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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to IPFS dat is more focused on what can be achieved right now while sacrificing true decentralisation, and is more opinonated with providing in its use case with providing things like versioning.

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What do you think it sacrifices? IPFS is more focused on static blob addressing while Dat focuses on data sources, and in that sense, there’s a single authority over a dataset. But I see that as a positive, since mutability is pretty valuable.

TBH, I'm not sure how a site can work without mutability.

a dynamic site can't work without mutability, ipfs can't deal with mutability, so ipfs comes with ipns, which allows you to statically reference content that might change.

Yeah, IPFS + IPNS is effectively on par with Dat archive mutability, but mutability being built-in to Dat + its verifiable history log is particularly well-suited to building peer-to-peer websites

Of course, the design of IPNS makes it impossible to prove that you've got the latest version of a name's value, and makes it relatively easy to attack. I don't know if Dat has the same issue, I haven't looked at it.

It's not impossible by design, it's simply a feature that hasn't been implemented so far. IPFS is by design pluggable on all layers and thus theoretically capable of a ton of stuff.

So IPFS is, according to you, not defined as its protocol, but instead as its API? So I could build an IPFS implementation that just grabs stuff from my (centralised) web server and say I'm using IPFS? Either nonsense, or useless - the goal here, I thought, was to build a global decentralised filesystem that looks the same from everyone's perspective.

All DHTs suffer from this issue. It's just particularly likely that IPNS's use of a DHT will lead to attacks. Making it not susceptible to this would require a redesign of IPNS's protocol.

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