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Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space
- artninja1988 3y agoSounds like a perfect way to distribute uncensorable OS models and datasets
- blamestross 3y agoWell the caching aspect of IPFS is useful for space, the transport protocols are way too chatty and latency sensitive for real usage.
- rudolph9 3y agoThe beauty of ipfs is the transport protocols are completely modular. They do a pretty good job supporting a lot of variety a separating concerns via https://github.com/libp2p/specs https://github.com/libp2p/specs
- otbutz 3y agoIsn't the QUIC transport the default since v0.6.0? Compared to TCP, it's much better suited for satellite communications.
- foobiekr 3y agoQuic is not suited for satellite communications. There are good custom protocols though that are FEC heavy.
- Jorropo 3y agoThe too chatty protocol is bitswap. Because the merkle-tree is not coupled to the protocol, they developped their own custom protocol on top of UDP for communication.
- mywacaday 3y agoOne of the most unusual home pages I've seen in a long time, not sure if I like it or I'm just conditioned to expect a certain style, kudos to them for being different though.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y agoI think the typography can be improved a little, but overall I like it quite a bit. It's refreshing to come across something that isn't just the zillionth iteration of your bog standard home/landing page. *One other thing I noticed is that the "Resources" section doesn't have the gradient border edges on it, which I don't know is intentional or not.
- LatticeAnimal 3y agoI really appreciated the interactive video-style homepage on https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/. I thought it was a lot cooler than the standard self-congratulatory graphs / bullet points that the I usually skim over. EDIT: However, it is strange that the foundation has a totally different site.
- pocketarc 3y agoHuge achievement. A big, big stepping stone toward interplanetary communication. But while I love the idea of IPFS, it comes with a bunch of tradeoffs that I think make it very unlikely that it'll ever become mainstream. What I do think will happen in space, is similar to what already happens with PoPs around the world, no IPFS required. As an example: I believe that there will be a YouTube on the moon and YouTube on Mars, and YouTube servers caching most of the content on both, and it'll all work the same. Cross-planet communication will be high latency, but it won't matter.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> What I do think will happen in space, though, is similar to what already happens with PoPs around the world. As an example: I believe that there will be a YouTube on the moon and YouTube on Mars, and YouTube servers caching most of the content on both, and it'll all work the same. Cross-planet communication will be high latency, but it won't matter. Importantly, this is enabled by content addressable storage in IPFS, where the address of the data is derived deterministically with cryptographic hashing. Agree it likely won't ever become super popular, but it is a core component of distributed storage systems without central orchestration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Importantly, this is enabled by content addressable storage in IPFS Can't it be enabled in all sorts of ways? E.g. edge caching, the way YouTube works today?
- toomuchtodo 3y agoCoordination, namespace, and addressing challenge with traditional addressing and caching. It’s why BitTorrent is so good at distribution: it is uncoordinated edge distribution, IPFS is just a bit more formalized. Subresource integrity demonstrates why the crypto is needed.
- dannyw 3y agoFilecoin is probably one of the few cryptocurrencies with intrinsic value, even if the amount is debatable. IPFS has stood the test of time and seems like a good protocol; and a cryptocurrency that can be used to pay for storage is not valueless.
- grumbel 3y agoHas it? I have never seen anybody using IPFS in the wild, even projects for which it should be well suited (archive.org, Linux package distribution, Git, Lemmy, Imgur, CivitAI), don't use it. Worse yet, IPFS still provides no real way to deal with private or local data, which drastically limits its use. I love the idea about data being addressable by hash, but I don't feel IPFS has actually delivered anything meaningful in that area yet. And with ipfs-search.com shutdown, there is not even any way left to explore what is actually on the network now. And technical issues aside, there is also the legal problem that IPFS conflicts with copyright. Redistributing anything is illegal by default, unless somebody gives you permission, IPFS provides no means to track that permission. You can't attach a GPL or an author to a hash.
- sandbx 3y agolibgen uses it
- timtom39 3y agoIn practice libgen uses torrents. The available seed nodes for IPFS are... few. This is largely due to the software/protocol being pretty bad compared to battle tested torrents.
- arsome 3y agoPerhaps if you're downloading full dumps, but distribution of individual books is often done via IPFS.
- diggan 3y ago> there is also the legal problem that IPFS conflicts with copyright. Redistributing anything is illegal by default I think you might misunderstand how IPFS works, or possibly confuse it with Freenet. When you use IPFS, nothing is automatically distributed, unless they happen to know the hash of the content you've added locally. It's not until someone starts to explicitly request data from you, that you start sharing anything.
- Uptrenda 3y agoThe kings of marketing and buzz-words at it again trying to re-spin CDNs as their invention. IPFS doesn't solve persistence of data; doesn't solve churn in p2p systems; doesn't actually 'store' anything. Sounds cool though! Space and shit, some-thing, something 'decentralized' --hand waving-- 'space', umm, can I have money now? I'm doing it.
- diggan 3y ago> CDNs If you think IPFS is trying to "re-spin CDNs as their invention", I'm pretty sure you misunderstand what IPFS. The homepage is a great starting point if you're curious rather than antagonistic: https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/ > IPFS doesn't solve persistence of data I don't think it claims to solve this either? What it does claim to solve is the persistence of identifiers of data. > doesn't solve churn in p2p systems What P2P system has ever done so or even claimed to have done so?
- Uptrenda 3y agoCheers, read the paper 10+ years ago. Nothing new or interesting in that time. Very impressive restatements of old ideas introduced by other people in typical pseudo-academic Protocol Labs style. Protocol Labs is famous for reinventing wheels poorly. It's like they look at dated papers and say: 'what can we do to sell this basic shit as our own.' Then they end up with horrible versions of STUN, TURN, hole-punching, DHTs, torrenting, commit-reveal schemes, hash-locks, and other technologies (((that are already well-known and ah... exist?))) You might be thinking that I'm making this up to troll. But the funny thing is so few people have any idea about this area of technology a company like Protocol Labs can get away with being completely insular, mediocre, unimaginative, impractical, and actually full of shit, and no one will notice. In fact, I'm routinely reminded what a 'visionary' the founder is. Despite nothing of value ever coming out of the company. But what I've learned is if enough people believe the lie it might as well be true. Now give me money! Space, space, blockchain, space!
- diggan 3y agoYou sound like you're having a grand time already with some personal beef with Protocol Labs/the founder, so I won't get in your way :) Enjoy
- bunderbunder 3y agoI'm still a little lost. Could someone more knowledgeable than me explain how operations in space would benefit from a public content-addressable filesystem? This seems like the kind of application that works best when bandwidth and storage are cheap, and I would have assumed that that, in space, both are about as far from cheap as you can get.
- diggan 3y agoThe internet traditionally uses location-addressing. A DNS name pointing to a IP which has a specific location your computer tries to reach in order to fetch the content. This means that particular node needs to respond to you, and the bandwidth is depending on the bandwidth available on the particular path to that specific node. Instead, IPFS uses content-addressing, where the content is hashed and given a ID based on the content itself. So "foo" could have the ID A, while "bar" could have the ID B. No matter who added the content to the network, if the content is the same, the ID will be the same. The benefit of this is that you can fetch the data from anywhere, and you'll get the data you wanted guaranteed (assuming the content is available somewhere on the network). In terms of space, imagine being on the moon and requesting some website. With location-addressing, you have to be able to reach that particular node, and the data has to travel from there to you. With content-addressing, that content can be fetched from anywhere, maybe another node on the moon has it already, so it can fetched quicker from there, or some node in-between the moon and earth. More reading about content-addressing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage Magnet links and git are two fairly common technologies that uses content-addressing with lots of benefits. (edit: of course, this is a simplification of both how IP, networks, IPFS, DNS and more works, but I hope it provides a fair overview at least)
- solarkraft 3y agoTorrents with extra steps, eh?
- kibwen 3y agoIt's basically the same idea as magnet links, so you could say it's torrents with the same steps.
- Cheer2171 3y agoSure space is cool (or maybe not, but don't want to upset the HN consensus), but this seems like a total gimmick and waste of money, time, and PR.
- colesantiago 3y agoExcept it's true. I don't see a use case for this other than speculation. I would even go as far to say that this 'side project' was done to try and pump the price of filecoin so that people can take profit off of it.
- diggan 3y ago> I don't see a use case for this other than speculation. The other use cases are hinted to in the name of the project...
- extraduder_ire 3y agoBased on a skim of the article; they uploaded, ran, and tested their code on a cubesat running "Lockheed Martin’s SmartSat technology". So, it wasn't that expensive. My initial thought was cubesats are cheap anyway, but they don't seem to have even launched one themselves. Gimmick, sure. but it's an important milestone and costs less than a series of TV ads.
- RestlessMind 3y agoAnd I thought I was reading Hacker news, not "only viable businesses" news. Sigh...
- rakoo 3y ago> waste of money, time, and PR That's exactly what cryptomoney has been about for years now, so it fits right in.
- colesantiago 3y agoThis doesn't really mean anything really. What is the use case of these crypto tokens other than speculation? Where is the market in space that is asking to use this?
- hanniabu 3y agoThe tokens are used for incentive alignment. Space is used for robustness.
- colesantiago 3y ago> The tokens are used for incentive alignment. Or pump and dump scams.
- hanniabu 3y agoOne doesn't exclude the other. Theranos and enron doesn't mean all companies are scams.
- colesantiago 3y agoYet the majority of crypto companies are scams.
- hanniabu 3y agoThe majority of stocks are scams, they're called penny stocks
- colesantiago 3y agoStocks have fundamentals and pay out dividends to shareholders. Crypto has no fundamentals, do not pay out dividends and only resemble ponzi and pyramid schemes.
- 3y ago
- m3kw9 3y agoDo something weird, pump up the price.
- m3kw9 3y agoI do hear IPFS maybe useful with powerful AI(AGI) agents, I’m not still understanding how.
- wegfawefgawefg 3y agoCould it be to avoid content liability laws? Pirate bay used to run servers from balloons above a certain altitude for this reason.
- Cheer2171 3y agoAnd like those failed projects, this has the same fatal flaw: you need that offshore or high altitude server to connect to a base station on Earth in order to connect the server to the rest of the Internet. The authorities where those base stations are located don't look kindly on this one weird trick to evade sovereignty.
- paulproteus 3y agoThe article says there are 3 advantages of IPFS -- speed, data verification, and data resilience. HTTPS/curl can provide the latter two. Does someone know if they published speed numbers of IPFS vs HTTPS/curl in the satellite environment?
- trogdor 3y agoFileCoin strikes me as yet another crypto scam. On April 1, 2021, “The FileCoin Foundation” announced that they were donating 50,000 FileCoin to The Internet Archive, valued at $10 million. That announcement got a lot of PR for FileCoin and drove its price to its highest value ever - $237 - that same day. It never saw anything near those prices again. Just a guess, but I bet the creators cashed out big time right after pumping their coin by announcing their generosity by press release. FileCoin’s current price is $5.85. A while ago, I contacted The Internet Archive to ask if they were able to sell their donated FileCoin at the price it was trading at when they received it. I didn’t receive a reply.
- HackerThemAll 3y agoMaybe initiatives like that will finally help transitioning to IPv6. We're out of address space here on Earth, and now we're going with TCP/IP to space. If we won't be wasteful with IPv6 space, it'll suffice for all inter-planetary and inter-galactic communication. Considering 1 trillion stars per galaxy and 1 trillion galaxies in the universe, we're safe with more than 340 trillion addresses per star. We would be able to address between 1/3 to 1/2 of all atoms in the universe with IPv6. Now that's a safety margin!
- p1mrx 3y ago> We would be able to address between 1/3 to 1/2 of all atoms in the universe with IPv6. There are around 10^38 IPv6 addresses and 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. It's not even close.