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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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

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