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Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

I think IPFS fails at the most basic tenet of file storage which is file permanence. It's touted as a decentralized approach but then anyone whose anyone ends up paying a centralized service to "pin" their content.

Arweave is leagues better: I use it all the time to store articles I've written and very precious media. It couldn't be easier to use with its browser extension. It's also very cheap for true file permanence forever at least until all the storage nodes die out but given replication stands at some absurd multiplier there's little chance of it.

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I think if you're really looking for permanence, the best bet is to make lots of copies using diverse storage systems -- including Filecoin, IPFS' own incentivized storage system, ArWeave, etc -- and then use a content-addressable protocol like IPFS as the front end to access them. That way, whatever system survives, you'll still be able to seamlessly locate and refer to your data.

(Full disclosure, I work for the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, which is certainly part of the wider IPFS Cinematic Universe.)

Nothing is permanent. IPFS is permanent for your data as long as you run a node in the network hosting it.

IPFS never promised anyone they could just put their stuff out there and have it last forever. That's equivalent to free energy. That's the pitch for Filecoin, but not IPFS.

And as far as centralization, you've got a Pareto distribution, no network topology can change that.

> And as far as centralization, you've got a Pareto distribution, no network topology can change that.

Explain for the more obtuse among us?

The majority of seeding/downloading will be done with the (minority) most popular files, while only a minority of seeding/downloading is done for the majority of files.

For example, go to TPB and look at the distribution of seeders/leechers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

Ahhhh of course! I wonder if there is a game-theoretically-sound way to smooth out the distribution. At first glance it seems not, because chunks (probably not using the right term for torrent file partitions) need to be addressable/discoverable. However, what if there was a way to couple “popular” chunks with slightly less popular chunks, such that seeding becomes some what more equitable for, say, the top 30-40% of files

Then I believe it fails at what I'll call a philosophical pillar of storage, which is that file objects saved or distributed anywhere should be durable. I, personally, have no use for IPFS as every use case I have for file storage and distribution is solved by Arweave. You may have other needs than my own which are better solved by IPFS. If so, I'd love to hear what they are.

my problem with filecoin is that it is essentially disconnected from IPFS… it’s basically completely unrelated. And you need big contraptions to use it together.

Protocol Labs people always sell “Filecoin” as solution to IPFS shortcomings… but it isn’t, really. Filecoin is an entirely separate network where you pay for both retrieval and storage. And you need big contraptions to use those two together in any way. It isn’t made to be used together at all.

Just like with normal files, you can pay a third party to keep them around or store them yourself. There are some cryptocurrency based cloud providers that will subsidise cloud storage for their content but like with the rest of the internet, someone will need to pay.

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