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Comment by k2enemy | Hacker News Reader

Oooo this is interesting, it seems that P2P type stuff has been gaining steam again, since we can't trust anything hosted anymore.

You can trust hosted things as long as you trust the deployment targets. Or, more specifically, have a trusted relationship with the deployment target.

What keeps someone from flooding it with trillions of files full of random data to waste all of the disk space on the participating nodes?

Don't quote me on that but I'm pretty sure that the data you add on IPFS isn't automatically replicated on participating nodes. Other nodes will only acquire the data when they request it.

This is correct.

I definitely agree, but it is still missing anonymity, which I consider extremely important. Of course it's built in such a way that you could run it on top of any anonymous network in theory but these networks are still way too slow to offer a good experience in my opinion.

Still, I'm super excited every time I hear people talking about it.

I don't think it's enough since it seems to be storage oriented. You need compute and cheap non-persistent messaging too instead of just data storage/retrieval to reach parity w/ the modern internet.

Check out Urbit if you're into meeting weird nerds in a place with a high technical bar to participate :)

How does it do DNS? Like Namecoin? Reading the site now..

We'll need a bridge into the current (centralized) DNS system. For now there is a domain that does that automatically for you.

IPNS (The Inter-Planetary Naming System) is a step in that direction...

http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsN...

Is everything Inter-Planetary?

We have IPNS, which allows you to have a mutable pointer to immutable content in ipfs. On top of that, you can put your IPNS name (which is still a longish ugly hash) into a DNS record to hide everything away (although youre still depending on DNS at that point)

If you want to read more about ipns, its discussed in section 3.7 of the paper[1]. Do note that a few things have changed since the paper was last updated, so its not the source of truth right now.

[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/papers/raw/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-...

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