ahnick

My understanding of why the US can print money without regard for consequences is because there are always "buyers" for US dollars, b/c countries need US Dollars to carry out business (e.g. China in order to maintain their export driven economy or the fact that the USD is used as the standard unit of currency in international markets for commodities such as gold and petroleum). Yes, there are technically other currencies that are part of the foreign exchange reserves, but none as prevalent as the USD.

As I understand it, this demand for US dollars is what allows USD to remain the dominant reserve currency and why when the US prints money it does not result in catastrophic inflation. If a country like Argentina tries to do what the US does it won't work out, because there is no demand for Argentinian dollars.

The conclusion I'm left with is that the balance sheet is largely irrelevant until the demand for US Dollar decreases. The real question in my mind is exactly what would cause that to occur? Most everything I read is that the network effect of the USD causes everyone to continue to use it, but perhaps something like a war between the US and China might be a precipitating event to decreased demand?

Other networks have implemented mechanisms for the network nodes to delete files as detailed elsewhere in this thread and I think it is entirely reasonable to say there is more that could be done at the network level to help mitigate exposure. Dealing in absolutes is a dangerous proposition.

So my understanding is that in the example of a decentralized app that uses Filecoin to store an IPFS object on the network the IPFS object id could be sniffed on the localhost by something like Wireshark. This way an attacker could identify the encrypted objects that are of interest to them and then independently request them from the IPFS network.

In terms of threat, I'm primarily thinking of larger criminal organizations that might target things like files containing SSNs, credit history, etc.

SHA-1 is an example, but my biggest concern comes from the potential of quantum computing to render what we consider secure today obsolete. (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/05/30/65724/how-a-quan...)

The threat model I'm thinking about is a malicious actor requests an IPFS object that he/she knows holds data that is valuable, but that they can not decrypt. They then hold this object for a period of time till at some point they are able to break into it using improved computing power or exploiting some flaw in the implementation.

Now, you raise a good point about Filecoin being an open membership network. In my particular example, the malicious actor could just decide to run an IPFS node and start holding any data that comes to it for future malicious purposes and maybe they start pulling down specific files that they want to target directly. I don't have a solution to this other than to think that having some reputation built into the IPFS node network could help mitigate that risk. You might imagine that nodes with high reputation are trusted and it is harder(requires a lot of time/money) as a node operator to become part of that group. People might decide to only trust the highly reputable nodes with their private data and utilize all nodes for public data.

The concern I have is about malicious actors being able to access the raw objects held on the Filecoin network. They won't be able to do anything with the encrypted objects immediately, but I don't know that you can claim that will always be the case decades from now.

Basically, how do you know what we are encrypting today, won't be able to have the encryption broken 30 or 50 years from now?

In the Filecoin case, I would still think that it should be possible to guarantee that a particular object is not being actively served by a node on the network at any particular point in time and penalizing nodes (loss of Filecoin) that do not pass this check.

Take the example of a traditional website or web application like Facebook. When I post content I can select who will be able to access that content and there is no way for anyone NOT in the groups I select to pull down that data even in an encrypted form.

If Filecoin operated this way, then there would be no way for anyone to archive the data, because they could not access it in the first place.

I don't understand the basis for this accusation. I thought the reason for Filecoin was essentially to provide an incentive layer to run IPFS nodes. The problem with IPFS was that it largely drew from volunteer efforts and therefore if you want to actually want IPFS to be a high-performing and low cost service you need to provide a market incentive structure to run a node.

I've been using it for our name generator product Mashword (https://mashword.com) and it was really straightforward to implement. It's reasonably priced, has a clean interface and graphs, is privacy protecting and supports using your own domain for pulling in the js include.

There basically is not a competitive market for either app marketplace right now, so an accurate price can't be determined. Allow 3rd party marketplaces to be installed as easily as any other app and I'm certain prices will come down from where they are today.

That's the entire issue right there. When Apple is the market, then they can make it whatever they want. If Apple has to legitimately compete with other "App Stores", then the market will find a lower price than 30%.