Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

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Because IPFS uses a distributed hash table like Bittorent, you don't have to know where stuff is--that's the problem with the HTTP, which is location addressed. IPFS is content addressed—the hash is the location.

You never host anything unless you want to; you don't host random stuff.

It's 2017, if you're using Google Docs or an instant messenger program and lose access to the backbone, you can't communicate with somebody who's in the same room with you. That's kinda silly. IPFS solves that issue.

IPFS is censorship resistance because it's a distributed protocol that can use a variety of transports. If I run example.com, people can DDOS it; it's much harder to do that when hundreds or thousands of nodes have the same content and you can connect to any of them. Sure worked in Turkey: http://observer.com/2017/05/turkey-wikipedia-ipfs/.

Filecoin is a cryptocurrency that will be mined by providing storage via IPFS.

Folks may want to read the white paper before they make assumptions about what's possible and what's hype: https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf

Someone has to have replicated the file though, else it can be lost. Yeah, you still have the hash, but if no one is left that stored the file, what are you gonna do - brute-force search for a preimage of the hash to get your content?

As long as IPFS requires replication to be voluntary on the side of the nodes, the argument of the parent holds.

That's the same thing we've got now, except that going through the process of "replicating the file" usually means either paying an a hosting company and learning how to maintain a server or signing your control and rights over to a company like Facebook.

There's nothing preventing anyone from going through these same measures with IPFS or dat. It's just that you don't have to in order to get started hosting something.

Did you miss the part regarding Filecoin monetization? If I have content I care about, I can pay to have it hosted by other IPFS nodes.

They certainly have the funding to create a storage market that can rival what passes for distributed storage: https://www.coindesk.com/257-million-filecoin-breaks-time-re...

But that really only holds true for content that hundreds of thousands of nodes find interesting enough to hold on to. IPFS is definitely a step up in that it allows for more than just the originating party to preserve it, but this isn't too different from http mirroring save for the obvious advantages to discoverability.

"You never host anything unless you want to; you don't host random stuff."

Then explain that to the author of TFA, because they seem to imagine that websites and whatnot are just somehow going to be out there forever with IPFS, without having to rely on one's server. In reality, unless the content is popular and anyone's bothering to replicate it, it's going to still fall off the internet the moment the server's down in an IPFS-based web.

Except for bittorrent, in my experience unless someone dedicates themselves to full time "hosting" of some torrent, it will be seedless within a month or so, after the initial wave of popularity.

Right, if you're running a site you'll still need to have your own infrastructure to host the authoritative source. IPFS is supposed to reduce the need for CDNs.

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