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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. There's talk about how the Internet's "own internal contradictions [will] unravel it from within", but I'm not seeing it. The first time I can recall an "the Internet is doomed" prediction is 1995:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Incorrect_pred...

At this point, there are circa 3 billion Internet users, nearly half the planet, so I think we're well past the point where "ZOMG GROWTH N STUFF" is a reasonable justification for this sort of hype. The Internet's growth rate peaked in the 90s:

http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/

Now it's under 10% user growth, which seems entirely manageable.

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It hasn't been without significant abuse to the original vision of TCP/IP that the internet has grown to its present size. For example, where we needed IPv6, we got NAT.

That said, there's no doubt that TCP/IP has been a runaway success, and I'm sure the credit largely belongs to some early visionary (who I should probably know about, but no name comes to mind).

Edit: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

Internet != Web. The Internet isn't broken, HTTP is.

Well, the article says Internet, but if you're proposing that instead it's the Web that will unravel from its own internal contradictions, could you explain how that will happen?

The major issue is that the Web is vulnerable to single-points-of-failure (unlike the Internet). Personally I wouldn't use the phrase "unravel from its own internal contradictions", but I think most people have been bitten by a SPOF on the Web, even though the Internet itself is robust to failures. IPFS is about making the Web as reliable as the Internet itself.

most websites need a shared database for all users. how do you decentralize them?

See https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/40

I agree there's technical issue there, but I don't see it as much of a practical one. People wait a bit or they hit reload. And most of the practical issues I see are bad nearby network connections (overloaded first hop, bad connection to cell tower or wifi, ISP issue), which wouldn't be helped by this approach.

For those working at scale, single points of failure get solved through CDNs, multiple servers with failover, and offering services from multiple data centers. Google's a good example of this; despite Google being an enormously complex service, I've seen effectively no downtime from them.

For me IPFS seems like a solution in search of a problem. It's definitely a cool solution, but cool isn't enough for broad adoption.

New users is one way to measure growth. Total content or bandwoth consume give a different picture :)

So you're saying that although user growth is slowing, bandwidth growth is accelerating? I'd like to see your figures for that; although I'm sure that bandwidth use is growing, I doubt it's growing faster than it was 15 years ago.

We aren't streaming 4K video regularly yet, and 8K is coming up. Each time we double the dimensions, we increase the pixel data four times. We also have higher frame rates and bit depths. This is only going to stabilize after we've reached some extreme resolution with lossless encoding - we're only just now getting there with audio data.

Again, I'd like to see some data. For most uses, people are perfectly fine with relatively low-res video, so although the technical capabilities of video keep increasing, I suspect the rate of growth in actual bandwidth draw is decreasing.

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