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Serious question: why would anyone use IPFS for storage compared to available options? Everything I see points to it being ludicrously more expensive, not havi

Serious question: why would anyone use IPFS for storage compared to available options? Everything I see points to it being ludicrously more expensive, not having good systems for redundancy and availability, etc.

anchpop 5y ago
It's not meaningful to talk about IPFS being expensive, it's like saying bittorrent is expensive. Both are just ways for people to seed a file, and other people to retrieve that file from its hash. There's only as much redundancy as there are people who want to seed it. IPFS is in wide usage because of libgen haha. Currently the resolver can take 30ish seconds, and there's a new, fancier resolver that supposedly takes <5 seconds, which is still pretty high compared to what people are used to but it's a work in progress. There's also IPNS which allows for the controller of a keypair to update the content associated with an identifier. Filecoin is an incentive layer for IPFS that I'm much less bullish on. It's probably what you were thinking of, it's a way to pay money to have someone host or serve something for you on IPFS. It seems pretty underbaked to me but I think it's in the same order of magnitude, cost wise, as AWS.
- VHRanger 5y ago
  What I really want is bittorrent, but with "live" file repositories, that can be updated by the maker. Otherwise, I'm actually too well served by the regular cloud storage options to be honest.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    That's IPNS
NathanKP 5y ago
Peer to peer networking is still expensive because there aren't as many peers in it and it is not likely that data is cached at a peer close to you. This also reduces redundancy and availability. There is nothing fundamentally stopping a peer to peer file system from having speed, redundancy, and availability, except that it doesn't have the economy of scale yet. I think the fact that providers like Cloudflare are offering an IPFS gateway (in private beta) is an encouraging sign that we could soon reach the point where there are many more peers and providers caching IPFS at the edge, in distributed locations around the world: https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gateway https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...

anchpop 5y ago

It's not meaningful to talk about IPFS being expensive, it's like saying bittorrent is expensive. Both are just ways for people to seed a file, and other people to retrieve that file from its hash. There's only as much redundancy as there are people who want to seed it. IPFS is in wide usage because of libgen haha. Currently the resolver can take 30ish seconds, and there's a new, fancier resolver that supposedly takes <5 seconds, which is still pretty high compared to what people are used to but it's a work in progress. There's also IPNS which allows for the controller of a keypair to update the content associated with an identifier. Filecoin is an incentive layer for IPFS that I'm much less bullish on. It's probably what you were thinking of, it's a way to pay money to have someone host or serve something for you on IPFS. It seems pretty underbaked to me but I think it's in the same order of magnitude, cost wise, as AWS.

VHRanger 5y ago
What I really want is bittorrent, but with "live" file repositories, that can be updated by the maker. Otherwise, I'm actually too well served by the regular cloud storage options to be honest.
- anchpop 5y ago
  That's IPNS

NathanKP 5y ago

Peer to peer networking is still expensive because there aren't as many peers in it and it is not likely that data is cached at a peer close to you. This also reduces redundancy and availability. There is nothing fundamentally stopping a peer to peer file system from having speed, redundancy, and availability, except that it doesn't have the economy of scale yet. I think the fact that providers like Cloudflare are offering an IPFS gateway (in private beta) is an encouraging sign that we could soon reach the point where there are many more peers and providers caching IPFS at the edge, in distributed locations around the world: https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gateway https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...