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Comment by akanet | Hacker News Reader

I think replicated personal data is great, but the author's point is you are probably going to get a lot more storage and bandwidth per dollar by replicating across centralized storage providers.

There may be some wins for the specific case of loading something from someone on the same LAN as you, but that's probably not something that can sustain a P2P storage market.

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The obvious benefit of something like Filecoin is that you don't have to trust people to host your data. However vile it may seem to some, if they want to get paid they have to provably host it. And it's fragmented enough that you can't go after everyone who has only part of a series of forbidden bits.

I think there's a market for impossible to take down information. The competitors aren't the Amazons of the world, more like whomever is hosting Scihub.

Yeah, I think we can agree that there will probably be lots of interesting innovation in the distribution of illicit material. However, for an information technology to truly shape our culture, it needs a plausible path to go mainstream. None of the champions of current P2P crypto storage systems are claiming their focus will be on the distribution of said illicit materials. They all claim it will revolutionize transmission and storage of totally ordinary data, too.

I think the core assumption blockchain proponents make is that a lot of problems can be better solved if they rely on trustless sytems, and that this includes mainstream things.

I'm not sure if i agree with that, but there once was a time when the only people who would ever need a decentralized network were the military, and the benefits did generalize to everyone.

I think it's too early to tell.

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