7 ms·

I'm surprised by the beginning of the post talking about pioneering in 2019. Maybe it is the case for ENS (I never cared for it), but regarding IPFS, my website

by p4bl0 3y ago

I'm surprised by the beginning of the post talking about pioneering in 2019. Maybe it is the case for ENS (I never cared for it), but regarding IPFS, my website was available over IPFS 3 years before that in 2016 [1]. Granted, I was never IPFS only. I also started publishing a series of article about censorship-resistant internet (Tor, I2P, IPFS, and ZeroNet) in 2600 Magazine – The Hacker Quarterly – back in 2017 [2]. Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is). So I stopped maintaining it a few years ago. That decision was also because of the growing involvement of some of these projects with blockchain tech that I never wanted to be a part of. This is also why I cancelled my article series in 2600 before publishing those on IPFS and ZeroNet. [1] See for example this archive of my HN profile page from 2016 with the link to it: https://web.archive.org/web/20161122210110/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p4bl0 https://web.archive.org/web/20161122210110/https://news.ycom... [2] https://pablo.rauzy.name/outreach.html#2600 https://pablo.rauzy.name/outreach.html#2600

neiman 3y ago
> Maybe it is the case for ENS Oh yeah, I was referring strictly to IPFS+ENS websites. I have been working with it for several years so my mind goes for this use-case automatically.
r3trohack3r 3y ago
> Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is). Do you have any writing (blog posts, HN comments, etc.) where you explore this thought more? I'm in the thick of building p2p software, very interested in what you came to know during that time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pphysch 3y ago
  True P2P networks don't scale, because every node has to store an (accurate if partial) representation of the whole network. Growing the network is easy, but growing every single node is virtually impossible (unless you control them all...). Any attempt to tackle that tends to increase centralization, e.g. in the form of routing authorities. And if you try to tackle centralization directly (like banning routers or something), you will often create an anti-centralization regulator, which is, you guessed it, another form of centralization. So your decentralized P2P network is either small and works good, medium and works not so good, or large and not actually decentralized. The best P2P networks know their limits and don't try to scale infinitely. For human-oriented network, Dunbar's Number (N=~150) is a decent rule of thumb; any P2P network larger than that almost certainly has some form of centralization (like trusted bootstrapping/coordination server addresses that are hard-coded in every client install, etc.)
  - KMag 3y ago
    > True P2P networks don't scale, because every node has to store an (accurate if partial) representation of the whole network Former LimeWire dev here... which P2P networks use a fully meshed topology? LimeWire and other Gnutella clients just have a random mesh with a fixed number of (ultra)peers. If the network gets too large, then your constrained broadcast queries hit their hop count before reaching the edge of the network, but that seems fine. Last I checked, Freenet used a variation on a random mesh. Kademlia's routing tables take O(log(N)) space and traffic per-peer to maintain (so O(N log(N)) for global total network space and traffic). Same for Chord (though, twice as much traffic due to not using a symmetric distance metric like XOR). There are plenty of "True" (non-centralized) P2P networks that aren't fully meshed.
    - sanity 3y ago
      Creator of Freenet here. Freenet[1] relies on peers self-organizing into a small world network[2]. Small world networks have the advantage of being able to find data in log N time where N is the network size, they're also completely decentralized, self-healing, and distribute load evenly across peers. The principle is similar to DHTs like Kademlia but more flexible and intuitive IMO, while having similar scaling characteristics. It's surprisingly common for people to confuse small world networks with "scale free networks", but scale free networks rely on a subset of highly connected peers which do a disproportionate amount of the work - which isn't truly decentralized. The new Freenet design incorporates adaptive learning into the routing algorithm. When a peer is deciding where to route a message, it predicts the response probability and time for each neighboring peer based on past performance and chooses the best. With conventional "greedy routing", peers choose the neighbor with a location closest to the data being retrieved. The new approach is adaptive to actual network performance. [1] Both the original Freenet from 1999 and the new sequel we're currently building - see https://freenet.org/ https://freenet.org/ for more. We hope to launch the network in the next few weeks. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network
int_19h 3y ago
I may be missing something, but name resolution has been touted as one of the more legitimate and sensible uses for blockchain for a very long time. Could you clarify what your issues with it in IPFS context are?
- edent 3y ago
  It isn't. Unless you want a long incomprehensible string. Someone is always going to want a short, unique, and memorable name. And when two people share the same name (McDonald, Nissan, etc) there needs to be a way to disambiguate them. If people die and are unable to release a desirable name, that just makes the whole system less desirable. I know one of the canonical hard problems in Computer Science is "naming things" and this is a prime example!
  - bombcar 3y ago
    And if you want a long incomprehensible string we already have that .onion sites work without a blockchain, too.
  - null0pointer 3y ago
    ENS (which is what the GP refers to) has human readable names. But it doesn't have support for A/AAAA records today (does anyone know why? A-record support was in the original spec). Aside from that the only reason you wouldn't be able to type "mycoolsite.eth" into your browsers URL bar and have it resolve to an IP is because no browser has an ENS resolver built in. Yet.
    - dazaidesu 3y ago
      Brave does right?
      - null0pointer 3y ago
        I didn't know that. That's good if it does.
  - 3y ago
DEDLINE 3y ago
When evaluating use-cases where blockchain technology is leveraged to disintermediate, I came to your same conclusions. Technically novel? Yes, sure. But, for what?
- hanniabu 3y ago
  For incentive alignment, consensus, trustless, etc
chaxor 3y ago
I never fully understood the use of ipfs/iroh for websites, but I really like the idea for data caching in data science packages. It makes me more sense to me that someone would be much more willing to serve large databases and neural network weights that they actually use everyday, rather than 'that one guys website they went to that one time'. I'm very surprised it's not as popular, if not more popular to just have @iroh-memoize decorators everywhere in people's database ETL code. That's a better use case (sense the user has a vested interest in keeping the data up) than helping people host we sites.
- wuiheerfoj 3y ago
  Desci Labs (1) do something like this - papers and all the associated data (raw data, code, analyses, peer review comments) are published and linked together - along with all the citations to other papers - in a big DAG. I believe their data is stored in a p2p - it might interest you! 1. https://desci.com/ https://desci.com/
- wharvle 3y ago
  IMO the case for something like IPFS gets worse and worse the larger proportion of clients are on battery. This makes it a really poor choice for the modern, public Web, where a whole lot of traffic comes from mobile devices. Serving things that are mostly or nigh-exclusively used by machines connected to the power grid (and, ideally, great and consistent Internet connections) is a much better use case.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    This is half the reason why P2P died in the late 2000s. Mobile clients need to leech off a server to function. The other reason why it died is privacy. Participating in a P2P network reveals your IP address, which can be used to get a subscriber address via DMCA subpoenas, which is how the RIAA, MPAA, and later Prenda Law attacked the shit out of Gnutella and BitTorrent. Centralized systems don't usually expose their users to legal risk like P2P does. I have to wonder: how does IPFS protect people from learning what websites I've been on, or have pinned, without compromising the security of the network?
teeray 3y ago
> I also started publishing a series of article about censorship-resistant internet (Tor, I2P, IPFS, and ZeroNet) in 2600 Magazine – The Hacker Quarterly – back in 2017 I very much enjoyed your articles on Tor and I2P :) I2P was entirely new to me, so I found that particularly interesting. I did idly wonder when the next article was coming, so I’m glad I didn’t just miss it in some issue. Totally understand where you’re coming from.
- p4bl0 3y ago
  Thanks! It's always great to have feedback on paper-published content :).

by p4bl0 3y ago

neiman 3y ago

> Maybe it is the case for ENS Oh yeah, I was referring strictly to IPFS+ENS websites. I have been working with it for several years so my mind goes for this use-case automatically.

r3trohack3r 3y ago

> Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is). Do you have any writing (blog posts, HN comments, etc.) where you explore this thought more? I'm in the thick of building p2p software, very interested in what you came to know during that time.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pphysch 3y ago
True P2P networks don't scale, because every node has to store an (accurate if partial) representation of the whole network. Growing the network is easy, but growing every single node is virtually impossible (unless you control them all...). Any attempt to tackle that tends to increase centralization, e.g. in the form of routing authorities. And if you try to tackle centralization directly (like banning routers or something), you will often create an anti-centralization regulator, which is, you guessed it, another form of centralization. So your decentralized P2P network is either small and works good, medium and works not so good, or large and not actually decentralized. The best P2P networks know their limits and don't try to scale infinitely. For human-oriented network, Dunbar's Number (N=~150) is a decent rule of thumb; any P2P network larger than that almost certainly has some form of centralization (like trusted bootstrapping/coordination server addresses that are hard-coded in every client install, etc.)
- KMag 3y ago
  > True P2P networks don't scale, because every node has to store an (accurate if partial) representation of the whole network Former LimeWire dev here... which P2P networks use a fully meshed topology? LimeWire and other Gnutella clients just have a random mesh with a fixed number of (ultra)peers. If the network gets too large, then your constrained broadcast queries hit their hop count before reaching the edge of the network, but that seems fine. Last I checked, Freenet used a variation on a random mesh. Kademlia's routing tables take O(log(N)) space and traffic per-peer to maintain (so O(N log(N)) for global total network space and traffic). Same for Chord (though, twice as much traffic due to not using a symmetric distance metric like XOR). There are plenty of "True" (non-centralized) P2P networks that aren't fully meshed.
  - sanity 3y ago
    Creator of Freenet here. Freenet[1] relies on peers self-organizing into a small world network[2]. Small world networks have the advantage of being able to find data in log N time where N is the network size, they're also completely decentralized, self-healing, and distribute load evenly across peers. The principle is similar to DHTs like Kademlia but more flexible and intuitive IMO, while having similar scaling characteristics. It's surprisingly common for people to confuse small world networks with "scale free networks", but scale free networks rely on a subset of highly connected peers which do a disproportionate amount of the work - which isn't truly decentralized. The new Freenet design incorporates adaptive learning into the routing algorithm. When a peer is deciding where to route a message, it predicts the response probability and time for each neighboring peer based on past performance and chooses the best. With conventional "greedy routing", peers choose the neighbor with a location closest to the data being retrieved. The new approach is adaptive to actual network performance. [1] Both the original Freenet from 1999 and the new sequel we're currently building - see https://freenet.org/ https://freenet.org/ for more. We hope to launch the network in the next few weeks. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network

int_19h 3y ago

I may be missing something, but name resolution has been touted as one of the more legitimate and sensible uses for blockchain for a very long time. Could you clarify what your issues with it in IPFS context are?

edent 3y ago
It isn't. Unless you want a long incomprehensible string. Someone is always going to want a short, unique, and memorable name. And when two people share the same name (McDonald, Nissan, etc) there needs to be a way to disambiguate them. If people die and are unable to release a desirable name, that just makes the whole system less desirable. I know one of the canonical hard problems in Computer Science is "naming things" and this is a prime example!
- bombcar 3y ago
  And if you want a long incomprehensible string we already have that .onion sites work without a blockchain, too.
- null0pointer 3y ago
  ENS (which is what the GP refers to) has human readable names. But it doesn't have support for A/AAAA records today (does anyone know why? A-record support was in the original spec). Aside from that the only reason you wouldn't be able to type "mycoolsite.eth" into your browsers URL bar and have it resolve to an IP is because no browser has an ENS resolver built in. Yet.
  - dazaidesu 3y ago
    Brave does right?
    - null0pointer 3y ago
      I didn't know that. That's good if it does.
- 3y ago

DEDLINE 3y ago

When evaluating use-cases where blockchain technology is leveraged to disintermediate, I came to your same conclusions. Technically novel? Yes, sure. But, for what?

hanniabu 3y ago
For incentive alignment, consensus, trustless, etc

chaxor 3y ago

I never fully understood the use of ipfs/iroh for websites, but I really like the idea for data caching in data science packages. It makes me more sense to me that someone would be much more willing to serve large databases and neural network weights that they actually use everyday, rather than 'that one guys website they went to that one time'. I'm very surprised it's not as popular, if not more popular to just have @iroh-memoize decorators everywhere in people's database ETL code. That's a better use case (sense the user has a vested interest in keeping the data up) than helping people host we sites.

wuiheerfoj 3y ago
Desci Labs (1) do something like this - papers and all the associated data (raw data, code, analyses, peer review comments) are published and linked together - along with all the citations to other papers - in a big DAG. I believe their data is stored in a p2p - it might interest you! 1. https://desci.com/ https://desci.com/
wharvle 3y ago
IMO the case for something like IPFS gets worse and worse the larger proportion of clients are on battery. This makes it a really poor choice for the modern, public Web, where a whole lot of traffic comes from mobile devices. Serving things that are mostly or nigh-exclusively used by machines connected to the power grid (and, ideally, great and consistent Internet connections) is a much better use case.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  This is half the reason why P2P died in the late 2000s. Mobile clients need to leech off a server to function. The other reason why it died is privacy. Participating in a P2P network reveals your IP address, which can be used to get a subscriber address via DMCA subpoenas, which is how the RIAA, MPAA, and later Prenda Law attacked the shit out of Gnutella and BitTorrent. Centralized systems don't usually expose their users to legal risk like P2P does. I have to wonder: how does IPFS protect people from learning what websites I've been on, or have pinned, without compromising the security of the network?

teeray 3y ago

> I also started publishing a series of article about censorship-resistant internet (Tor, I2P, IPFS, and ZeroNet) in 2600 Magazine – The Hacker Quarterly – back in 2017 I very much enjoyed your articles on Tor and I2P :) I2P was entirely new to me, so I found that particularly interesting. I did idly wonder when the next article was coming, so I’m glad I didn’t just miss it in some issue. Totally understand where you’re coming from.

p4bl0 3y ago
Thanks! It's always great to have feedback on paper-published content :).