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0 pointsacdha4y ago0 comments

> think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea.

This interesting given your description:

> IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands of people, and finding it and downloading it would be extremely fast.

This idea hasn’t been new since the turn of the century (BitTorrent offered exactly that in 2001) and nothing in that description explains why this is different than the many previous attempts. It’d be interesting to hear about how IPFS plans to maintain that without the problems with abuse and how it keeps competitive performance relative to non-P2P in a world where things like CDNs are much cheaper and easily available than they were around the turn of the century. Using P2P means giving up a lot of control for the content provider and that’s a challenge both from the perspective of the types of content offered and the ability to update or otherwise support it on your schedule.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

noman-land4y ago· 2 in thread

IPFS is basically BitTorrent if all the torrents could share with each other. IPFS is as if each "torrent" is a single chunk of data instead of a siloed collection of stuff.

IPFS expands BitTorrent into a global filesystem.

You can mount IPFS on your filesystem and address files by pointing at local resources on your machine. So you could have an HTML file say `<img src="/ipfs/QmCoolPic" />`. You can't do that with BitTorrent.

hannasanarion4y ago

Okay, but it's not 2001 anymore. Bittorrent was useful because parallelizing uploads across a broad network increased speed to a degree that content hosts couldn't manage.

But that's not true anymore, most internet power-users are on broadband connections, many of which are symmetric, transfer speeds up or down are no longer a limiter that pushes people towards decentralization.

So when considering a decentralized system like IPFS, the downsides of decentralization, like availability, edit control, and service support, are much more salient.

There are a lot of things that "could work if everybody uses it". You can never get there if the thing isn't desirable compared to existing alternatives.

easrng4y ago

BitTorrent v2 shares dedups chunks between torrents as a side affect of changes to the hashing algorithm.

bawolff4y ago· 1 in thread

> This idea hasn’t been new since the turn of the century (BitTorrent offered exactly that in 2001)

I feel like freenet (2000) is maybe a better comparison

white-flame4y ago

Yes. I can't stand that IPFS basically took the Freenet model, stripped out all the anonymity & privacy, and added the weird "interplanetary" marketing push.

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