Hacker News Reader

Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

A lot of Web 3 stuff is about federating infrastructure in ways that still allow centralization of control. IPFS is just another one of those protocols. One other thing that turned me off about IPFS/Filecoin was the huge amount of compute power needed to run a node.

View on HN

IPFS was around before people started talking about “web3”.

I see it as part of increasing resiliency and data locality. A key characteristic is that the cost for data storage is shifted to the people who care about preserving that data.

So a good example is distributing Linux distro packages.

Apparently, cpu/mem can be tuned.

Not really. The Ethereum whitepaper was 2013, and I'm pretty sure the first Web3 stuff talking about Ethereum(execution)+Swarm(storage)+Whisper(signalling) was 2014, and IPFS was launched in 2015. IPFS worked well enough that people lost motivation to work on Swarm, and IPFS pubsub would have been cool for the signalling layer, but it seemed to fall flat on its face. Ethereum went all in on being the execution layer of Web3 and mostly delegated other components to other projects which are competing to fill in the gaps, but all generally play nice with each other.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/18/building-decentralized-...

I suppose "long before" is a mischaracterization. According to Protocol Lab's history, this stuff was bandied about in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20210428163146/https://protocol....

To be fair, ideas like can emerge all together, whether in parallel or because people were talking to each other about it.

Personally for me, I don't think web3 will get anywhere (and I could be wrong). I'm more interested in IPFS (and less so with FileCoin) because the use-case I am interested in is much narrower in scope. It's also interesting to me that "web3" got hijacked from semantic web ... though semantic web stalled out as well.

I think the point is not to force decentralization, but to allow it. When the protocol is open, there are more chances to break the monopolies through innovation, quality of service etc. and avoid lock-in.

In this case, IPFS breaks the monopoly of trust (only obtaining content from a single source because that source is the reputable source for it). Content addressed data makes the source irrelevant. Many possibilities open from there (i.e. breaking the monopoly of storage).

I've been under the impression that IPFS has way lighter computational requirements than Filecoin, which is basically impossible to run without a server.

Filecoin needs a server. IPFS needs a high-end laptop (that you don't take anywhere and keep 100% connected to reasonably fast internet) at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com