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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Could be that I'm just really out of touch, but I need at least one paragraph saying "What is this?" (and ideally also, "Who is the target audience?" - or "Why would I be interested in reading this?")

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I'm with you on this one. I had to Google all of this for a few minutes. This is my best interpretation below. I hope others will come in and correct my silly mistakes. (Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer and English is my 2nd language):

"So you know how people use BitTorrent to distribute big-budget Hollywood movies with occasional mediocre storylines? What if you could distribute your own data on a similar P2P network, but view it directly in a web browser (among other HTTP clients)? You suddenly turn your seed box into a "web server". Plus, you can stream videos on it too. So your home computer is not just a "web server", it can act as your own "Netflix" server to publish your home movies. And you could do it in a secure fashion. You would need a few protocols (eg IPFS), concepts (eg Merkle Trees), and some freely available software to make it practical, easy, and secure. These tutorials will show you how to get all of those things working together to publish & stream to the world."

Watch a demo of this @ 7:00 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CMxDNuuAiQ

While he doesn't touch on IPFS iirc, this talk by Mathias Buus is what got me excited about decentralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tf14VpeHlE

He does a great job explaining e.g. Merkle Trees in a practical manner that made me immediately go "Wait, I could use this for X and Y?!"

Recommended watch!

Thanks a lot for this. Any other recommendations for videos for other concepts or protocols?

Thanks for the recommendation. Positively great talk and you are right it inspires a lot of usecases. Speaking as someone who had heard about Merkle trees but never looked into the details of what they were about, this talk was absolutely worth watching. Regarding IPFS there was a question at the end about the difference between IPFS and the stuff he talked about so it's briefly talked about by the speaker then.

Pretty good explanation mate! No need for that disclaimer ;)

You're hired! Well done.

While you've done well to filter the language, I still don't get the benefits to the consumer

Most of the seedbox providers already support a good subset of this. You can view your files in a browser, you can stream with Plex. You also have full ssh and ftp access, but those are not reallt the points being made here.

Thanks for pointing out all of this. But are some of the points being made that I missed?

Way too many project pages are like this. It really shows how nontrivial good documentation is to make.

Agreed, there needs to be some discussion (a few sentences at least) of what might be use cases for IPFS.

Who's the enemy ? Why now ? If you are going to give a long presentation you better start with those questions!

Just stop reading if those words doens't mean anything to you.

I don't think this is in the spirit of your typical Hacker News reader. HN readers are naturally curious, but with the volume of what comes across, it can be really hard to decipher if something would be of interest or value just based on the title or page 1.

For me, it's just not possible to read very deeply on everything that seems interesting, and it would be helpful to get a summary sentence or two for posts that are non-trivial.

How about instead "If those words don't mean anything to you, go read their wikipedia entries before continuing"? Not every article on IPFS needs to have its own separate introduction about what IPFS is.

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