Hacker News Reader

Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

This sounds interesting academically, but what I don't understand (I have the same problem with Siacoin, StorJ and Swarm) is:

You could build a Dropbox clone where users have the option of contributing storage to get rewarded with real currency. Why would anyone want to use the decentralized version instead, both as a user and as a contributor of storage?

The decentralized version is going to be much harder to get right for the developers, and why should the users believe that the technology is trustworthy? I just don't see the advantage, but I would be truly interested in hearing what I may be missing.

View on HN

Because once they do get it right, it's open source and no one can take it away. A centralized system can and most likely will eventually degrade and disappear. Also, privacy.

I believe the market right now tells you that people value neither redundancy (creating business for file recovery services) nor privacy all that much.

They do value simplicity of use above all and they do trust large companies (for better or worse).

What makes this system better than the other systems that fulfill essentially the same purpose? What does "getting it right" mean? Are they getting it right and how so?

Is there not room in the market for multiple solutions? Both Dropbox and a decentralized solution can co-exist.

What I'm saying is that these are not actually big selling points for a general audience.

I'm not saying it's not viable at all, but the distributed aspect alone requires a certain amount of popularity to sustain it.

If you can build a Dropbox clone that is faster, cheaper and can hold your files longer than one single entity ever could, wouldn't you chose that one instead?

"If you could make a brown fizzy drink faster and cheaper than Coca-Cola, why wouldn't everyone buy it?" Rebuttal: store brand soda.

Welcome to branding / advertising / marketing.

Filecoin and IPFS assemble the world’s knowledge and data into one big content-addressed graph (Merkle DAG), and attempt to make it accessible to any device, anywhere. This is great because it allows for all kinds of use cases apart from just securely storing and sharing files. So the idea is not to build an app, but public infrastructure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com