8 ms·

IPFS Backed by Decentralized Storage

130 points by zacincceo 5y ago

octoberfranklin 5y ago
Error 1005 Ray ID: 6e577ed77a5902bc • 2022-03-02 04:47:38 UTC Access denied Hilarious.
- acejam 5y ago
  Our sincere apologies. I admit, our Cloudflare firewall rules have been tuned very aggressively in an effort to prevent spam accounts. I've made some significant changes to the rules and it should now work for you.
fswd 5y ago
I am unable to reach the site.
- acejam 5y ago
  Please try again. :)
kingcharles 5y ago
This is the same price as Dropbox, roughly. $12/month for 2TB. I don't see the advantage.
- isaacimagine 5y ago
  I mean, that's what you should expect, right? That (Sia) market forces will push the price of storage towards equilibrium, which is the price other similar products are charging.
- bckr 5y ago
  The advantage is that the data would be stored redundantly with >>1 points of failure
  - authorityofnil 5y ago
    Corrent me if I'm wrong, but aren't most cloud providers already providing redundancy in their EBS/equivalent setups? S3 had quite a lot of nines too
    - kevincox 5y ago
      But arguably those have a single point of failure, the company owning the data. In theory Filebase is storing your data on a distributed system (that you can verify) that has no single point of failure. You can make this even more reliable by using two filebase-like providers to store the data. Thanks to IPFS you can access the data the same way and transparently use both providers so that if any single one is up you can access your data. Of course it isn't perfect, if filebase goes bankrupt you need to scramble to get another set of pins for your data. But I think it does provide a much better system overall. You can also imagine shifting the data around providers over time much like S3 storage tiers, maybe on provider provides cheaper storage but more expensive access, you can pin cold data there and remove it from your hot data provider. This would be completely transparent to any users. It also provides interesting opportunities for bring-your-own storage. Users can just give my the CID and use it on my app/service. It will be around as long as they keep it alive. Or they can pay me and I can pin it for them.
      - musingsole 5y ago
        > Thanks to IPFS you can access the data the same way I think this is a big feature that I hadn't recognized until you phrased it this way. It allows a strategy of guaranteeing *at least 1* pin of your data if it's important, but from the application side, you can forget about the details of the data storage. I doubt IPFS is fast enough to justify it over other strategies today, but it makes me think of a type of cache where if a CID can't be found, you might rehydrate some slow, cold-storage data and push it back out to the network.
        dmitriid 5y ago
        > It allows a strategy of guaranteeing at least 1 pin of your data if it's important Who decides your data is important? What happens to the so-called guarantees when your data suddenly becomes unimportant?
- pixxel 5y ago
  Depending on your ethics, you might prefer not to fund a company that hires a war criminal. https://www.drop-dropbox.com/ https://www.drop-dropbox.com/
  - blitzar 5y ago
    > that hires a war criminal I must have missed the trial, how many years did she get?
    - sascha_sl 5y ago
      The US putting their own war criminals on trial, that's funny. They don't even put foreign war criminals - sorry, "unlawful combatants" - on trial most of the time.
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        Other countries don’t put their “war criminals” on trial either. I witnessed another country violate the Geneva Conventions. Politically it was pandemonium, when the city found out, there were riots. No one went to jail or put on trial. Statements were taken, the guy got off with a slap on the wrist by his own country and some cash moved between hands to smooth things out. My point is, the US isn’t something special here, they’re just more transparent about it and/or journalists get more clicks for talking about it.
  - shuckles 5y ago
    And how would one scrupulously confirm that supporting a blockchain project is not supporting war criminals?
  - sp332 5y ago
    Neither https://dropbox.com/about https://dropbox.com/about nor https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DBX/company-people https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DBX/company-people list her as being on the board anymore. Edit: https://investors.dropbox.com/node/9146/html https://investors.dropbox.com/node/9146/html says she stepped down last year.
- samatman 5y ago
  Time is a flat circle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Sounds interesting. I like the notion of having an IPFS capable store with support for pinning at a reasonable price. When I looked into this a few years ago, this was a bit of a mess. There was a half-assed s3 plugin with some severe limitations that was a bit sketchy to setup and not a whole lot else in terms of what to do, best practices, or anyone offering commercial support for this. I liked the idea but our conclusion at the time was that we'd have to build out our own storage solution to be able to use this. I walked away from this company ultimately and haven't really looked at the whole space again since. Filecoin, which people were pitching at the time seems to have largely gone silent. Is that still a thing? So, if this is legit, I could be a potential customer for this. One of the issues I have with using s3 for personal storage is just that it is so expensive to use at scale. Basically the cost of storing what I want backed up would be the equivalent of buying a new hard disk every few months. Plus I need to baby sit and micro manage the whole setup. Both are bad things. I need something turnkey that "just works" that has a reasonable cost. So, liking the idea. But I have some concerns: - I never heard of Filebase before. How long have they been around and what is their track record? Maybe a blunt question but I'd need to know before trusting something like this with my backups. - Not to excited about the NFT and web3 stuff they seem to be pitching. Is that needed? Is this some kind of blockchain thingy or is there a serious business that works with normal money and invoices. In that case, maybe start acting more like a trust worthy SAAS company. Seriously, this stuff scares away corporate customers like nothing else. - They mention they use the Sia storage network. It lists a price even lower than the Filebase price of 2$/TB/month but it looks like it doesn't have any commercial operations around it. What's the relationship with Filebase. - How many people actually use this and how robust is this sia network? - I looked at the sia github and that doesn't instill a lot of confidence. I maintain several tiny projects that managed to get more stars than siad or sia-core. So, a few red flags here. I don't mind being an early adopter of stuff but I'd like to know what I'm getting into at least. This all looks a bit sketchy and too good to be true. I'd recommend the founders to - park the web3/nft stuff; this will re-assure corporate customers and be good for business. - add a page to the website detailing a bit what this company is, where it comes from, and who is behind it. I was able to figure out from the terms of use that the company address is in Boston at least. - if you have notable customers, maybe add some kind of logo wall. I actually suspect the answer might be no at this point. - publish some details on the size of your network. Numbers of TB stored, usage statistics, etc.
can16358p 5y ago
More mass adoption, and browser extensions to support IPFS, and to resolve ENS names, and we're completely in the "web3" world. We just need a standardized way of mapping ENS names to IPFS CIDs to serve entry point for dApps that are running completely decentrelized.
- bckr 5y ago
  OK I'm web3 now
  - bckr 5y ago
    This was said in earnest. This blog post is the first thing that made me excited about this stuff. shrug.
- rvz 5y ago
  This is the unresolved myth I keep seeing in web3: > "dApps that are running completely decentrelized" ENS is basically a GoDaddy-like registrar but with blockchain and with all the .eth names still controlled by 7 keyholders in a 'DAO' with four of them only needed to override control (but not totally remove) the .eth TLD. Putting in 'trust' defeats the whole purpose of 'complete decentralization'. At least with Handshake [0], one totally removes 'trust' from the equation which I can already see ENS anchoring (or already has anchored) their TLD on Handshake. [0] https://handshake.org https://handshake.org
  - can16358p 5y ago
    Yup trustless naming would be even better, gave the example of ENS because it's popular. My point is that we need adoption for decentralized naming, routing/locating, hosting/"pinning". Be it a combination of ENS/Handshake/IPFS/Sia/Filecoin/BitTorrent/Ethereum or any combination of stacks.
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    I’m not a fan of Handshake. The auction system is pretty much the worst system you could build for normal (ie: not rich) businesses that want to register their own names. Seriously, who wants to compete against people who have a gazillion HNS that they got for free? Then add in the fact that it’s a judgement proof blockchain and you’ve got a system that’s awesome for squatters, flippers, and rent seekers while being terrible for real businesses that want to build real value. How do I stop someone from typo squatting or violating my trademarks? I’m always surprised by the number of people that want lawlessness.
janandonly 5y ago
FILEBASE seems to have been working on uniting (or switching?) filestorage in (or between) several other solutions: * Skynet: https://filebase.com/blog/drag-and-drop-files-onto-the-decentralized-web-using-skynet-and-filebase/ https://filebase.com/blog/drag-and-drop-files-onto-the-decen... * S3 compatibility: https://filebase.com/ https://filebase.com/ * Storj: https://filebase.com/blog/hello-storj/ https://filebase.com/blog/hello-storj/
k__ 5y ago
I'm always a bit sceptic of un-incentivized solutions. Arweave seems to be a better long-term solution.
- acejam 5y ago
  Agreed - there is no incentive layer present with vanilla IPFS. This is where Sia comes in. Hosts on the Sia network are paid using Siacoin to keep data readily available and online - they are incentivized. At Filebase, we have connected the two technologies to give us the best of both.
encryptluks2 5y ago
IPFS is decentralized storage. I really don't get this concept of paying someone to "decentralize" your storage when if you just want someone to pin it then there are plenty of VPS providers that provide significantly more bandwidth for less. Just setup rclone and mount a cloud drive.
- shepardrtc 5y ago
  > Just setup rclone and mount a cloud drive. Filebase isn't really for people that can - and want - to do that. Its for people with non-engineer management that want a dramatically cheaper S3.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    If you want cheaper S3 then you go with a cheaper object storage provider, and there are plenty that are cheaper than this and will provide a much better experience and guarantee: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/ This is taking into consideration bandwidth, which Filebase does charge for.
    - shepardrtc 5y ago
      > R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers. Our object storage will be extremely inexpensive for infrequent access and yet capable of and cheaper than major incumbent providers at scale. Sure, if you don't access those objects frequently.
- acejam 5y ago
  "Just setup rclone and mount a cloud drive." This reads like the infamous Dropbox comment. :)
roywiggins 5y ago
> However, if AWS S3 goes down, your IPFS server goes down too. Unless the data has been cached somewhere, your IPFS CID links are no longer accessible. This can result in an NFT "rug pull". Can't you just re-pin whatever files that were lost? Surely you'd keep a copy of anything that was actually important, even if just offline on a hard drive.
- acejam 5y ago
  Sure - but you (or a pinning provider) need the actual file first before you can re-pin it. The data has to live somewhere.
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    I just find it strange that someone might decide to buy an NFT and then not keep an offline copy of the file themselves, and that people do this often enough that it's a selling point. It's not like the files are large. If the Sia network breaks down, you'd want to have done that, same as if S3 somehow exploded.
    - sliken 5y ago
      What's even strange is the NFTs don't keep a checksum in the blockchain, so anyone hosting the content could change it whenever they want and the NFT is none the wiser. Moxie even wrote an example that would show different images depending who asked. See https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
      - roywiggins 5y ago
        If the NFT does actually reference an IPFS CID, that amounts to a hash of the image, so that particular issue isn't there. It's just kind of nuts to talk about "everyone stopped pinning my NFT" as being a "rugpull"- anyone can pin a piece of content in IPFS, including anyone with an interest in the NFT existing, such as the owner. So the only thing you have to do if an NFT falls off the IPFS network is just to take your copy and pay someone else to pin it. It's only a "rugpull" if you, you know, forgot to keep a copy of it anywhere.
phreack 5y ago
I looked into Sia since it's something I'd love to see working and I'd heard of them before. Last time I'd found that the biggest tutorial about how to practically get started had a big red warning and a huge manifesto about how Sia and its collaborators are the worst and should be dropped [0]. So now I went around just looking for old links to files on the network, on places like Reddit and old guides, to check if they'd survived a couple years. Sadly all of them timed out, even the first link on the 'video' category on the Sky App Store. I looked up the error ('failed to create Skylink') and nothing of help turned up to even realize what the problem is. Hopefully things work out in the long term but I haven't been convinced yet of Sia's usefulness in practice. [0] https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

130 points by zacincceo 5y ago

octoberfranklin 5y ago

Error 1005 Ray ID: 6e577ed77a5902bc • 2022-03-02 04:47:38 UTC Access denied Hilarious.

acejam 5y ago
Our sincere apologies. I admit, our Cloudflare firewall rules have been tuned very aggressively in an effort to prevent spam accounts. I've made some significant changes to the rules and it should now work for you.

fswd 5y ago

I am unable to reach the site.

acejam 5y ago
Please try again. :)

kingcharles 5y ago

This is the same price as Dropbox, roughly. $12/month for 2TB. I don't see the advantage.

isaacimagine 5y ago
I mean, that's what you should expect, right? That (Sia) market forces will push the price of storage towards equilibrium, which is the price other similar products are charging.
bckr 5y ago
The advantage is that the data would be stored redundantly with >>1 points of failure
- authorityofnil 5y ago
  Corrent me if I'm wrong, but aren't most cloud providers already providing redundancy in their EBS/equivalent setups? S3 had quite a lot of nines too
  - kevincox 5y ago
    But arguably those have a single point of failure, the company owning the data. In theory Filebase is storing your data on a distributed system (that you can verify) that has no single point of failure. You can make this even more reliable by using two filebase-like providers to store the data. Thanks to IPFS you can access the data the same way and transparently use both providers so that if any single one is up you can access your data. Of course it isn't perfect, if filebase goes bankrupt you need to scramble to get another set of pins for your data. But I think it does provide a much better system overall. You can also imagine shifting the data around providers over time much like S3 storage tiers, maybe on provider provides cheaper storage but more expensive access, you can pin cold data there and remove it from your hot data provider. This would be completely transparent to any users. It also provides interesting opportunities for bring-your-own storage. Users can just give my the CID and use it on my app/service. It will be around as long as they keep it alive. Or they can pay me and I can pin it for them.
    - musingsole 5y ago
      > Thanks to IPFS you can access the data the same way I think this is a big feature that I hadn't recognized until you phrased it this way. It allows a strategy of guaranteeing *at least 1* pin of your data if it's important, but from the application side, you can forget about the details of the data storage. I doubt IPFS is fast enough to justify it over other strategies today, but it makes me think of a type of cache where if a CID can't be found, you might rehydrate some slow, cold-storage data and push it back out to the network.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > It allows a strategy of guaranteeing at least 1 pin of your data if it's important Who decides your data is important? What happens to the so-called guarantees when your data suddenly becomes unimportant?
pixxel 5y ago
Depending on your ethics, you might prefer not to fund a company that hires a war criminal. https://www.drop-dropbox.com/ https://www.drop-dropbox.com/
- blitzar 5y ago
  > that hires a war criminal I must have missed the trial, how many years did she get?
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    The US putting their own war criminals on trial, that's funny. They don't even put foreign war criminals - sorry, "unlawful combatants" - on trial most of the time.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      Other countries don’t put their “war criminals” on trial either. I witnessed another country violate the Geneva Conventions. Politically it was pandemonium, when the city found out, there were riots. No one went to jail or put on trial. Statements were taken, the guy got off with a slap on the wrist by his own country and some cash moved between hands to smooth things out. My point is, the US isn’t something special here, they’re just more transparent about it and/or journalists get more clicks for talking about it.
- shuckles 5y ago
  And how would one scrupulously confirm that supporting a blockchain project is not supporting war criminals?
- sp332 5y ago
  Neither https://dropbox.com/about https://dropbox.com/about nor https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DBX/company-people https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DBX/company-people list her as being on the board anymore. Edit: https://investors.dropbox.com/node/9146/html https://investors.dropbox.com/node/9146/html says she stepped down last year.
samatman 5y ago
Time is a flat circle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Sounds interesting. I like the notion of having an IPFS capable store with support for pinning at a reasonable price. When I looked into this a few years ago, this was a bit of a mess. There was a half-assed s3 plugin with some severe limitations that was a bit sketchy to setup and not a whole lot else in terms of what to do, best practices, or anyone offering commercial support for this. I liked the idea but our conclusion at the time was that we'd have to build out our own storage solution to be able to use this. I walked away from this company ultimately and haven't really looked at the whole space again since. Filecoin, which people were pitching at the time seems to have largely gone silent. Is that still a thing? So, if this is legit, I could be a potential customer for this. One of the issues I have with using s3 for personal storage is just that it is so expensive to use at scale. Basically the cost of storing what I want backed up would be the equivalent of buying a new hard disk every few months. Plus I need to baby sit and micro manage the whole setup. Both are bad things. I need something turnkey that "just works" that has a reasonable cost. So, liking the idea. But I have some concerns: - I never heard of Filebase before. How long have they been around and what is their track record? Maybe a blunt question but I'd need to know before trusting something like this with my backups. - Not to excited about the NFT and web3 stuff they seem to be pitching. Is that needed? Is this some kind of blockchain thingy or is there a serious business that works with normal money and invoices. In that case, maybe start acting more like a trust worthy SAAS company. Seriously, this stuff scares away corporate customers like nothing else. - They mention they use the Sia storage network. It lists a price even lower than the Filebase price of 2$/TB/month but it looks like it doesn't have any commercial operations around it. What's the relationship with Filebase. - How many people actually use this and how robust is this sia network? - I looked at the sia github and that doesn't instill a lot of confidence. I maintain several tiny projects that managed to get more stars than siad or sia-core. So, a few red flags here. I don't mind being an early adopter of stuff but I'd like to know what I'm getting into at least. This all looks a bit sketchy and too good to be true. I'd recommend the founders to - park the web3/nft stuff; this will re-assure corporate customers and be good for business. - add a page to the website detailing a bit what this company is, where it comes from, and who is behind it. I was able to figure out from the terms of use that the company address is in Boston at least. - if you have notable customers, maybe add some kind of logo wall. I actually suspect the answer might be no at this point. - publish some details on the size of your network. Numbers of TB stored, usage statistics, etc.

can16358p 5y ago

More mass adoption, and browser extensions to support IPFS, and to resolve ENS names, and we're completely in the "web3" world. We just need a standardized way of mapping ENS names to IPFS CIDs to serve entry point for dApps that are running completely decentrelized.

bckr 5y ago
OK I'm web3 now
- bckr 5y ago
  This was said in earnest. This blog post is the first thing that made me excited about this stuff. shrug.
rvz 5y ago
This is the unresolved myth I keep seeing in web3: > "dApps that are running completely decentrelized" ENS is basically a GoDaddy-like registrar but with blockchain and with all the .eth names still controlled by 7 keyholders in a 'DAO' with four of them only needed to override control (but not totally remove) the .eth TLD. Putting in 'trust' defeats the whole purpose of 'complete decentralization'. At least with Handshake [0], one totally removes 'trust' from the equation which I can already see ENS anchoring (or already has anchored) their TLD on Handshake. [0] https://handshake.org https://handshake.org
- can16358p 5y ago
  Yup trustless naming would be even better, gave the example of ENS because it's popular. My point is that we need adoption for decentralized naming, routing/locating, hosting/"pinning". Be it a combination of ENS/Handshake/IPFS/Sia/Filecoin/BitTorrent/Ethereum or any combination of stacks.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  I’m not a fan of Handshake. The auction system is pretty much the worst system you could build for normal (ie: not rich) businesses that want to register their own names. Seriously, who wants to compete against people who have a gazillion HNS that they got for free? Then add in the fact that it’s a judgement proof blockchain and you’ve got a system that’s awesome for squatters, flippers, and rent seekers while being terrible for real businesses that want to build real value. How do I stop someone from typo squatting or violating my trademarks? I’m always surprised by the number of people that want lawlessness.

janandonly 5y ago

FILEBASE seems to have been working on uniting (or switching?) filestorage in (or between) several other solutions: * Skynet: https://filebase.com/blog/drag-and-drop-files-onto-the-decentralized-web-using-skynet-and-filebase/ https://filebase.com/blog/drag-and-drop-files-onto-the-decen... * S3 compatibility: https://filebase.com/ https://filebase.com/ * Storj: https://filebase.com/blog/hello-storj/ https://filebase.com/blog/hello-storj/

k__ 5y ago

I'm always a bit sceptic of un-incentivized solutions. Arweave seems to be a better long-term solution.

acejam 5y ago
Agreed - there is no incentive layer present with vanilla IPFS. This is where Sia comes in. Hosts on the Sia network are paid using Siacoin to keep data readily available and online - they are incentivized. At Filebase, we have connected the two technologies to give us the best of both.

encryptluks2 5y ago

IPFS is decentralized storage. I really don't get this concept of paying someone to "decentralize" your storage when if you just want someone to pin it then there are plenty of VPS providers that provide significantly more bandwidth for less. Just setup rclone and mount a cloud drive.

shepardrtc 5y ago
> Just setup rclone and mount a cloud drive. Filebase isn't really for people that can - and want - to do that. Its for people with non-engineer management that want a dramatically cheaper S3.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  If you want cheaper S3 then you go with a cheaper object storage provider, and there are plenty that are cheaper than this and will provide a much better experience and guarantee: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/ This is taking into consideration bandwidth, which Filebase does charge for.
  - shepardrtc 5y ago
    > R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers. Our object storage will be extremely inexpensive for infrequent access and yet capable of and cheaper than major incumbent providers at scale. Sure, if you don't access those objects frequently.
acejam 5y ago
"Just setup rclone and mount a cloud drive." This reads like the infamous Dropbox comment. :)

roywiggins 5y ago

> However, if AWS S3 goes down, your IPFS server goes down too. Unless the data has been cached somewhere, your IPFS CID links are no longer accessible. This can result in an NFT "rug pull". Can't you just re-pin whatever files that were lost? Surely you'd keep a copy of anything that was actually important, even if just offline on a hard drive.

acejam 5y ago
Sure - but you (or a pinning provider) need the actual file first before you can re-pin it. The data has to live somewhere.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  I just find it strange that someone might decide to buy an NFT and then not keep an offline copy of the file themselves, and that people do this often enough that it's a selling point. It's not like the files are large. If the Sia network breaks down, you'd want to have done that, same as if S3 somehow exploded.
  - sliken 5y ago
    What's even strange is the NFTs don't keep a checksum in the blockchain, so anyone hosting the content could change it whenever they want and the NFT is none the wiser. Moxie even wrote an example that would show different images depending who asked. See https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
    - roywiggins 5y ago
      If the NFT does actually reference an IPFS CID, that amounts to a hash of the image, so that particular issue isn't there. It's just kind of nuts to talk about "everyone stopped pinning my NFT" as being a "rugpull"- anyone can pin a piece of content in IPFS, including anyone with an interest in the NFT existing, such as the owner. So the only thing you have to do if an NFT falls off the IPFS network is just to take your copy and pay someone else to pin it. It's only a "rugpull" if you, you know, forgot to keep a copy of it anywhere.

phreack 5y ago

I looked into Sia since it's something I'd love to see working and I'd heard of them before. Last time I'd found that the biggest tutorial about how to practically get started had a big red warning and a huge manifesto about how Sia and its collaborators are the worst and should be dropped [0]. So now I went around just looking for old links to files on the network, on places like Reddit and old guides, to check if they'd survived a couple years. Sadly all of them timed out, even the first link on the 'video' category on the Sky App Store. I looked up the error ('failed to create Skylink') and nothing of help turned up to even realize what the problem is. Hopefully things work out in the long term but I haven't been convinced yet of Sia's usefulness in practice. [0] https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]