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I never understood why this was allowed for so long. IPFS is primarily used to store infringing content, yet few users directly interacted with IPFS. Instead,
by JeremyNT 4y ago
I never understood why this was allowed for so long.
IPFS is primarily used to store infringing content, yet few users directly interacted with IPFS. Instead, they usually rely on Cloudflare basically serving as a free proxy.
It's like the early days of mega or something, just with a layer of indirection that serves as plausible deniability.
Why Cloudflare bothers to provide this presumably costly service at all is confusing to me. I guess maybe they drank the crypto kool-aid and thought that it might some day be profitable?
- nyolfen 4y agoipfs is not a crypto project
- JeremyNT 4y agoBut filecoin is. IPFS is crypto adjacent and got plenty of hype because of it.
- nyolfen 4y agobitcoin uses sha256, is that crypto?
- miohtama 4y agoIPFS is also not used to store content. It’s peer-to-peer distribution network similar to Bittorrent.
- acdha 4y agoKind of but there’s a fairly large community overlap because they were trying to use FileCoin to support development, and a lot of cryptocurrency projects wanted to use it to work around technical limitations (e.g. many NFTs referenced IPFS gateways) to the point that I’ve had a number of marketing people use it as an example when asked for an example of a “web3” project which does something useful.
- nyolfen 4y agoweb3 is not crypto either (crypto is merely a constituent metaproject). these are important distinctions, like saying web2 is a database or something
- acdha 4y agoweb3 is a marketing term VCs started boosting when they realized that cryptocurrency had a bad reputation which was deterring sales. Unlike Web 2.0 it wasn’t giving you new capabilities but trying to build demand for things which had already failed in the market.
- nyolfen 4y agoit is a floating signifier for a variety of projects and technologies, some of which include crypto -- the unifying goals are decentralization and data ownership but these do not require crypto. if you think it is just a marketing gimmick (which it is, among many other things), i will let you continue to enjoy fb et al
- acdha 4y agoIt’s a cryptocurrency marketing campaign. The people pushing the term all got their money from cryptocurrency speculators, the apps being promoted all require cryptocurrency payments, and they share the similar poor technical and economic understanding of the fields they’re trying to enter. That doesn’t mean I love the way that Facebook influences the world – quite the opposite, but that means I have even less tolerance for people hawking get rich quick scams as the solution since they’re distracting attention and resources away from things which can possibly work. It’s similar to how cryptocurrency salespeople talk about “the unbanked” as if the solution to that problem is to make a bunch of rich people in the developed world even richer in the hopes that they’ll share some of that largesse.