforementioned speed advantages for all but the IPFS Google popularity equivalent class content.
  - gspr 5y ago
    You seem to underestimate how slowly logarithms grow.
    - saurik 5y ago
      That doesn't matter, as it clearly grows faster than constant (as in, O(1)), which means that as the system gets larger it will take more time to do queries and maintain the index (which is ridiculously expensive on IPFS), not less (which was the claim we are contending is wrong... a claim which would still be wrong even if the system somehow were magically constant); and any supposed advantages in "caching" don't fix this (except maybe for extremely popular files: at best, ones more popular than the median file, though my intuition tells me it is going to be some inverse log worse than that, and I also suspect it might be the mean file instead of the median) as one is going to expect the number of unique files stored in the system as well as the number of queries performed to scale with the number of people using the system.

kortilla 5y ago

It’s not a young idea though. The basic technology for p2p networks has been around for decades. DHTs, voting, vouching, etc were all got academia topics like 10-20 years ago. It’s just engineering skills at this point. I remember popcorntime was as responsive as Netflix at the time it came out and it scared the shit out of the MPAA so they killed it with prejudice. IPFS doesn’t have an excuse for sucking beyond a basic lack of engineering effort.

acdha 5y ago

> think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. This interesting given your description: > IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands of people, and finding it and downloading it would be extremely fast. This idea hasn’t been new since the turn of the century (BitTorrent offered exactly that in 2001) and nothing in that description explains why this is different than the many previous attempts. It’d be interesting to hear about how IPFS plans to maintain that without the problems with abuse and how it keeps competitive performance relative to non-P2P in a world where things like CDNs are much cheaper and easily available than they were around the turn of the century. Using P2P means giving up a lot of control for the content provider and that’s a challenge both from the perspective of the types of content offered and the ability to update or otherwise support it on your schedule.

noman-land 5y ago
IPFS is basically BitTorrent if all the torrents could share with each other. IPFS is as if each "torrent" is a single chunk of data instead of a siloed collection of stuff. IPFS expands BitTorrent into a global filesystem. You can mount IPFS on your filesystem and address files by pointing at local resources on your machine. So you could have an HTML file say `<img src="/ipfs/QmCoolPic" />`. You can't do that with BitTorrent.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  Okay, but it's not 2001 anymore. Bittorrent was useful because parallelizing uploads across a broad network increased speed to a degree that content hosts couldn't manage. But that's not true anymore, most internet power-users are on broadband connections, many of which are symmetric, transfer speeds up or down are no longer a limiter that pushes people towards decentralization. So when considering a decentralized system like IPFS, the downsides of decentralization, like availability, edit control, and service support, are much more salient. There are a lot of things that "could work if everybody uses it". You can never get there if the thing isn't desirable compared to existing alternatives.

amelius 5y ago

> IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. So niche content is difficult to get a hold of? Sounds like a bad idea.

haggy102 5y ago
Yeah sounds like our existing situation where content is largely moderated by centralized governing bodies. Big -1
naasking 5y ago
No more difficult than it already was to obtain. The point being, obtaining the popular stuff is no longer subject to DoS because distributed caching is built into the protocol itself.

kbumsik 5y ago

> If millions of people were using IPFS You criticize that people have unrealistic expectation, and then you are making an unrealistic claim...

noman-land 5y ago
I don't think that's necessarily true. Ethereum 2 is using libp2p to facilitate p2p communication between nodes. IPFS also uses libp2p. That means that every Ethereum node could easily become an IPFS node so people may end up running an IPFS node without even realizing it.

nl 5y ago

> I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. It launched in Feb 2015. Things that have launched since then: The idea of Donald Trump as President of the USA TikTok Covid-19 Tesla Model 3 OpenAI It's entirely possible that everything could change any day now. It's equally plausible that it's just a bad implementation of a decent idea, and something similar could come along and deliver on its promise.

perl4ever 5y ago
>The idea of Donald Trump as President of the USA I find this disturbing, because not only is it not true, that it originated in 2015, and many people have commented on how The Simpsons predicted it in 2000... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_to_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_to_the_Future ...but the reason they predicted it had a lot to do with Trump running in 2000, and more recently, he's reportedly been saying he is such a winner he won the first time he ran. So it reminds me of the famous photo with Stalin and the "vanishing Commissar"...but what do you know - that has been deleted from Wikipedia recently! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Commissar_Vanishes_2.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Commissar_Vanish... It was there prior to 2016 though: https://web.archive.org/web/20150516002908/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Commissar_Vanishes_2.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20150516002908/https://commons.w...
- nl 5y ago
  You are missing the point of what I'm saying. Trump wasn't taken seriously as a candidate in 2015. He didn't declare his candidacy until July 2015 at which point his odds were 150/1 and it didn't get above 66/1 in 2015. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-36392621 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-36392621 In 2000 his run wasn't taken seriously either. He had a approval rating of 7%. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidential_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidenti...
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    Ok, fine, you wrote "the idea" and you meant "taking seriously". But I suspect you had it right the first time. I sort of think "the idea" is the relevant stage. And that adds ~15 years to that particular thing.

FalconSensei 5y ago

> If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands of people, and finding it and downloading it would be extremely fast. Except that most people outside tech would probably be using phones/tablets/crappy pcs, with upload speed that is 10% of their download speed.