Comment by zer01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zer01 | Hacker News Reader

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If you just want to store and host files like a website, there's a few projects in that vein that I know of - Arweave (https://www.arweave.org/), IPFS (https://ipfs.io/), and Filecoin (https://filecoin.io/).

IMO these projects are aiming at a new form of sovereignty on the internet that doesn't/can't exist currently - the ability to have your data be permanently stored and accessible on the web. Google can decide to kill Google Photos, and every email provider on the planet can delete everyone's old emails if they so choose. It's unlikely, yes, but the ability to put something on the internet permanently surely has some novel value to it, even if just as an open building block to something bigger than the sum of its parts.

A massive part of what's going on right now in the crypto space is people experimenting with these new protocols and tools like smart contracts and DAOs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...) and attempting to figure out new and novel things to do with them. Web3 is a moniker du-jour to try to encompass these experiments in finance, governance, art, and collaboration.

When the internet was early, people were doing the same, and it gave rise to new forms of art, online gaming, radically different access to banking, ecommerce, and low latency, (basically) free, video calling anywhere in the world. Imagine trying to explain Twitch.tv or Facebook to someone in the early 90s when people were paying for long distance calls and stamps. The groundwork for these things was being created as people were inventing DNS, HTTP, etc etc, but in the same way that NeoPets was not the ultimate expression of online gaming (but had influence on it nonetheless), the things we're seeing today are not the ultimate expression of what "web3" will eventually be but instead a bunch of passionate people trying to figure out what revolutionary things can be built with these new unique tools.

Resources like storage and bandwidth aren’t free. People won’t pay to host strangers content for free forever, especially with the personal legal risk that entails, so you’re going to need to pay regularly to host content which isn’t both very popular and under an open license, which is the content which is most reliably replicated now at much lower cost.

Similarly, there’s a lot of mythology about content not being censorable which falls apart as soon as you think about it. People still have to follow the law in their country: if you upload a Disney movie to IPFS, their lawyers will send takedowns to everyone hosting it. Just as with other P2P services, anyone using it will be deterred by the risk of your ISPs cutting your service if you don’t comply with legal requirements but unlike its more efficient and private alternatives these services are both public (making it easier to track users) and the blockchain services handily provide a signed statement for prosecutors, which seems unlikely to be a popular feature for anyone who actually needs it.

That’s the key difference between the early internet and “web3”: those early efforts were building things people outside of that community clearly wanted but the latter is what happened when people spent a decade pumping money into cryptocurrencies in the hopes of one day becoming rich and are now desperately searching around for reasons why everyone else should pay a premium for their random numbers. It never goes well when the conversation starts with what you’d like to sell someone rather than what they need.

Sure, I generally think of these projects as experiments to try to make this “store something permanently” vision happen in reality. Just because the vision has hurdles to overcome doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Arguably GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault aimed to do the same thing in a different way https://archiveprogram.github.com/. I agree that the tail end support of bandwidth and storage costs for X years are obstacles for this vision but blockchains in their current form already incentivize keeping this data around and hosting the data as part of normal network operations. These projects are just trying to separate out the storage layer from the computation layer (which may be a folly, or may prove viable). The point is that there’s groups of people trying to apply these new tools in novel ways to try to give humanity better tools in some capacity, and I think that’s a fine use of resources and effort.

Have you heard of the uncensorable library project? https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en it aims to make some data permanent and available even in the face of Chinese censorship. Is it a panacea that’s going to scale for all data forever? Of course not, but it’s a novel approach and an interesting experiment (and look ma, no blockchain!).

If people aren't backing up their photos and emails, heck any data that they care about, it is only a matter of time until something happens to it.

But it's not on the internet permanently, it will disappear eventually at an unknown point in the future, like a dead torrent due to the lack of seeders.

Eventually everything will disappear, so this is. It quite a valid counter argument. On the other hand, there is a real chance that these protocols have a shot on enabling preservation of data for a significant amount of time - literally hundreds of years, sensorship-free, which is kind of cool.

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