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0 pointsacdha4y ago0 comments

… if someone else paid to host a copy. Major companies hosting it makes that less likely and if their backing increases usage that also increases the cost of hosting everything, making it more likely that the content you want will be available. When Google shuts down their mirror, suddenly all of that traffic is hitting nodes with far fewer resources.

The underlying problem is that storage and bandwidth cost money and people have been conditioned not to think about paying for what they consume so things end up either being ad supported or overwhelming volunteers.

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a13692099934y ago· 4 in thread

> suddenly all of that traffic is hitting nodes with far fewer resources.

One of the points of IPFS (and bittorrent before it) is that this is not a problem; each node that downloads the data also uploads it to other nodes, so having lots of traffic actually makes it easier to serve something (indeed, if it was already widely seeded by Google's mirror, there wouldn't be any sudden traffic).

zerocrates4y ago

I'm not particularly familiar with IPFS: does it have some solution for free-riding?

BitTorrent as many have noted is great for popular things, even not-particularly-popular things, but absent incentives to continue seeding (i.e. private trackers' ratio requirements) even once-popular things easily become inaccessible as the majority of peers don't seed for long, or at all.

I guess what I don't quite is what IPFS adds vs. say, a trackerless BitTorrent magnet link that uses DHT? Or is it really just a slight iteration/improvement on that system?

a13692099934y ago

> I guess what I don't quite is what IPFS adds vs. say, a trackerless BitTorrent magnet link that uses DHT?

Beats me! I think there might be support for finding new versions of things, but I'm not sure about the details or how it prevents authors from memory-holing stuff by saying "The new version is $(cat /dev/null), bye!".

vmception4y ago

No it doesn’t

If nobody pins a link it disappears but there is no strong incentive it just rides on abundant space and bandwidth and wealthy Gen Xers that want to be a part of something

The same group released filecoin which experiments with digital asset incentives.. and venture capital

Inconclusive results

vmception4y ago

Bittorrent use breaks Tor, IPFS download does not.

so that's one advantage to one audience

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