10 ms·

IPFS needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web

IPFS needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance? Right now it does none of those things well. The client chews through CPU and memory when seemingly doing nothing. If I try to download content, it is far slower than BitTorrent unless I go through a centralized gateway. If I add content it takes ages to propagate, making it utterly unsuitable as a replacement for a web server. There is no system to keep content alive so links will still die. The name system is byzantine and I don't think anyone uses it. Unfortunately, they are now unable to pivot because they did that asinine ICO. The right thing to do is to give up on the FileCoin nonsense and build a system that solves a problem better than anything else, but that is no longer allowed because they already sold something else to their "investors"

stuaxo 5y ago
I think you've hit the thing that many new techs have, they don't 100% cover old techs it's a bit of one and a bit of another, but not 100% of each.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  But the web wasn't about listening to music at the start! It started with organizing documents on a network, at CERN. And it took over existing document platforms by adding a simple point-and-click browser user interface to them, inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?) The modern, more economic web, wouldn't come until Netscape added form fields and cookies, at the behest of some of the original owners. And there were a ton of people at Netscape making these decisions about their vision of the future of the web. In-browser music listening wouldn't come until Macromedia, Disney and Microsoft pushed their vision for a "multi-media web"; browsers wouldn't build native support until much, much later. So yes, we absolutely decided what the web would be about, and built technology to match that vision.
  - corndoge 5y ago
    I don't see how the first two paragraphs support your conclusion here
    - bshipp 5y ago
      The first two paragraphs reiterate that the early web was very much a reflection of the hypertext transfer protocol and hypertext markup language in that it literally just handled text pages with links in them. and it did it pretty well. It wasn't designed to handle streaming video or client-side processing/page rendering via Javascript or any of the innumerable other elements added on to it later. It was designed to do one thing well.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?) I'm as much of a HyperCard fan as (almost) anyone else, but that is almost certainly not where the term "hyperlink" comes from. Ted Nelson used the word "link" back in the mid 1960s, in the context of another coinage of his, "hypertext". The historical record is already a little unclear about whether or not he was using hyperlink that early, but by the time HyperCard came to be, the term was already differentiated from a "simple link", with some level of implication caused by the "hyper" prefix that it was most likely on another computer/server. The most HyperCard could offer was a link into a different stack. The "hyper" prefix predated Hypercard, and it's meaning in the context of information processing/retrieval/presentation meant more than the majority of links that HyperCard offered (even though they were also great). Yes, I know that the wikipedia page on the word "hyperlink" claims that HyperCard "may have been the first use", but the cited reference for that claim offers no evidence for it whatsoever.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      I remember a whole fascinating section about various hypertext system in a mid-80s issue of Byte. I spent hours pouring over the screenshots in it. EDIT: here's a good summary article of pre-WWW hypertext systems from the 80s https://fibery.io/blog/hypertext-tools-from-the-80s/ https://fibery.io/blog/hypertext-tools-from-the-80s/
- adfrhgeaq5hy 5y ago
  Why is it that people trot out this argument in response to any criticism of any technology? You could apply exactly the same sort of reasoning to Microsoft Bob. Do you think that had the potential to be revolutionary? I can't see the future. I can, however, look at the world and think about what I see.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I think that the question of what user-facing purpose(s) a technology can be put to is somehow qualitatively different than what backend roles it might play. I could be wrong.
- echelon 5y ago
  > Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The web was fast (for documents on 56k) and extremely useful almost immediately. It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything.
  - muxator 5y ago
    I do not understand the downvotes here. "It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything": how to disagree?
    - lovemenot 5y ago
      I wasn't a down-voter, but I didn't have 56k in 1994. 14.4 baud iirc. You wouldn't call it fast.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        I think something regulatory changed about 1995, such that there were instantly tons of ISP startups, and I think that 33.6k modems were available about then. I had a 14.4K Zoom modem, but I'm pretty sure the ISP I worked for around '95-'96 was buying lots of US Robotics 33.6 modems. I agree that 56k came a bit later, and didn't necessarily work on any particular phone line.
        mftb 5y ago
        IMHO what changed in 1995, was MS adding TCP/IP to Windows 95. Prior to that you had fight with dial-up, Trumpet Winsock, PPP and PPTP to get on the internet at all. Most normal people still couldn't do it without help, but it moved into the realm of possible.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        During 95 or 96, I was explaining to customers over the phone how to set up Trumpet Winsock and MacTCP/PPP. Most people didn't instantly get Windows 95, so it wasn't the reason that the ISP existed. And it was already possible to access the internet to some extent through an established online service, I think I'd used Delphi, AOL, maybe others during high school. Something made it feasible right then for anybody to set up a bank of modems in their apartment, to provide direct internet, and there was an explosive growth in small ISPs before they consolidated. At the time, I was kind of oblivious to the historic moment, but the one I worked for was literally a few modems in the closet of a crummy apartment downtown when I started and within months we'd moved to an office a few blocks away and were installing modems like mad. I found this, not necessarily authoritative: "In 1994 the National Science Foundation commissioned four private companies to build four public Internet access points to replace the government-run Internet backbone: WorldCom in Washington, Pacific Bell in San Francisco, Sprint in New Jersey, and Ameritech in Chicago. Then other telecom giants entered the market with their own Internet services, which they often subcontracted to smaller companies. By 1995 there were more than 100 commercial ISPs in the USA." I think that was probably it - right then and there anyone could buy a pipe to the internet and connect some modems. It was around then that I heard the term "T1" which was a lot back then. Maybe there was some connection to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act_of_1991 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act...
- acdha 5y ago
  There are two problems with this line of argument: 1. The web succeeded but many things whose backers made similar comparisons failed. Knowing that one technology had a big impact doesn’t say that a given unproven technology will be the next one to go big. It’s more likely that you’re looking at the next Groove Networks or something like that. 2. The web was immediately useful for many people and you could get started easily. IPFS has some interesting but far from unique properties and trying to be a network increases the amount of adoption and maturity needed for it to be worth using for most people. This is especially true for peer-to-peer sharing where the most useful participation requires up-front risk and costs which many people aren’t going to want to accept. Without that, it’s basically just harder to use web hosting which may or may not be cheaper.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  It's been 6 years now and IPFS is still stuck with the same problems it had at the start with no real pathway to being useful. Most technology does something useful early on. I don't know the timeline for the web but I don't imagine it involved 6 years of marketing and selling to investors while not serving any purpose well.
  - garrickvanburen 5y ago
    HTTP was invented in 1989. Netscape was founded in 1994. So, if you’re comfortable with either of those a starting point, 6 years is somewhere in the dot com boom.
    - SwimSwimHungry 5y ago
      I'd argue the WWW was instantly useful, even during its halcyon days. IPFS on the other hand is a horrible "jack of all trades" that has mediocre performance even in the best of times, and it hasn't really gotten any better since it first launched 6 years ago. And that's not even bringing up the cryptocurrency cohort souring the project with its stench. I don't object to the existence of IPFS, rather I prefer more efficient and focused projects instead. Someone in the comment threads mentioned Solid, which sounds like a decent decentralized information protocol or system of sorts. And for those that want censorship resistance... who can forget Freenet? That project has been around since 2000 and seems to do a pretty bang up job, even if the performance is not much better.
- davidgerard 5y ago
  Saying "imagine if we said that about a technology that doesn't suck" doesn't make a technology that clearly sucks, not suck. The Web was a hit because it was really obviously useful for real work from the moment of its creation. IPFS is BitTorrent with magnet: links, and the seeding problems that implies, and the rest is janky nonsense.
- ntr-- 5y ago
  - A complex system cannot be “made” to work. It either works or it doesn’t - A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works. - Some complex systems actually work. - A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. - A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. Systemantics, John Gall, 1978
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  This only sounds ridiculous because you replaced the things the OP was talking about, with your own, to make it sound ridiculous. "Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance?" websites at the beginning did not decide to be a caching layer - they decided to be websites. they did decide to permanently store content. they did decide to use web servers. they did not decide to replace dns. they did decide to be about censorship resistance. now imagine you put up a website, put some time into it, and it may or may not be up at a random time in the future. not a product that's usable.
rackjack 5y ago
Decentralized DNS, apparently: https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/
- pmlnr 5y ago
  That is based on yet another shitcoin. IPFS is not.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rackjack 5y ago
    Hence the "apparently"...
  - short12 5y ago
    Filecoin
sebastos 5y ago
IPFS's design makes it so that it's all of those things, or none of them. Picking one of them doesn't fit the shape of the technology. IPFS is basically the answer to the question "what is the RIGHT way to decentralize the web?". If you think about that question hard enough, then anyone can see that their way of doing it is the "right" way. It's just obvious. The problem is that all of these mutually supporting components need to be bootstrapped in order to make it work. You can't take the storage of content and federate it out across the entire internet without being able to refer to it by a content id. You can't just have content addressing by itself, because then it's inconvenient to find things on a day-to-day basis. So that means you need a DNS equivalent. And you can't assume a decentralized graph of network participants will bother to serve this information unless there's reward in it for them. So you come to filecoin. Etc. Point being, they didn't just bite these pieces off randomly: they see a picture of how the internet _could_ work, and they're trying to realize it. If they can get it working, then boom! You have decentralized internet, and you also have a ton of bonuses that just fall out from this being the right way to do things: resistance to censorship, better archiving, reduced influence of web megacorps, etc. But you have to have it -all- to actually be better. The sum is WAY greater than the parts. The trouble is, this statement: > Right now it does none of those things well. is true. So I get what you're saying. To build user-adoption, they need to find a way to deliver an improved experience, not just an improved model that would be better if more people used it. But I object to the idea that the solution is to choose one of those things at the exclusion of the others. The whole idea doesn't make sense if they choose one. If I were advising them, I wouldn't tell them to reduce their scope in terms of "doing all the things", but rather reduce their scope in terms of doing all the things for the entire internet. They should find some kind of sub-network or community that gets extra value out of the decentralization, and prove out the concept there. Maybe it's a big company's intranet, or a network of (paging ARPA) universities?
- cyanydeez 5y ago
  as in government, even if you have the mythical unicorn, the actual behavior of the users is what decides what is right and will push that forward.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
agumonkey 5y ago
and recently, a crypocurrency subsystem
jayd16 5y ago
Yeah, I have to agree. We have working examples of immutable copy/append only web apps. Email/mailing lists didn't need crypto to succeed. Neither did bit-torrent. Baking in a coin seems like a me-too sort of move.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> There is no system to keep content alive so links will still die. Torrent trackers solved this in a very interesting way. They created an economic system where bandwidth was the currency, incentivizing the permanent seeding of content. It was illegal to take more than you gave. I've even seen an academic paper studying their system! Bandwidth as a currency eventually proved to be a failure. It enabled the rise of seedboxes, dedicated servers featuring terabytes of storage and connections to high capacity network links. Just like the IPFS centralized gateways you mentioned. They would eventually monopolize all seeding, removing any normal person's ability to gain currency. In some trackers, if you wanted to consume content, your only options were renting one of these seedboxes or uploading new content to the tracker. You always stood to gain at least as much bandwidth as the size of the content you uploaded. The seedboxes would monitor recent uploads and instantly download your new content from you so that they could undercut you. I suppose it was a form of market speculation. They also failed to realize that there is no uploading without downloading. By penalizing leechers economically, they disincentivized downloading. This led to users being choosier: instead of downloading what they like, they'd download more popular stuff that's likely to provide higher bandwidth returns on their investment. Obscure content seeders would not see much business, so to speak, due to the low demand for the data. Users would stock up on popular and freeleech content so they could get any spare change they could. The more users did this, the less each individual user would get. Then seedboxes came and left them with nearly nothing. This was eventually solved by incentivizing what was truly important: redundancy. Trackers created "bonus points" awarded to seeders of content every hour they spent seeding, regardless of how much data they actually uploaded to other users. These points can be traded for bandwidth. This incentivized users to keep data available at all times, increasing the number of redundant copies in the swarm. People will seed even the most obscure content for years and years. In some trackers, these rewards were inversely proportional to the amount of seeders: you made more when there were fewer seeders. This encouraged people to actively find these poorly seeded torrents and provide redundancy for them. We can learn from this. People should be compensated somehow for providing data redundancy: keeping data stored on their disks, and allowing the software to copy it over the network to anyone who needs it. The data could even be encrypted, there's no reason people even need to know what it is. Perhaps a cryptocurrency could find decent application here. Isn't there a filecoin? Not sure how it works.
dannyobrien 5y ago
Note that the Filecoin network (which was designed to be the incentive layer for IPFS storage) has been operational for some time. If you look at the current status at https://file.app/ https://file.app/ , you can see that storage costs there are extremely low for large amounts of data. If you can get your data verified as open, public data by applying for datacap with a Filecoin+ notary, it's currently free. See https://plus.fil.org/ https://plus.fil.org/ (you can get 32GB of free datacap to play with just for having a github account). If you want to use the Filecoin network as a "provider of last resort" for IPFS data, there's https://estuary.tech https://estuary.tech which will mark your data as verified, sort out the deals with storage providers, and then mirror it to IPFS. There's also third-party tools like https://fission.codes/ https://fission.codes/ , https://docs.textile.io/powergate/ https://docs.textile.io/powergate/ , https://web3.storage/ https://web3.storage/ and https://www.pinata.cloud/ https://www.pinata.cloud/ for making this easier. (Disclosure: I work at the Filecoin Foundation.)
- nl 5y ago
  > If you look at the current status at https://file.app/ https://file.app/ , you can see that storage costs there are extremely low for large amounts of data. We were looking at this at work the other day. We noticed the storage price vs S3 saying "0.03% the cost of Amazon S3" and then someone (who's been trying to get adequate performance out of IPFS for a while) said "0.03% of the price, and even lower performance".
skyde 5y ago
what did they sold to investor? The idea that people will pay for hosting using filecoin?

stuaxo 5y ago

I think you've hit the thing that many new techs have, they don't 100% cover old techs it's a bit of one and a bit of another, but not 100% of each.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?

Jasper_ 5y ago
But the web wasn't about listening to music at the start! It started with organizing documents on a network, at CERN. And it took over existing document platforms by adding a simple point-and-click browser user interface to them, inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?) The modern, more economic web, wouldn't come until Netscape added form fields and cookies, at the behest of some of the original owners. And there were a ton of people at Netscape making these decisions about their vision of the future of the web. In-browser music listening wouldn't come until Macromedia, Disney and Microsoft pushed their vision for a "multi-media web"; browsers wouldn't build native support until much, much later. So yes, we absolutely decided what the web would be about, and built technology to match that vision.
- corndoge 5y ago
  I don't see how the first two paragraphs support your conclusion here
  - bshipp 5y ago
    The first two paragraphs reiterate that the early web was very much a reflection of the hypertext transfer protocol and hypertext markup language in that it literally just handled text pages with links in them. and it did it pretty well. It wasn't designed to handle streaming video or client-side processing/page rendering via Javascript or any of the innumerable other elements added on to it later. It was designed to do one thing well.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?) I'm as much of a HyperCard fan as (almost) anyone else, but that is almost certainly not where the term "hyperlink" comes from. Ted Nelson used the word "link" back in the mid 1960s, in the context of another coinage of his, "hypertext". The historical record is already a little unclear about whether or not he was using hyperlink that early, but by the time HyperCard came to be, the term was already differentiated from a "simple link", with some level of implication caused by the "hyper" prefix that it was most likely on another computer/server. The most HyperCard could offer was a link into a different stack. The "hyper" prefix predated Hypercard, and it's meaning in the context of information processing/retrieval/presentation meant more than the majority of links that HyperCard offered (even though they were also great). Yes, I know that the wikipedia page on the word "hyperlink" claims that HyperCard "may have been the first use", but the cited reference for that claim offers no evidence for it whatsoever.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    I remember a whole fascinating section about various hypertext system in a mid-80s issue of Byte. I spent hours pouring over the screenshots in it. EDIT: here's a good summary article of pre-WWW hypertext systems from the 80s https://fibery.io/blog/hypertext-tools-from-the-80s/ https://fibery.io/blog/hypertext-tools-from-the-80s/
adfrhgeaq5hy 5y ago
Why is it that people trot out this argument in response to any criticism of any technology? You could apply exactly the same sort of reasoning to Microsoft Bob. Do you think that had the potential to be revolutionary? I can't see the future. I can, however, look at the world and think about what I see.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I think that the question of what user-facing purpose(s) a technology can be put to is somehow qualitatively different than what backend roles it might play. I could be wrong.
echelon 5y ago
> Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The web was fast (for documents on 56k) and extremely useful almost immediately. It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything.
- muxator 5y ago
  I do not understand the downvotes here. "It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything": how to disagree?
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    I wasn't a down-voter, but I didn't have 56k in 1994. 14.4 baud iirc. You wouldn't call it fast.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I think something regulatory changed about 1995, such that there were instantly tons of ISP startups, and I think that 33.6k modems were available about then. I had a 14.4K Zoom modem, but I'm pretty sure the ISP I worked for around '95-'96 was buying lots of US Robotics 33.6 modems. I agree that 56k came a bit later, and didn't necessarily work on any particular phone line.
      - mftb 5y ago
        IMHO what changed in 1995, was MS adding TCP/IP to Windows 95. Prior to that you had fight with dial-up, Trumpet Winsock, PPP and PPTP to get on the internet at all. Most normal people still couldn't do it without help, but it moved into the realm of possible.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        During 95 or 96, I was explaining to customers over the phone how to set up Trumpet Winsock and MacTCP/PPP. Most people didn't instantly get Windows 95, so it wasn't the reason that the ISP existed. And it was already possible to access the internet to some extent through an established online service, I think I'd used Delphi, AOL, maybe others during high school. Something made it feasible right then for anybody to set up a bank of modems in their apartment, to provide direct internet, and there was an explosive growth in small ISPs before they consolidated. At the time, I was kind of oblivious to the historic moment, but the one I worked for was literally a few modems in the closet of a crummy apartment downtown when I started and within months we'd moved to an office a few blocks away and were installing modems like mad. I found this, not necessarily authoritative: "In 1994 the National Science Foundation commissioned four private companies to build four public Internet access points to replace the government-run Internet backbone: WorldCom in Washington, Pacific Bell in San Francisco, Sprint in New Jersey, and Ameritech in Chicago. Then other telecom giants entered the market with their own Internet services, which they often subcontracted to smaller companies. By 1995 there were more than 100 commercial ISPs in the USA." I think that was probably it - right then and there anyone could buy a pipe to the internet and connect some modems. It was around then that I heard the term "T1" which was a lot back then. Maybe there was some connection to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act_of_1991 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act...
acdha 5y ago
There are two problems with this line of argument: 1. The web succeeded but many things whose backers made similar comparisons failed. Knowing that one technology had a big impact doesn’t say that a given unproven technology will be the next one to go big. It’s more likely that you’re looking at the next Groove Networks or something like that. 2. The web was immediately useful for many people and you could get started easily. IPFS has some interesting but far from unique properties and trying to be a network increases the amount of adoption and maturity needed for it to be worth using for most people. This is especially true for peer-to-peer sharing where the most useful participation requires up-front risk and costs which many people aren’t going to want to accept. Without that, it’s basically just harder to use web hosting which may or may not be cheaper.
Gigachad 5y ago
It's been 6 years now and IPFS is still stuck with the same problems it had at the start with no real pathway to being useful. Most technology does something useful early on. I don't know the timeline for the web but I don't imagine it involved 6 years of marketing and selling to investors while not serving any purpose well.
- garrickvanburen 5y ago
  HTTP was invented in 1989. Netscape was founded in 1994. So, if you’re comfortable with either of those a starting point, 6 years is somewhere in the dot com boom.
  - SwimSwimHungry 5y ago
    I'd argue the WWW was instantly useful, even during its halcyon days. IPFS on the other hand is a horrible "jack of all trades" that has mediocre performance even in the best of times, and it hasn't really gotten any better since it first launched 6 years ago. And that's not even bringing up the cryptocurrency cohort souring the project with its stench. I don't object to the existence of IPFS, rather I prefer more efficient and focused projects instead. Someone in the comment threads mentioned Solid, which sounds like a decent decentralized information protocol or system of sorts. And for those that want censorship resistance... who can forget Freenet? That project has been around since 2000 and seems to do a pretty bang up job, even if the performance is not much better.
davidgerard 5y ago
Saying "imagine if we said that about a technology that doesn't suck" doesn't make a technology that clearly sucks, not suck. The Web was a hit because it was really obviously useful for real work from the moment of its creation. IPFS is BitTorrent with magnet: links, and the seeding problems that implies, and the rest is janky nonsense.
ntr-- 5y ago
- A complex system cannot be “made” to work. It either works or it doesn’t - A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works. - Some complex systems actually work. - A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. - A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. Systemantics, John Gall, 1978
soylentnewsorg 5y ago
This only sounds ridiculous because you replaced the things the OP was talking about, with your own, to make it sound ridiculous. "Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance?" websites at the beginning did not decide to be a caching layer - they decided to be websites. they did decide to permanently store content. they did decide to use web servers. they did not decide to replace dns. they did decide to be about censorship resistance. now imagine you put up a website, put some time into it, and it may or may not be up at a random time in the future. not a product that's usable.

rackjack 5y ago

Decentralized DNS, apparently: https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/

pmlnr 5y ago
That is based on yet another shitcoin. IPFS is not.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rackjack 5y ago
  Hence the "apparently"...
- short12 5y ago
  Filecoin

sebastos 5y ago

IPFS's design makes it so that it's all of those things, or none of them. Picking one of them doesn't fit the shape of the technology. IPFS is basically the answer to the question "what is the RIGHT way to decentralize the web?". If you think about that question hard enough, then anyone can see that their way of doing it is the "right" way. It's just obvious. The problem is that all of these mutually supporting components need to be bootstrapped in order to make it work. You can't take the storage of content and federate it out across the entire internet without being able to refer to it by a content id. You can't just have content addressing by itself, because then it's inconvenient to find things on a day-to-day basis. So that means you need a DNS equivalent. And you can't assume a decentralized graph of network participants will bother to serve this information unless there's reward in it for them. So you come to filecoin. Etc. Point being, they didn't just bite these pieces off randomly: they see a picture of how the internet _could_ work, and they're trying to realize it. If they can get it working, then boom! You have decentralized internet, and you also have a ton of bonuses that just fall out from this being the right way to do things: resistance to censorship, better archiving, reduced influence of web megacorps, etc. But you have to have it -all- to actually be better. The sum is WAY greater than the parts. The trouble is, this statement: > Right now it does none of those things well. is true. So I get what you're saying. To build user-adoption, they need to find a way to deliver an improved experience, not just an improved model that would be better if more people used it. But I object to the idea that the solution is to choose one of those things at the exclusion of the others. The whole idea doesn't make sense if they choose one. If I were advising them, I wouldn't tell them to reduce their scope in terms of "doing all the things", but rather reduce their scope in terms of doing all the things for the entire internet. They should find some kind of sub-network or community that gets extra value out of the decentralization, and prove out the concept there. Maybe it's a big company's intranet, or a network of (paging ARPA) universities?

cyanydeez 5y ago
as in government, even if you have the mythical unicorn, the actual behavior of the users is what decides what is right and will push that forward.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

agumonkey 5y ago

and recently, a crypocurrency subsystem

jayd16 5y ago

Yeah, I have to agree. We have working examples of immutable copy/append only web apps. Email/mailing lists didn't need crypto to succeed. Neither did bit-torrent. Baking in a coin seems like a me-too sort of move.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> There is no system to keep content alive so links will still die. Torrent trackers solved this in a very interesting way. They created an economic system where bandwidth was the currency, incentivizing the permanent seeding of content. It was illegal to take more than you gave. I've even seen an academic paper studying their system! Bandwidth as a currency eventually proved to be a failure. It enabled the rise of seedboxes, dedicated servers featuring terabytes of storage and connections to high capacity network links. Just like the IPFS centralized gateways you mentioned. They would eventually monopolize all seeding, removing any normal person's ability to gain currency. In some trackers, if you wanted to consume content, your only options were renting one of these seedboxes or uploading new content to the tracker. You always stood to gain at least as much bandwidth as the size of the content you uploaded. The seedboxes would monitor recent uploads and instantly download your new content from you so that they could undercut you. I suppose it was a form of market speculation. They also failed to realize that there is no uploading without downloading. By penalizing leechers economically, they disincentivized downloading. This led to users being choosier: instead of downloading what they like, they'd download more popular stuff that's likely to provide higher bandwidth returns on their investment. Obscure content seeders would not see much business, so to speak, due to the low demand for the data. Users would stock up on popular and freeleech content so they could get any spare change they could. The more users did this, the less each individual user would get. Then seedboxes came and left them with nearly nothing. This was eventually solved by incentivizing what was truly important: redundancy. Trackers created "bonus points" awarded to seeders of content every hour they spent seeding, regardless of how much data they actually uploaded to other users. These points can be traded for bandwidth. This incentivized users to keep data available at all times, increasing the number of redundant copies in the swarm. People will seed even the most obscure content for years and years. In some trackers, these rewards were inversely proportional to the amount of seeders: you made more when there were fewer seeders. This encouraged people to actively find these poorly seeded torrents and provide redundancy for them. We can learn from this. People should be compensated somehow for providing data redundancy: keeping data stored on their disks, and allowing the software to copy it over the network to anyone who needs it. The data could even be encrypted, there's no reason people even need to know what it is. Perhaps a cryptocurrency could find decent application here. Isn't there a filecoin? Not sure how it works.

dannyobrien 5y ago

Note that the Filecoin network (which was designed to be the incentive layer for IPFS storage) has been operational for some time. If you look at the current status at https://file.app/ https://file.app/ , you can see that storage costs there are extremely low for large amounts of data. If you can get your data verified as open, public data by applying for datacap with a Filecoin+ notary, it's currently free. See https://plus.fil.org/ https://plus.fil.org/ (you can get 32GB of free datacap to play with just for having a github account). If you want to use the Filecoin network as a "provider of last resort" for IPFS data, there's https://estuary.tech https://estuary.tech which will mark your data as verified, sort out the deals with storage providers, and then mirror it to IPFS. There's also third-party tools like https://fission.codes/ https://fission.codes/ , https://docs.textile.io/powergate/ https://docs.textile.io/powergate/ , https://web3.storage/ https://web3.storage/ and https://www.pinata.cloud/ https://www.pinata.cloud/ for making this easier. (Disclosure: I work at the Filecoin Foundation.)

nl 5y ago
> If you look at the current status at https://file.app/ https://file.app/ , you can see that storage costs there are extremely low for large amounts of data. We were looking at this at work the other day. We noticed the storage price vs S3 saying "0.03% the cost of Amazon S3" and then someone (who's been trying to get adequate performance out of IPFS for a while) said "0.03% of the price, and even lower performance".

skyde 5y ago

what did they sold to investor? The idea that people will pay for hosting using filecoin?